Memory Price Hikes Will Kill Off Budget PCs and Smartphones, Analyst Warns
- Reference: 0180865682
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/02/27/008259/memory-price-hikes-will-kill-off-budget-pcs-and-smartphones-analyst-warns
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> Ballooning memory prices are [1]forecast to kill off entry-level PCs , leading to a decline in global shipments this year -- and a similar effect is going to hit smartphones. Analyst biz Gartner is projecting a drop in PC shipments of more than 10 percent during 2026, and a decline of around 8 percent for smartphones, all due to the AI-driven memory shortage. Some types of memory have doubled or quadrupled in price since last year, and Gartner believes DRAM and NAND flash used in PCs and phones is set for a further 130 percent rise by the end of 2026.
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> The upshot of this is that the budget PC will disappear, simply because vendors won't be able to build them at a price that will satisfy cost-conscious buyers, according to Gartner research director Ranjit Atwal. "Because the price of memory is increasing so much, vendors lose the ability to provide entry-level PCs -- those below about $500," he told The Register. PC makers could just raise the price of their cheap and cheerful boxes to above that level to compensate for the memory hike, however, price-sensitive buyers simply won't bite, he added.
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> Another factor expected to add to declining fortunes of the PC industry this year is AI devices -- systems equipped with special hardware for accelerating AI tasks, typically via a neural processing unit (NPU) embedded in the CPU. These systems were predicted to take the market by storm, but they require more memory to support AI processing and vendors like to mark them up to a premium price. "Historically, downgrading specifications was the way to go when prices were being squeezed, but that's difficult here," Atwal said. "The thinking was that the average price [of AI PCs] would fall this year, and lead to more adoption," said Atwal, "but that's not happening." The lack of killer applications isn't helping either.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/26/memory_price_hikes/
Bad for gamers too (Score:5, Insightful)
Sony and Nintendo both had to increase the costs of their consoles once already, and Nintendo is warning that the Switch 2 might have to go up again because the memory situation is getting that bad.
On a grand scale, my gut says that China is doing to us with AI what we did with military spending to the USSR. The way these companies are inefficiently using capital is insane, but what's even crazier is how no one in the financial sector or government is willing to say "you're drunk, go home."
The one saving grace in all of this is that Tesla is dog-fooding their own AI chips, and Musk has hinted that they might declare war on Nvidia in the nearish future. Allegedly, their chips are faster and more energy efficient than Nvidia's because they're specifically designed for AI workloads, particularly in embedded systems like cars and satellites (SpaceX is a fast growing private customer of Tesla here). That could end up shaking up a lot of things if it works out.
Re:Bad for gamers too (Score:4, Funny)
gamers can manage, i don't need more memory or a better GPU because like most gamers, i've turn off the eye candy anyways so I can get better FPS.
not to even mention how the classist transnational corporations have turned our games into thier engines of exploitation designed to rip off even children :(
Re: (Score:2)
"what's even crazier is how no one in the financial sector or government is willing to say "you're drunk, go home."
The financial sector sees income from interest on the construction loans, possible profits if it works and deductible write-offs if it fails. The government sees tax revenue.
If this sounds familiar think back to the housing crisis in 2008 or the dot-com crash of 2000. The finance sector and the government love booms, it's the busts that make them cranky.
Sniffing his own farts (Score:2)
Take anything Elon Musk says with a salt mine (or two). If Tesla had the ability to compete with nVidia on this level, they would be doing so. There's a limited number of engineers that can produce NPUs, and most of them work for the behemoth. Most people are not going to be willing to walk away from a job with the market leader to go work 16 hour days for a fascist.
YouTube tech reviewers are losing their sh*t (Score:4, Funny)
Steve Burke at Gamers Nexus seems to post a daily video about how the industry is ripping off consumers. You can hear the actual rage in his voice, the kind of rage one has when he sees the future of his channel in doubt due to his viewers being unable to afford any of the tech gear he reviews. In other words, self-selfing rage.
Re:YouTube tech reviewers are losing their sh*t (Score:4, Funny)
Steve Burke has more integrity than all the upper management and the owners of these corporations. He's right to be angry, we should all be angry at how we are all being cheated, lied to and manipulated. Gamers Nexus is one of the few channels producing honsety professional journalism. He has to make up for a corrupt and classist fifth estate which has been taken over by the rich and powerful. If it wasn't for a few people who bravely speak out, most people wouldn't even bother to try to understand how bad our situttion really is.
People, we are losing our freedoms and our rights. Once gone, they will be almost impossible to reclaim. Now is the time to get involved and do anything which might help.
