Well...but @MangoCats@feddit.it isn't asking about the spike, but about the absolute price.

PC Part Picker's memory trends page unfortunately only shows the past 18 months. But we can hit archive.org's Wayback Engine.

First of all, here's a current level for DDR5-5200 2x16GB:

So about $500 for DDR5-5200 2x16GB.

They only started tracking this category back in early 2022-ish. It looks like it was about $380 then. Adjusted for inflation, that's $435.14 in 2026 dollars. So it's probably never been that expensive.

However, that was also when DDR5 was pretty new, and it looks like it started out expensive.

If we look at DDR4, which might be more interesting, since we can go back further and avoid the initial spike:

Looking at DDR4-3200 2x8GB, it's come down a bit, but looks like it peaked at about $190.

Inflation-adjusted, that's $144 in 2019 dollars.

It looks like that was about April 2019 when DDR4 exceeded the peak from the last few weeks.

https://finance.yahoo.com/...

The iShares Russell 1000 ETF (IWB) and Invesco QQQ Trust (QQQ) are expected to hold SPCX starting on June 29 and July 7, respectively.

Well, probably good news for people who own those index funds, since they won't ride SPCX down, at least to some extent. Their worst case scenario would have been the peak holding until they bought in.

I don't have familiarity with the standard, but one bright Californian engineer who I knew who was into auto computer hacking --- much more into automobile technology than I am --- had a pretty strong position that California's auto emissions requirements were unreasonably stringent.

That same guy also had a history of making correct technical claims that I didn't I didn't initially believe, like that USB device-to-host transfers had to be triggered via host-side polling, and that there's no device-driven interrupt mechanism (he was right), so he's got a pretty good track record in my book.

That's a separate issue from whether-or-not there's a legal basis for the Trump administration to revoke California's waiver, or of whether market fragmentation on emissions standards is an economic concern, which are also factors here.

Labour had become too expensive in Germany by international standards, Brudermüller said. "We no longer have a productivity advantage over key competitors," he said.

"There are two levers: Either you cut salaries or people work longer for the same salary," said the former chief executive of chemicals group BASF. The former option was not reasonable in practice, he said.

I mean, open or expand facilities in another country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/...

Currently you have:

Germany: Affalterbach, Berlin, Bremen, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Kölleda, Ludwigsfelde, Rastatt, Sindelfingen, and Stuttgart

China: Beijing, Fuzhou

India: Bengaluru, Pune

Indonesia: Bogor

Argentina: Buenos Aires

US: Charleston, South Carolina; Vance, Alabama

South Africa: East London

Brazil: Juiz de Fora, Sao Berenardo do Campo

Hungary: Kecskemét

Malaysia: Pekan

Thailand: Samut Prakan

Spain: Vitoria-Gasteiz

If whatever it is doesn't have constraints, then put it wherever you want. If it needs to be in the EU, then you already do Hungary and Spain besides Germany. If the people are capable of doing the work you need done and the going rate is lower, then makes sense to have it done there. If they aren't capable, then, well, the statement that the existing wages in Germany are uncompetitive internationally doesn't stand up.

EDIT:

https://ecipe.org/...

Germany’s Industry Isn’t in Decline, It’s Changing

Germany’s industry is in turmoil. Last year’s headlines about mass layoffs by German industrial giants like Volkswagen, Thyssenkrupp, BASF, and Continental were striking—but hardly surprising.

Experts offer numerous reasons for the root causes of Germany’s economic problems, ranging from increased energy prices and high labour costs to the country’s political culture and excessive bureaucracy. Yet the underlying forces of the Germany economy point to another unavoidable conclusion: downsizing the industrial labour force is, in the end, inevitable.

Economics, often misunderstood, operates under its own immutable laws. One of them asserts that as countries grow richer, they initially add more industrial jobs to the economy. But, after reaching a tipping point, they begin shedding factory jobs. Instead, economies create more intangible and services work, ranging from diligent engineers to smart consultants.

Germany is no exception. Its glory days of manufacturing jobs growth are long behind it, having peaked already in the 1980s. Since then, the share of industrial work has steadily declined, dropping from 40% in 1990 to just 27% today (left panel). Over that same period, a rapidly growing share of jobs in Germany has shifted to services.

For a long time, however, many thought of Germany being an exception from that law. After all, it was able to continue its industry dependency and consistently maintained a higher manufacturing share than France, another European industrial heavyweight. Germany also managed to slow its decline: while manufacturing jobs in other Eurozone countries continued to plummet, Germany’s post-Global Financial Crisis drop was only half as steep as the Eurozone as a whole. In fact, Germany still holds a strong comparative advantage in manufacturing.

However, Germany is just like every other country. Like all countries around the world, service jobs will inevitably start to outpace factory jobs in Germany. Even China, the world’s factory floor, won’t escape this tipping point. Since 2013, and despite the country’s manufacturing rebound, its industrial share in the economy has actually begun to decline (although its employment not yet)—a fate mirrored across the entire globe.

