The era of cheap technology is ending.

Over the past year, RAM prices have increased 2.5 times. In Germany — 4 times!

In basic smartphones, RAM used to account for 5% of material costs, now it's 50%.

Margins for simple devices were already in single digits, so a smartphone that used to cost $50 now sells for $120.

Many people cannot afford such a purchase. Transsion, the main phone manufacturer for Africa, lost half its revenue; Oppo and Xiaomi shipped 20% fewer phones.

Soon we will feel the price increase too. Samsung's latest flagship was released with less RAM than planned; Apple delayed the launch of new iPhones and Macs.

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Why is RAM getting more expensive? AI giants are buying up special high-performance HBM (High-Bandwidth Memory) at any cost. Producing each gigabyte of such memory removes 3 gigabytes of regular RAM from the market.

Why don't memory manufacturers simply expand production?

All companies that grew memory chip production in response to a "hot market" went bankrupt. Now the remaining players have "evolutionary memory": it's better to have a shortage of memory chips (and let some go without) than to overinvest. Building one such factory costs $20 billion.

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I highly recommend the original source, a story about RAM, its history, and industry insights on current deals (Apple used to have multi-year fixed prices that recently expired, and now factories lock in prices for at most a quarter, while company executives move to Korea permanently to better lobby for supplies) — it's simply unputdownable.

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The fact that modern websites consume gigabytes (!) of RAM is a separate conversation, for which we are not yet ready…