No tech company is interested in Home n PC market right now. So yeah RAM prices are high (on paper and actually) but no home user is gonna buy it.
DC is a separate story. We had to setup a mini DC for a subproject 40 servers with 64 CPU and 192G ram each. We had to go with AWS because of a) we are now fully on cloud b) AWS execs talked our execs out of DC citing haedware volatility. So now we will be paying ~1M to AWS. This was when our Supermicro vendor gave us good pricing on contracts. So yeah enterprise world doesn’t care about prices, it does care about shortage though. So as long as each DRAM chip goes to enterprise no one cares about the price.
Edit: Any (at least two that I know of) tech company that has it’s own hardware has preordered/contracted RAM till 2028. And this is via a huge network of vendors, middlemen, fixers etc. So keep you RAMs and buy only when needed. Cuz Non ECC consumer RAM is gonna be a luxury and waste at the same time
I think what we are calling corporate greed/apathy is just cold business calculation. Desktop PC users number is shrinking day by day and now is mostly limited to either gamers or homelab enthusiasts, making it a niche market. On the other hand, we have the mass market of Mobile phones, Tablets and Laptop users. Here the price fluctuation has been neither immediate nor looks imminent, and you can see that in the current prices of SODIMMs.
Home desktop PC users and gamers became the second fiddle when it was discovered that GPUs could be used to mine bitcoins. First it was the GPU, then hard drives, and now RAM. In the evolving world where everything is XaaS or SDx, hardware market is not the driver of “change” any more and is considered as “change” when it comes to corporate profits.
Many would not agree with what I just wrote but then again, it was my rant, in which I lost the plot too many times. Sorry
Funny enough, you might get more for the RAM than GPU.
As fked up as this situation is, I am taking pleasure in how the trolls that were trolling people from asking a fair market-adjusted price a month back for their used kits & SSDs on Reddit are feeling now. RAM has gotten 20% more expensive since then, and now everyone is fuming, cursing the dealers and RAM makers. Small pleasures in life.
Absolutely gonna punch me in the stomach when I build my next MFF build myself, but I am still taking pleasure that those trolls are now nowhere to be seen on listings of people asking even more money than a month or two back for used kits.
Major win for the folks who upgraded to 32 GB DDR5 in 2023, especially with how f**ked up DDR5 was in the initial months of AM5, multiple BSODs, crashes, etc, just by enabling EXPO.
Actually no, this was expected. A lot of homelab circles are going back to DDR3 because while they need the high capacity, they don’t really need the bandwith of DDR4.