Microsoft's problem, I think, is in significant part that they are the big commercial player trying for a local AI play. Like, your local Windows machine does AI inference. In Anthropic's business model, the inference is cloud-based.

Local is more hardware-intensive, because the capacity utilization of hardware is going to be lower for local AI. If you stick a piece of hardware in a datacenter and lots of people share it, you need less hardware, because when one person isn't using that hardware, another can be. If you would use local AI hardware 1% of the time, then it costs only about one-hundredth the amount from a hardware standpoint to have people sharing parallel compute hardware in a datacenter as to do everything locally. So as long as hardware prices, like shortages of memory, are a constraining factor (or cooling, for that matter, or maybe power if you're talking about laptops on battery, all of which have cloud-based approaches getting an advantage) Microsoft's going to have a harder time of it than the cloud guys.

Microsoft (and local AI in general) does better if people really want low-latency or always-doing-work load, or reliably always-available services, or services where data privacy is critical. There, local AI has the advantage over cloud-based or at least erodes the cloud-based advantage. Right now, I think that that's just not generally where the state of affairs is. Could change in the future, but I think that they're just going to have a hard time of things in the near term. My guess is that Microsoft's relative potential improves as memory prices come back down.

I think that running local LLMs would be great. But the simple fact is that for most users, it's just too costly to make sense for a lot of applications with current memory prices.

I got a Framework Desktop, 128GB, specifically to do local generative AI stuff, in 2025. At the time, the system was $2,500, which is already going to be pricey for a number of people for a single-purpose computer. In the months since that shipped, the price on the exact same hardware configuration has gone up to over $6,500. That's just not a price that a lot of people are going to be willing to pay for a PC. If component supply rises and prices drop back down, then I think that the calculus changes for local AI.

AI companies are acquiring more memory than the entire rest of the world uses. If we want to do the same thing that we could do in the cloud locally and have capacity utilization of 1% on that hardware, then we need a hundred times as much memory as we do with a cloud-based compute approach. That's...a kind of staggering number.

EDIT: Oh, one major exception that could favor local compute, if R&D produces some major improvements in this direction. Right now, the way most models work, we have a very-expensive-to-generate model that's static, unchanging. This model does not change as one does inference on it. This makes it fairly efficient for a single compute node in an AI datacenter somewhere to have this one model loaded onto it, and then be used by many users who are all wanting to use the same model.

However, if the same model isn't being used by many users, then the (expensive) cost of loading a new model onto memory attached to parallel compute hardware for each prompt has to be paid.

If someone comes up with major improvements that can be derived from mutating a model, from updating it as it is used --- and I would say with some confidence that human-level AI will require some mechanism giving it more ability to learn after the initial training phase is complete than is presently the case for LLMs as used in 2026 --- this is something that may greatly shift the balance in favor of local AI. It's something that we, as humans, do.

If I were Microsoft, I might seriously look into advanced AI R&D, where models are updated during use. It's not just that it's an area with potential, but that it's an area that might advantage Microsoft's strengths (control of the local computer, doing local compute) relative to other major AI companies. It only takes one major breakthrough that makes everyone very badly want to have an constantly-updated model to drastically alter the economics of AI compute.

Though...if that happens, as I point out above, that'll likely set off an even greater RAM crisis than happened with cloud AI compute...

I feel like killing a rat is probably therapeutic for a therapy ferret. I mean, that's kind of what ferrets are into. Probably more than being handled by the planet's superpredator, at any rate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/...

This is a bit older, from 2003, but it has an index of the degree to which a country is multicultural in ethnic, linguistic, and religious aspects.

Looking up a couple of countries and their relative rankings, out of 215:

Russia has its own opioid epidemic.

Kind of straying from the original point here, but you might consider Blu-Ray 4k/UHD versus streaming in general if you're specifically after the highest quality video that you can get. My understanding is that generally, commercial, streamed 4K stuff is heavily-compressed enough that quality suffers relative to the stuff on Blu-Ray 4k.

There are Linux challenges with the DRM stuff on Blu-Ray 4k too, but with an appropriate drive, most 4K stuff can be played in 2026.

I finally got around to getting a Linux Blu-Ray 4K setup, and I have to say that now, the limiting factor for a lot of film, especially the older stuff, is the film grain, frame rate, or the quality of special effects. Film grain you can often work around with temporal denoising, frame rate with frame interpolation, and special effects...well, no general solution for that.

I think that they should have deferred it two years for component prices to drop. I had a graphic showing inflation-adjusted console prices a while back. Aside from the Atari 2600, no console has had a price near that level and been successful.

goes looking

https://lemmy.today/...

The highest-priced successful console was the PS3, at $778 in 2024 dollars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3

At launch, the PS3 received a mixed reception, largely due to its high price—US$599 (equivalent to $960 in 2025) for the 60 GB model and $499 (equivalent to $800 in 2025) for the 20 GB model—as well as its complex system architecture and limited selection of launch titles. The hardware was also costly to produce, and Sony sold the console at a significant loss for several years. However, the PS3 was praised for its technological ambition and support for Blu-ray, which helped Sony establish the format as the dominant standard over HD DVD. Reception improved over time, aided by a library of critically acclaimed games, the Slim and Super Slim hardware revisions that reduced manufacturing costs, and multiple price reductions. These factors helped the console recover commercially.

