I don’t see how it would push manufacturers to do that. I can see how it would make consumers more open to soldered RAM if RAM is so expensive there is no way you are going to upgrade it later. But, I would be interested to get your thoughts as I miss stuff that feels obvious I’m hindsight all the time.
If consumers aren’t going to or are much less likely to upgrade, then that affects demand from them, and one would expect manufacturers to follow what consumers demand.
Prices rarely, if ever, go down in a meaningful degree. Stuff like this is partially necessity and partially a REALLY good excuse to see what the price ceiling actually is… and then turn that into the floor moving forward. Just look at gas prices
The “AI Bubble” is likely to be on the same level as the Dotcom Bubble and the like. It is going to be brutal and a LOT of people are going to lose their jobs… and then much of the same tech will still dominate just with more realistic expectations. And that will still need large amounts of memory
If the “AI Bubble” really is as bad as people seem to want it to be: A LOT of the vendors who make the parts you are buying RAM to use are going to be gutted. And then RAM production will drop drastically. Which will decrease supply and…
In 1995 I bought 4 MB of RAM for DM 200, which, adjusted fire inflation probably works out to about €200 in today’s money. I’d say, prices have come down quite a bit, since.
Prices rarely, if ever, go down in a meaningful degree.
In 2011, there was a large flood in Thailand that impacted ~40% of hard drive manufacturing. As a result, hard drives significantly increased in price. This was back when SSDs weren’t mainstream yet.
A year or two later, when manufacturing capacity was restored, prices were essentially back to what they were before the disruption.
Apart from disruptions like that, HDDs, SSDs, and RAM have always been going down in price.
I don’t see how it would push manufacturers to do that. I can see how it would make consumers more open to soldered RAM if RAM is so expensive there is no way you are going to upgrade it later. But, I would be interested to get your thoughts as I miss stuff that feels obvious I’m hindsight all the time.
If consumers aren’t going to or are much less likely to upgrade, then that affects demand from them, and one would expect manufacturers to follow what consumers demand.
RAM prices will come down sometime after the AI bubble bursts and they start making more DDR5 again.
In 1995 I bought 4 MB of RAM for DM 200, which, adjusted fire inflation probably works out to about €200 in today’s money. I’d say, prices have come down quite a bit, since.
In 2011, there was a large flood in Thailand that impacted ~40% of hard drive manufacturing. As a result, hard drives significantly increased in price. This was back when SSDs weren’t mainstream yet.
A year or two later, when manufacturing capacity was restored, prices were essentially back to what they were before the disruption.
Apart from disruptions like that, HDDs, SSDs, and RAM have always been going down in price.
Prices on memory have virtually always gone down, and at a rapid pace.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-computer-memory-and-storage
people say go back in time to pick the correct lotto number
I say go back in time and sell my 8TB disk for 80 billion