Kill off? No, it will make them dominant (Score:2)
I have a 5825U 32GB/1TB MiniPC. It cost me $300, they're over $500 now. But it's also all the machine most people need, unless they're gaming, then it's pretty worthless. But someone who goes looking for a PC to buy and finds the big powerful ones are over $1500 may well look at something a lot smaller, quieter, lower-power, and cheaper.
China's biggest RAM manufacturers (CXMT and YMTC) expect to open new fabs in 2027, and the price of Chinese MiniPCs should become even more competitive when that happens.
Re: Kill off? No, it will make them dominant (Score:2)
YMTC does not produce RAM, yet. It will produce RAM in the future, probably in 2027 when the fab you allude to comes online.
They are a very fine purveryor of NAND Flash for storage.
so what, classism is killing people (Score:2, Insightful)
typical first worlders, worried about our toy prices while our upper class commits genocide, kills our climate and pollutes our planet
rich people are evil and completely irresponsible, welcome to the collapse of civilization once again brought about by our greed, selfsihness and stupidity
Re: (Score:2)
"... our planet rich people are evil ..." Envy your betters much ? Live for hate? Rather than toxic spew why not build one (1) item of material value for yourself or others . Tye a dry-fly, code a better "clippy", sculpt a wooden pot-holder, forge a paring knife, find compactified spaces, weave a sit-upon ... . Physical and cultural evolution has spent seven million years preparing you to be useful. Success of our race depends creation of that next "hand axe". Choose life.
Re: (Score:2)
> "... our planet rich people are evil ..." Envy your betters much ? Live for hate?
Oh look, commentary from a corporate cock swallowing hipster.
Re: (Score:2)
Why are you fearful? I'm actually ... a retired academic. But, yes I have worked at private industry you could not imagine; earned returns for stockholders that paid my wage. I've won grants at uni and taught your children Maxwells Equations; prefer paleo/craft fly-tying to hipster coke-sniffing. Straight white Christian so never sucked a cock. Honestly, I do not understand your fear.
Can this bubble please burst already ?!?!?!? (Score:1)
Pretty please !
So let me get this straight. (Score:2)
They are building all these AI data centres, which is driving up the prices of consumer hardware, so no one can afford it, and thus can't utilize all the AI data centes anyway. ( and that's besides the fact that most of them won't be built anyway)
What a genius business plan. It can't collapse soon enough.
Re: (Score:2)
Consumers won't be able to afford it.
Governments and businesses will likely sign long term contracts with service organizations, if the past is any indication.
We'll all be interacting with these systems in one way or another. Possibly not directly, but at one or two levels removed. The technology keeps changing so I can be confident that what we think of as the primary methods of using these systems is probably not what will be the dominant form in a few years.
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I'd say the opposite. An AI client can be very low spec, so the buy/rent decision will tilt towards paying a fee to rent AI from the cloud rather than run it locally.
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This. AI companies will actually have a chance of evading the bubble when personal computers are no longer affordable. You will only be able to afford a terminal with a keyboard that does everything in the data center via subscription. The Client-Server model is coming back. This sucks.
Stagnate not 'kill off' (Score:2)
My Android 12 with 4/128 specs does all I need. The only reason to replace it is when it physically breaks or they discontinue the 4G network and I'm forced onto 5G.
So I don't expect a minimum spec phone from 2026 to be much of an upgrade from 2022 but manufacturers will always cater to a price point despite inflation and a global memory crisis.
Also companies are doing Mass layoffs (Score:2)
Just a free of cash to spend on AI bullshit. This crap is remaking our entire civilization. It is the single biggest automation push since the first industrial revolution and we aren't talking enough about it and the effect it's going to have on employment
Retrenchment (Score:3)
MSI is releasing new AMD AM4 boards, that use older DDR4 RAM, supposedly to leverage lower DDR4 prices.
A quick glance across Amazon and Newegg, it may be too late.
[1]MSI's $80 AMD motherboards with DDR4 support swoop in to rescue gamers amid the global RAM crisis — AM4 emerges as the unexpected hero with RAM prices skyrocketing [tomshardware.com]
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/motherboards/msis-usd80-amd-motherboards-with-ddr4-support-swoop-in-to-rescue-gamers-amid-the-global-ram-crisis-am4-emerges-as-the-unexpected-hero-with-ram-prices-skyrocketing
Re: (Score:2)
Not only is it too late, but they only have 2 memory slots, limiting your options.
I have 4x16GB which cost me $110 or so, replacement cost is now $380. But if one DIMM dies I can limp along with a mere 32GB...
Upsides (Score:2)
Hopefully it stops appliance makers from trying to 'smart' all of their products.
Makes electronic recycling more economical.
People stick with their existing, functional phone and not buy new just because it's new.
