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Comment by BoredomIsFun | Hacker News Reader

> since the mid-2000s.

Did you adjust for inflation ?

Adjusted for inflation, the last time prices (/GB) were this high was May 2011; the tail end of the 2009/2010 shortage. Aside from a brief glut in 2008, it wasn't really cheaper before (than it is now) though. Of course RAM is much faster these days, but also in 2011 most people had no more than 4 GB of system memory and 512 MB VRAM.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240805053759/https://jcmit.net...

https://thememoryguy.com/dram-prices-hit-historic-low/

Inflation applied manually; https://www.bls.gov/cpi/

https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/983036-latest-steam-hardw...

Steam hardware survey GPU history: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHTdnIviZTE

Inflation since the 2000s cannot possibly make up the difference in price we’ve seen in just the last 6 months.

That was not my point entirely; my point that citing prices from 2000s and comparing with modern ones |(with indexing about 2x times), regardless of underling reason is either a demonstration of lazyness or innumeracy, or even worse - an attempt to manipulate.

It’s not laziness, innumeracy, or manipulation when it can be taken at face value that the cost increase vastly outstrips anything that could be attributed to inflation. You don’t even need to look it up to know that.

> when it can be taken at face value that the cost increase vastly outstrips anything that could be attributed to inflation

But that was not my point _whatsoever_. What I said is - every time you bring the explicit numbers (like in GP "$500 for 32GB is about $15/GB which is a high we haven't seen since the mid-2000s") you _absolutely_ have to adjust for inflation to have a meaningful conversation. This is it.

Ram is clearly way more expensive now, yes?

Did you adjust for technological improvements that pumps out more chip per wafer compared to mid-2000s due to node-size shrink?

No, I didn't adjust for the huge inflation in average RAM requirements since the mid-2000s.

Not the point - my point utterly of arithmetical nature - dollar has substantial inflation, and any comparison more that 5 years apart, let alone 20 warrants adjusting of prices, as error is substantial, 2x in the case of 2000s

You demand specific data points but respond with vague handwaving and general statements about the importance of calculating inflation in this discussion as if it represents more than a small fraction of the overall increase in ram cost

> more than a small fraction of the overall increase in ram cost

There is nothing vague about the question if prices were scaled or not (and in this pretty much unvague coefficient of ~2x between usd in 2000 and 2026), otherwise there is point in comparing these numbers, as there is no point in comparing inches and cm's without declaring beforehand which number is which.

You are perfectly capable of looking at the rate of inflation since the mid 2000s and seeing that it only tells a small portion of the story.

You cannot possibly look at the price of ram now compared to six months ago and be so fixated on including inflation. Obviously inflation occurred and obviously after 20 years it has an impact on price. But we are all on HN and all know what inflation is, so forcing people to drill down on its contribution in order to advance the conversation when it clearly only accounts for a small portion and we all know it’s a factor is absolutely ridiculous. You know this, we know this, and yet here we are still talking about it. I may as well explain what ram is if we want to get this elementary about things.

True or false: ram has become substantially more expensive in the last 6mo in a way that cannot be meaningfully explained by inflation.

There is a very clear, very obvious answer here. Inflation or not.

> You are perfectly capable of looking at the rate of inflation since the mid 2000s and seeing that it only tells a small portion of the story.

Have no idea why you are keeping arguing about something which was not my point to begin with.

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