Comment by doom2
12 hours ago
I'm also very skeptical of "everything eventually passes" as it pertains to hardware prices. Right now, prices are high because supply can't keep up with demand. But if/when supply increases to meet demand or demand decreases, there's no reason for companies to drop prices now that consumers have become accustomed to them.
One local store drops prices to clear stock and/or gain mindshare. Within a week, everybody else does.
Happened before, will happen again.
Then why did they drop prices the last few times prices spiked like this?
RAM was this price some years back, and yet last summer/fall it was at an all-time low.
> there's no reason for companies to drop prices
Competition.
Exactly. Production of RAM, SSDs, etc is spread out enough that no one company/country/fab has a stranglehold on the market. Right now anyone with a memory fab has a money printer. More people will build fabs, just like they did last time. It takes a bit but they'll get built.
How many companies have a memory fab? How many companies can build a memory fab?
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My primary concern is for next generation hardware.
Will we continue to see steady improvement in top quality CPU/GPUs? Would they even bother releasing consumer versions of ram faster than DDR5?