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I just did exactly that. I had an old i7 with 64GB of DDR4 that I bought when it was cheap. DDR5 was so expensive I just bought an AM4 and moved the RAM over.

My MacBook is showing its age, though. Hearing that 2027 wont be any better makes me hopeful all the vibe coders can ask for memory efficient implementations to stretch existing hardware a little further.

> Hearing that 2027 wont be any better makes me hopeful all the vibe coders can ask for memory efficient implementations to stretch existing hardware a little further.

I've been thinking about this too. After being forced to work off a laptop with 6GB of RAM for a few weeks it made me appreciate my 32GB at home where I run Electron apps with abandon. It still seems crazy to me that we've normalized running an entire browser for a single program just because the UI frameworks are too hard/unfamiliar to the majority of programmers.

  > just because the UI frameworks are too hard/unfamiliar

i'm not sure if thats the biggest issue. working at a few large companies that had to support multiple platforms, the management was always looking for ways to deduplicate work with things like flutter, kmp etc; they just want one codebase to manage and qa because 2 or more gets to be hard for them to handle (hiring is also easier)

i take it even with ai companies will still do this, whith exhibit a being the electron-based codex app from openai...

> Demand is elastic. If the price of potatoes rises to $1000 / kg most people will switch to using pasta or rice for their dinner instead. There might be a shortage of potatoes at $1 / kg, but not at $1000 / kg.

If potatoes suddenly became $1000/kg, everyone would agree that there is a shortage of potatoes. While sure, people won't starve and will eat other things, it doesn't change the basic fact that there aren't enough potatoes.

The situation with RAM is even worse. If I'm trying to build and sell computing devices, I need RAM. Whether no one is willing to sell RAM at all, or whether they'll sell it only for 10x yesteryears's price, it doesn't make much difference to me, I'm still going out of business. Sure, that will then make demand technically go down, but not the shortage.

This whole thread is a bad analogy. Take all potatoes out of the market, and:

1) Some people won't be able to afford alternatives. They will starve to death

2) There may not be enough of other foods, so even if people have money, people will starve to death.

There are years where corn or rice or oats are of poor yield. A couple of years of that, and canned food and stored food is gone. It doesn't take long for "we have no <core staple food>", and things become bad.

This isn't a 3 month or year long blip in RAM pricing. If nothing changes, no bubble bursts, we won't see RAM become plentiful until 2035 at least. And a tight supply until 2030.

That's not a year of no potatoes. That's a decade of a core crop, with loads of calories, gone. That's "people are going to starve somewhere" trouble.

(I hate this food analogy, because in the West we've not seen a drought cause people to starve for half a century, if not longer. People are too complacent.

To speak to that, we grow crops where we get best value for the money. And best results. Corn cannot be grown in much of Canada, it needs a LOT of sun to mature, where as wheat can with a shorter growing season. Rice needs lots of water, where as other crops are more tolerant. Potatoes do well in certain soils. If there are no potatoes, you cannot just grow anything in that location.

Take away a core crop, and you can just lose those calories. Especially as farmers won't switch on the first year of a lost crop.)

RAM is quite durable, so I can imagine buying new servers with new CPUs, but instead of DDR5, it has DDR4 RAM slots. A loss of performance to be sure, but a good way to renew your fleet, and reduce the impact of all of this. But such boards aren't really here I don't think, not in quantity.

> Demand is elastic. If the price of potatoes rises to $1000 / kg most people will switch to using pasta or rice for their dinner instead. There might be a shortage of potatoes at $1 / kg, but not at $1000 / kg.

The year 1845 called, and they'd like a word

What do I switch to instead of memory for my AI computer?