Home PCs are as cheap as they’ve ever been. Adjusted for inflation the same can be said about “home use” Macs. The list price of an entry level MacBook Air has been pretty much the same for more than a decade. Adjust for inflation, and you get a MacBook air for less than half the real cost of the launch model that is massively better in every way.
A blip in high end RAM prices has no bearing on affordable home computing. Look at the last year or two and the proliferation of cheap, moderately to highly speced mini desktops.
I can get a Ryzen 7 system with 32gb of ddr5, and a 1tb drive delivered to my house before dinner tomorrow for $500 + tax.
It's not a blip and it's not limited to high end machines and configurations. Altman gobbled up the lion's share of wafer production. Look at that Raspberry Pi article that made it to the front page, that's pretty far from a high end Mac and according to the article's author likely to be exported from China due to the RAM supply crisis.
I can get a Ryzen 7 system with 32gb of ddr5, and a 1tb drive delivered to my house
before dinner tomorrow for $500 + tax.
B&H is showing a 7700X at $250 with their cheapest 32GB DDR5 5200 sticks at $384. So you've already gone over budget for just the memory and CPU. No motherboard, no SSD.
Amazon is showing some no-name stuff at $298 as their cheapest memory and a Ryzen 7700X at $246.
Add another $100 for an NVMe drive and another $70–100 for the cheapest AM5 motherboards I could find on either of those sites.
> I can get a Ryzen 7 system with 32gb of ddr5, and a 1tb drive delivered to my house before dinner tomorrow for $500 + tax
That's an amazing price, but I'd like to see where you're getting it. 32GB of RAM alone costs €450 here (€250 if you're willing to trust Amazon's February 2026 delivery dates).
Getting a PC isn't that expensive, but after the blockchain hype and then the AI hype, prices have yet to come down. All estimations I've seen will have RAM prices increase further until the summer of next year, and the first dents in pricing coming the year after at the very earliest.
It’s just depressing that the “PC in every home” era is being rapidly pulled out from under our feet by all these supply shocks.
You can get a Mac Mini for $600 with 16GB of RAM and it will be more powerful than the "PC in every home" people would need for any common software.
The personal computing situation is great right now. RAM is temporarily more expensive, but it's definitely not ending any eras.
Not Apple’s ram.
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Huh?
Home PCs are as cheap as they’ve ever been. Adjusted for inflation the same can be said about “home use” Macs. The list price of an entry level MacBook Air has been pretty much the same for more than a decade. Adjust for inflation, and you get a MacBook air for less than half the real cost of the launch model that is massively better in every way.
A blip in high end RAM prices has no bearing on affordable home computing. Look at the last year or two and the proliferation of cheap, moderately to highly speced mini desktops.
I can get a Ryzen 7 system with 32gb of ddr5, and a 1tb drive delivered to my house before dinner tomorrow for $500 + tax.
That’s not depressing, that’s amazing!
It's not a blip and it's not limited to high end machines and configurations. Altman gobbled up the lion's share of wafer production. Look at that Raspberry Pi article that made it to the front page, that's pretty far from a high end Mac and according to the article's author likely to be exported from China due to the RAM supply crisis.
B&H is showing a 7700X at $250 with their cheapest 32GB DDR5 5200 sticks at $384. So you've already gone over budget for just the memory and CPU. No motherboard, no SSD.
Amazon is showing some no-name stuff at $298 as their cheapest memory and a Ryzen 7700X at $246.
Add another $100 for an NVMe drive and another $70–100 for the cheapest AM5 motherboards I could find on either of those sites.
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> I can get a Ryzen 7 system with 32gb of ddr5, and a 1tb drive delivered to my house before dinner tomorrow for $500 + tax
That's an amazing price, but I'd like to see where you're getting it. 32GB of RAM alone costs €450 here (€250 if you're willing to trust Amazon's February 2026 delivery dates).
Getting a PC isn't that expensive, but after the blockchain hype and then the AI hype, prices have yet to come down. All estimations I've seen will have RAM prices increase further until the summer of next year, and the first dents in pricing coming the year after at the very earliest.
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> Home PCs are as cheap as they’ve ever been.
just the 5090 GPU costs +$3k, what are you even talking about
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Home calculators are cheap as they've ever been, but this era of computing is out of reach for the majority of people.
The analogous PC for this era requires a large amount of high speed memory and specialized inference hardware.
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