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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

Yes, but the impact will be small.

The average consumer isn't purchasing a lot of products with a lot of RAM every year.

Their 8GB of RAM phones will go up in price a little bit, but people aren't buying phones every year or even every other year.

So if the price of the 8GB of LPDDR went from $40 to $160 and it's all passed on to the consumer buying a new phone every 4 years, that's an extra $30/year in spending.

Most adults I know now use their phone for everything, so they're not buying new computers and laptops. They can wait 3 years for the market to settle before upgrading those, too.

Even I'm a heavy buyer of tech products and RAM, and I would bet you that my family's annual food bill fluctuates by more than what I've had to pay for RAM prices growing.

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You don't have to directly buy RAM to be affected. It's just like oil or electricity...if RAM was part of the economic process that you participated in, then that price increase will be passed down to you. If every datacenter in the US suddenly had to pay double for electricity, how would that affect every operation that is operating in that datacenter? Ok now it's not electricity, it's the RAM.

Almost everything we consume is downstream of RAM pricing. I don’t buy a phone every year, but corporate workforces, streaming servers, cars, factories, etc. will all cost more next year.

Oh, I hope you are right about cars. If one of the outcomes of the memory crunch is that manufacturers start making “dumb cars” again, it would almost make it all worthwhile.

Cars get developed on a cycle that spans a decade in many cases. Four or five years is pretty much the minimum. It could impact development cycles going forward but it will take a good while for that to be reflected in the marketplace.

In the shorter term, you’ll probably see more “base” models on offer with some of the most intensive features disabled. There’s still going to be all of the telemetry stuff that makes them money through third parties though.

The headline says "sold out". That doesn't mean prices will go up, that means the memory will not be available at all for many companies and the products they make will not be available to consumers.

The companies making phones will be able to get new memory chips.

Many smaller companies will have issues getting enough, but even they could buy something with memory and rip it out. When you're willing to pay a hefty multiple, you can outbid other people. The shortages are not nearly bad enough to escape standard supply and demand.

It means prices will go up and that's it. If you read "sold out" and immediately believe "no company will have memory in 2027 besides AI companies" then I think you have to reconnect your thoughts to the reality.

You forgot to tack on the rise in prices of SSDs too, so that's $50 per year at least.

>Most adults I know now use their phone for everything

You mean the cloud for everything. A lot of phone tasks share their computational and storage workloads off in the invisible ether that has actual computers with real costs behind them. Amazon has no problem with bumping up their costs in order to pay for their fleet of servers. I mean, what business doesn't use the cloud these days.

Remember when car companies couldn’t get the chips they needed to make cars? And so now there’s not enough used cars. And so car companies charge way more the new ones and just stopped making cheap cars altogether?

At the low end, where the vast majority of people are, even in the US, an extra $120 will double the price.

I think you are really underestimating how much memory prices are going to impact everything. I mean, look at Apple, they raised the prices of the HomePod mini and Apple TV- why? Because they use memory. It's going to have lots of follow on effects.

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