I'm Going To McFucking Lose It.
Did the manufacturers stop making them to create artificial scarcity or something??
In like September RAM manufacturers created an agreement with OpenAI to sell like 40% of the global manufacturing capacity for RAM to them, and then in like October Crucial announced that they were shutting down their consumer RAM division to focus on enterprise manufacturing but yeah in like 2022/2023 the manufacturers intentionally limited production in order to 'correct' for low prices so long story short there are multiple issues causing scarcity in the consumer RAM market and they have gotten WAY worse since September.
This is specifically for DDR5 ram. DDR4 is still relatively stable, and comparatively lower overall.
Unfortunately DDR4 is at the end of its lifecycle and at the same time that the above was happening the RAM manufacturers announced the end of production for DDR4; besides that DDR5 has been the standard for new production machines for years so DDR4 is only going to be helpful for people with devices at least a few years old.
DDR4 is *comparatively* better but a 32GB kit has still gone from under $100 to almost $300 in the last year.
Oh, thank you, everytime I think I have a grasp on tech in some way, it turns out to be only surface level, thank you for the clarification
It's hard to keep track of this kind of stuff honestly! It's literally my job to do this and I keep surprising my coworkers with hardware costs - another thread on this post is about how I quoted some computers for around $850 (that's the wholesale cost that my business would pay) at the end of January and those same devices would cost us $1100.
I had a client who signed a quote on January 30th too late in the day for me to place an order, the machines were $730 on January 30th and when I placed the order on February 2nd the same machines were $1050. (I ended up finding comparable machines for $830 so we were able to keep the client price the same and not actually lose money on the sale)
If anyone wants to keep track of component pricing in a general way, the site that I'm using for these graphs is the PC Part Picker trends page.
(SSDs are slowly trending up right now and Crucial is closing down their consumer SSD production as well so I suspect it's going to go up but there are more groups that make SSDs and no massive market sectors are eating storage the way they're eating RAM so I don't think we're going to see a hit as bad for storage as we are for RAM; however I don't think we're going to see RAM prices level off or dip for a while, so if you're thinking of upgrading you may need to bite the bullet and buy now)
























