We supposedly live in a world where electronics get cheaper even if everything else is subject to rampant inflation. Here’s an example from PC Part Picker’s memory price trend for 18 months:
Most of the other graphs are flat as well. If you adjusted these for official CPI there would perhaps be a slight downward trend in real dollars.
Why are memory prices more or less stuck at 2023 levels? Is it that fewer companies are making RAM? That the AI Boom (TM) has increased demand? (economics proves that immigrants don’t drive up prices for housing, but Econ 101 says that demand for memory drives up prices for memory)
Related:
- Where are the 16 TB M.2 SSDs? (from July and there still aren’t any for sale)
DDR4 has been going up. It’s now a 25 year old technology with minor improvements. It’s like using a computer from 1955 in 1980. Normally, falling technology prices push up everything else from monetary policy. Rising or flat technology prices cause the fed to push down everything else.
If all other prices are going up, the relative price of memory is going down even as the absolute price remains steady. Have not considered foreign currency affect.
Chipmakers spend a lot of money making CPUs faster by means of being more complicated internally, including caches, and not enough R&D into making main RAM faster. Like lion said, that has made memory kind of stagnant technology and not follow Moore’s law. A.I. probably is a factor, and even bitcoin–which made high end graphics cards go up.
The latest laptop I bought, a Lenovo, has 8GB of memory soldered to the MB, so the price won’t matter to me anyway.