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Comment by phoboslab | Hacker News Reader

I just looked at the invoice for my current PC parts that I bought in April 2016: I paid 177 EUR (~203 USD) for 32GB (DDR4-2800).

It's kinda sad when you grow up in a period of rapid hardware development and now see 10 years going by with RAM $/GB prices staying roughly the same.

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Well, I've experienced both to some degree in the past. The previous long time with very similar hardware performance was when PCs were exorbitantly expensive and commodore 64 was the main "home computer" (at least in my country) over the latter 80s and early 90s.

That period of time had some benefits. Programmers learned to squeeze absolutely everything out of that hardware.

Perhaps writing software for today's hardware is again becoming the norm rather than being horribly inefficient and simply waiting for CPU/GPU power to double in 18 months.

I was lucky. I built my am5 7950x Ryzen pc with 2x48gb ddr5 2 years ago. I just bought 4x48gb kit a month ago with an idea to build another home server with the old 2*48gb kit.

Today my old g.skill 2x48gb kit costs Double what I paid for the 4x48gb.

Furthermore I bought two used rtx3090 (for AI) back then. A week ago I bought a third one for the same price... ,(for vram in my server).

Olds remember the years around '95 when RAM stayed the exact same price per megabyte for what seemed a decade.

I paid about GBP 20K for the 192MB RAM in a Sun SPARC 5 workstation in 1995. That’s maybe $27K USD in 1995 dollars. Gulp.

There is or was a website that would let you plug in an Apple computer, and then tell you what you'd be worth if instead you'd bought Apple stock.

I put my G4 PowerBook into it once, and then vowed never to look at it again.

> It's kinda sad when you grow up in a period of rapid hardware development and now see 10 years going by with RAM $/GB prices staying roughly the same.

But you’re cherry picking prices from a notable period of high prices (right now).

If you had run this comparison a few months ago or if you looked at averages, the same RAM would be much cheaper now.

We’re just consuming a lot of DRAM in general.

Aside, $203 USD back then would be about $276 USD after inflation. Not a primary effect, but contributory.

Also we’re likely comparing RAMs at different speeds and memory bandwidth.

I think that goes to show that official inflation benchmarks are not very practical / useful in terms of buckets of things that people actually buy or desire. If the bucket that measured inflation included computer parts (GPUs?), food and housing - i.e. all that the thing that a geek really needs inflation would be wayy higher...

> If the bucket that measured inflation included computer parts (GPUs?), food and housing - i.e. all that the thing that a geek really needs inflation would be wayy higher...

A house is $500,000

A GPU is $500

You could put GPUs into the inflation bucket and it wouldn’t change anything. Inflation trackers count cost of living and things you pay monthly, not one time luxury expenses every 4 years that geeks buy for entertainment.

Also need to account for the dollar decline vs other currencies (which yes is possibly somewhat factored into dollar inflation so you'd have to do the inflation calculation in Euros then convert to dollars accounting for the decline in value).

I bought a bunch of hard drives in 2021 (16TB Seagate Exos) that are now $50-$100 more expensive. It's depressing.

If the sticker price stayed the same since 2016, it got about 35% cheaper due to inflation.

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