But we'll see.

In fact, IIRC from an article I was reading a while back, the very first industrial robot was used on an American auto assembly line.

searches

Yes, Unimate, and it was even on a GM line, same as here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unimate

Unimate was the first industrial robot,[1] which worked on a General Motors assembly line at the Inland Fisher Guide Plant in Ewing Township, New Jersey, in 1961.

Devol, together with Joseph Engelberger, his business associate, started the world's first robot manufacturing company, Unimation.[7] Devol's background wasn't in academia, but in engineering and mechanics, and previously worked on optical sound recording for film and high-speed printing using magnetic sensing and recording. Engelberger's ultimate goal was to create mechanical workers to replace humans in factories.[8]

The machine weighed 4000 pounds[9] and undertook the job of transporting die castings from an assembly line and welding these parts on auto bodies, a dangerous task for workers, who might be poisoned by toxic fumes or lose a limb if they were not careful.[4]

I don't think that it will crash (well, okay, rather, it's not why I'm making the statement), but 2028 is when substantial new memory production will be coming online (well, okay, absent unforseen disruptions like a war with China or another COVID-19 or something).

I think sitting on it does nothing

The thing is that once they release it, they freeze the specs, if they want to have a consistent target. If they wait two years, they can bump the specs up as part of that.

Like, if they ship now, then they're really constrained to, in 2028, ship a two-year-old system.

True. And maybe there will emerge a new group of people who use a living room computer in a new way, and that might really mix things up.

But I still think that the principal market here is most-likely going to be people who are looking to use it in basically the same way that they have a console, and will probably have roughly the same price sensitivity.

EDIT: One factor in the Steam Machine's favor is going to be the vastly-larger existing launch library compared to the other consoles listed. The Steam store currently has 115,106 items in the "Game" category listed. Hard to quantify the impact of that, since we don't really have data points for anything on that scale (though maybe someone could still try to look for correlation between launch library size and sales --- consoles have had varying level of backwards compatibility).

It's better than driving the state budget into the ground, though I still think that it'd be better to get the birth rate up to a sustainable level.

I have been assuming they had stock set aside for some kind of Machine + Controller bundle.

Could be --- I haven't seen news along those lines and the Steam Machine description on their website doesn't presently say anything about coming with a Steam Controller --- but I suppose that it's not unreasonable. But it's also worth remembering that they're probably aiming for the console market with the Steam Machine, and a lot of people use consoles for local multiplayer games and are probably going to want more than one controller for that.

Now, local multiplayer is less common among PC games than console games. But, especially with console ports, it's definitely out there.

https://store.steampowered.com/search?tags=7368&supportedlang=english&ndl=1

That says that there are 7,933 games currently on the Steam store that are tagged as Local Multiplayer.

That does sound like something that Trump would say.

ebikes

Apparently there are now also rolling blackouts in Crimea. Electric vehicles may not work so well.

https://lemmy.today/post/55232637

Well...

https://www.pcgamesn.com/...

Pity the poor PC of 1983-1984, before EGA graphics changed everything. It wasn't the graphics powerhouse we know today. IBM's machines, such as the IBM PC 5150, and their clones might have been the talk of the business world, but they were stuck with text-only displays or low-definition bitmap graphics.

The maximum color graphics resolution was 320 x 200 on a CGA graphics card, with colors limited to four from a hard-wired palette of 16. Even at the time, you'd have a hard time convincing someone that this was really the best graphics card you could buy. Worse, three of those colors were cyan, brown, and magenta, and half of them were just lighter variations of the other half.

You can see in the screenshot from The Secret of Monkey Island below that 16 colors make all the difference, with EGA on the left and four-color CGA on the right.

However, EGA had one big problem; it was prohibitively expensive, even in an era when PCs were already astronomically expensive. The basic EGA card price was over $500 (around $1,400 today), and the Memory Expansion Card cost a further $199.

Go for the full 192KB of RAM and you were looking at a total of nearly $1,000 (approximately $2,900 in today's money), making a top-end EGA card way more expensive than the GeForce RTX 4090 today. What's more, the monitor you needed to make the most of it cost a further $850 (approximately $2,500 today). EGA was a rich enthusiast's toy.

I mean, they aren't going to stop making them if there are people buying them. I'm sure that, at some point, there will be enough manufactured to catch up with demand.

2026 has been a pretty exasperating year to try to get ahold of a lot of pieces of hardware, I have to say.

I'm wondering if --- assuming Valve still is trying to release the Steam Machine this year, which according to the last news I've seen, they're still saying that they're going to do --- this shortage is gonna dick up their Steam Machine sales. I mean, the Steam Controller is a nice-to-have on a regular PC, but for people with a Steam Machine in the living room, they probably are going to want it even more --- like, there it's a lot more important to have the touchpads to replace a mouse, remote power-on capability, etc.