Free markets (Score:2)
In a proprly operating free market, climbing RAM prices would
1) encourage new entrants to the market (new manufacturing companies to produce RAM)
2) encourage existing manufacturers to invest in new production capacity ...until prices return to a lower equilibrium. This situation is basically the demand curve shifting right, waiting for the supply curve to do the same.
Time will tell. Meanwhile we will be rocking our existing equipment for a few more years.
I wish (Score:2)
Killing off budget PCs? I wish. I saw brand new laptops being sold with 4G RAM.
Takes one ai slop electron app to fill up the ram.
Other effects (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder what this does to the fortunes of other budget component makers, and even binning as far as chips makers goes for parts like CPUs.
At some point it becomes rather non-nonsensical to pair expensive memory with some budget CPU, or GPU to constrained to also support AI inference well or play the latest games. Why would try to save $15 on 1Gbps Ethernet PHY vs a 2.5Gbps in a $1000+ computer?
Sure it all adds up and if you an save $15, here and $5 there, and $10 over here pretty soon you have a number that might matter to a consumer but the flip side of that is you're trying to sell a still expensive machine that barely runs better then the box they are replacing. PCs have not for the most part been CPU bound for most consumer tasks for a while. How are you going to convince someone to drop $1000 on machine with the same 8GB of memory as the one they're replacing. Consumers are not totally ignorant anymore, they may not know what the bottlenecks on their workloads are but they mostly do understand there is more to 'how fast' the computer is than than how big the numbers are on the CPU.
Re: (Score:2)
> Why[sic] would try to save $15 on 1Gbps Ethernet PHY vs a 2.5Gbps in a $1000+ computer?
> Sure it all adds up and if you an save $15, here and $5 there, and $10 over here pretty soon you have a number that might matter to a consumer but the flip side of that is you're trying to sell a still expensive machine that barely runs better then the box they are replacing.
Ford does value engineering to do things like save $2 on the wiring harness for wing mirrors on trucks that cost $50k but don't have the $300 option for e.g. power folding mirrors (which get the wiring harness that costs $2 more). You'd think the inventory management costs alone would make this a stupid idea, but apparently not. $15 on $1000 is a much larger percentage and much easier to imagine.
Re: Other effects (Score:2)
Small mistake on your part here: automakers have long had systems that were only available to you if you paid the extra but were actually installed on ALL cars. Usually, the only thing missing were the appropriate on/off switches or the last 50cms of wiring.
So, no, they didn't really pay extra stock management costs.
Re: (Score:3)
This is a lot less common now than it used to be. e.g. back in the 90s Audi started compiling harnesses from sections, so there would be a main harness that's in all cars and then they'd add in sub-harnesses for optional equipment which go to a junction box under the hood, inside the vehicle, or both. This avoids the situation where customers buy a car and then add content later when you want to charge them for all of that up front, AND it makes the vehicle cheaper to construct.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah I see that kind of stuff too and I do find it rather amazing. I as more looking at it from a final options package perspective.
I don't know about the market for the guy going to PC Parts Picker and assembling things from individual components. I am more thinking thinking about what Apple/Dell/HP/[Whatever is on the shelf at Walmart] is going to offer in pre-boxed, or per-selectable packages.
Think if it like with trim level in Ford trucks. If you want leather seats you are also getting the fancy info
Re: (Score:2)
> Why would try to save $15 on 1Gbps Ethernet PHY vs a 2.5Gbps in a $1000+ computer?
My originally $300 MiniPC has dual 2.5GbE, WiFi 6, and Bt 5.2... That stuff is REALLY cheap and throwing more goodies in helps make the sale. It's weird to me if anyone is even still making machines with 1GbE. BUT, for the average person it's irrelevant. They probably don't have multiple machines, even if they do they don't have a NAS, and their internet connection is typically well under 1Gbps.
Re: (Score:2)
I foresee that embedded memory will become more common as this shortage continues, since vendors who make embedded CPUs and microcontrollers will need to sell them, and can't afford to let memory shortages sabotage their sales. That trend could spread to budget CPUs and GPUs as well
However, having watched the memory industry since the 90s, I don't see this shortage lasting. Inevitably, supply catches up w/ demand, resulting in a drop in demand and then a contraction of suppliers. Also, once the AI bubb
Re: (Score:2)
What they're doing is dropping the amount of ram in the budget models to crazy-low levels. My laptop died due to a motherboard problem (ram test was fine), so I just bought a new laptop of the same series, which has a better processor and GPU but only 12GB of RAM : So I'm going to try taking the 32GB of ram out of my old laptop and putting it in the new one. It *should* be compatible.
I bet there's a good market right now for people buying up "broken - for parts" computers to strip the ram out of them.
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