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Comment by direwolf20 | Hacker News Reader

RAM is still cheaper than 10 years ago. Every time you ask "are RAM prices killing X?" ask yourself if we had X 10 years ago.

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I'm not sure this holds up when you look at the actual numbers. In 2016, you could get a DDR4-2400 16GB kit for $81 [1], and a comparable G.SKILL Ripjaws V kit was around $52 [2]. Today (January 2026), that same G.SKILL kit costs $105-146 [3], and most 16GB DDR4 kits are running $95-150 [4]. So RAM is actually more expensive now than it was 10 years ago, not cheaper.

The "did we have X 10 years ago" argument also misses a a lot of modern software requirements. Yes, we had mid-range laptops and budget gaming PCs in 2016, but the memory footprint of everyday applications has exploded since then. Electron-based apps (Slack, Teams, VS Code, Discord) routinely consume 500MB-1GB+ each [5], and it's entirely normal to have multiple running simultaneously. A typical "light" workload in 2026 easily uses 2-3x the RAM that a comparable workflow needed in 2016.

So we're getting squeezed from both sides: applications demand more memory whilst memory itself costs more. An 8GB laptop was perfectly serviceable for office work in 2016; in 2026, it's borderline unusable with a few Chrome tabs and Teams open. The same kit that cost $55 in June 2025 now costs $150 [2, again]. That's a 150%+ increase in six months, pushing capable systems out of reach for budget-conscious users precisely when software bloat is making RAM more essential than ever.

[1] https://gamersnexus.net/industry/3212-ram-price-investigatio... [2] https://gamersnexus.net/news/ram-wtf [3] https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=ddr4+ram+8gb [4] https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/ [5] https://josephg.com/blog/electron-is-flash-for-the-desktop/

In late 2024 I bought a 32GB kit with unbuffered ECC for ~80$ /shrug

late 2024 is neither 2016 nor is it 2026, it's irrelevant to the discussion.

Oh you're right, I was thinking in the context of self-hosting and not a VPS nor the same era. oops.

I don't think people really understand how big of a wall outside of GPU/TPUs the CPU, ram and even flash market has hit. We're paying as much if not more for the same stuff we were buying 4-5 years ago.

I do think we're more efficient and matrix operations are better (again, GPU/TPUs), but by and large, the computer hardware world has stopped exponential growth.

The period from 1990 to 2005 was amazing. Both in transistor counts and clock speed, it seemed like we were nearly *doubling* performance with every new generation. Memory and disk space had similar gains.

In March 2015 I could buy a "Corsair Vengeance RED 32GB (4x8GB) DDR3 PC3-14900C10 1866MHz Dual/Quad Channel Kit" for £259.99 [1]

Today, I can buy a "Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB (4x8GB) DDR4 PC4-28800C18 3600MHz Quad Channel Kit" for £259.99 [2]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150303141114/http://www.overcl... [2] https://www.overclockers.co.uk/corsair-vengeance-lpx-32gb-4x...

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