RAM prices are forcing companies to choose higher prices, worse specs, or both

https://gizmodo.com/shrinkflation-is-quietly-making-all-gadgets-worse-2000754565

by cainxinth • 3 months ago

145 114 3 months ago

toasty228• 3 months ago

We squeezed everything we could squeeze over the last decades, getting better products / quality of life (in the west at least). Now that there is almost no one left to abuse (ie people on the other side of the planet willing to work for pennies) we'll have to get by with shittier products, more working hours, later retirement, worse public services, etc.

Many product segments peaked and the only way left to extract more money from us is to either lower the quality so that it's cheaper to make/break faster or subscriptions/ads.

ButyTh04• 3 months ago

Why do we have to get by as you say? On whose command?

Why do we always act like there's an immutable social obligation to march right along believing the prior generations had freedom to start marching in that direction, but we are forever locked in to such a direction.

You know all the people that made those choices are dying and future generations have zero obligation to carry on linearly from where they left off?

Women would not have the right to vote. We'd all be speaking Latin.

Two things that would remain true if society of the living was tightly coupled to exactly how the past worked.

tonyedgecombe2• 3 months ago

This is a valid point but I’m struggling to understand what it has to do with the gp comment.

The reality is the West has been leaning on cheap labour for decades. That can’t continue as the rest of the world is catching up.

This is a good thing even though it will be painful for people used to consuming cheap goods from Asia and other parts of the world.

kakacik• 3 months ago

You don't have to do anything, nobody cares about individuals when you have 8 billions. The masses, on average, want cheap simple fun, cheap stuff and so on. Market responds. Good luck trying to change that.

Sure, there is some market manipulation, ads are the best example (how can any adult with even a smidge of self-respect accept any ads in any form is beyond me, thats mind slavery 101) but since forever masses wanted bread and games more than literally anything.

All those companies making high quality expensive products that lasted decades? Barring tiny exceptions, they either went down with quality (less control, move to china etc) or went bankrupt.

Parent is right in 1 aspect - if we elevate whole world to similar income levels, the income of previously-rich countries will have much less purchasing power, can't escape simple numbers. But who cared in the past about slave kids in sweat shops, right, they didn't have the right skin color, passport or religion to worry about.

pjc50• 3 months ago

The original comment has conflated every ill into "have to", combined with political fatalism. Not unreasonable given the way things have turned out, but yes it's not inevitable either. It's just the direction of travel that the majority chose.

Certain "have to" are imposed by the physical world. The world will have to use less oil in 2026 than in 2025, because production has been so heavily impacted by the war. What happens beyond that .. well, only a fairly small number of people get to make that decision. Next US presidential election is in 2028.

pclowes4• 3 months ago

Almost every global graph tells the opposite story. There are far fewer people in poverty. There are much better average outcomes on basically every metric you can imagine. Almost all directly attributed to global commerce

rexpop4• 3 months ago

Despite decades of expanding global commerce and industrialization in the developing world, the data shows that extreme income inequality between nations has remained stubbornly entrenched, and between-country inequalities still account for an overwhelming ~80% of total world income inequality.

By the end of the twentieth century, these decades of development and industrialization had primarily succeeded in consolidating world inequalities in income and resource use, while accelerating environmental degradation to unprecedented levels.

When corporations relocate manufacturing to the imperial periphery, they successfully export the social contradictions of mass production (like class conflict and labor unrest), but they do not relocate the wealth that historically allowed high-wage countries to afford social safety nets and high living standards.

armchairhacker• 3 months ago

Bullshit jobs (and unnecessary in-office), material waste (food, clothes, etc.), culture warring...we have much more to squeeze.

rexpop4• 3 months ago

The dynamic is not a straightforward "race to the bottom" that simply runs out of victims, but rather a cyclical process that continually recreates working-class resistance and shifts capital into entirely new industries.

Maybe it seems like this strategy leads to a permanent decline in global labor power, but history shows a different pattern: "where capital goes, conflict goes". Relocating capital to exploit cheap labor does not permanently resolve crises of profitability; it merely reschedules them in time and space. By moving to new regions, multinational capital inevitably creates and strengthens entirely new industrial working classes in those areas.

Conversely (complementarily) when an industry becomes too crowded and profits are squeezed, capitalists do not just cut corners; they rely on what Beverly Silver terms the product fix—shifting capital entirely out of mature, highly competitive sectors into new, innovative, and more profitable industries.

Historically, the epicenter of capitalist accumulation (and subsequent labor unrest) shifted from textiles in the 19th century to automobiles in the 20th century. In the first decades of this century, capital shifted toward semiconductors, the "education industry," and producer services (like finance, telecommunications, and consulting).

Because a product fix involves withdrawing capital from an established industry, it usually brings about mass layoffs, deindustrialization, and the breaking of existing social compacts. In response, the workers who previously benefited from those compacts have, historically, risen up to protect their jobs, pensions, and established ways of life.

Unfortunately, they are often doomed by their diminishing economic leverage.

lccerina• 3 months ago

And then Google is moving at full speed to lock-up the whole Android experience (bootloaders, OS, app store, etc.) so that even tech-savvy consumers are forced to get new, crappier devices when the old ones start slowing down. Enshittification at its highest level

Qem• 3 months ago

Wait until Shrinkflation meets AIflation, where most services once mediated by humans are taken over by dumb, error-prone, allucinating AI, with no possibility of recourse.

lostmsu• 3 months ago

, allucinating AI

Oh, the irony

rootusrootus• 3 months ago

Maybe speling mistakes will become more common, as a signal of non-AI content.

For a while, at least.

dangus5• 3 months ago

We can see this with the Lenovo Legion 2026 models. They literally perform worse than the 2025 models and cost more. Not only that, the build quality was cut for 2026.

I know Apple is escaping it due to their large contracts but I’m honestly not sure how at this point. They must have pre-purchased multiple years of memory or otherwise have a really insane contract.

But what’s puzzling about that is, why don’t other manufacturers have the same kind of deals? It’s not like Lenovo is a low volume supplier.

Obviously, the iPhone sells in volume unmatched by other devices. But still…I’d have to ask why other high-volume brands like Samsung have wildly expensive laptops.

It just seems like the other companies are asleep at the wheel and don’t have any passion for their strategy, to the point where a tiny company like Framework is overperforming just by caring a little bit. Sure, they can’t beat Apple on raw value but they at least they put together a laptop with a respectable trackpad and a CNC body. Where is volume leader Lenovo?

prepend2• 3 months ago

This has always been my question of why don’t companies just directly emulate Apple.

If lenovo is buying a billion chips a year, why can’t they lock in like Apple?

entropicdrifter2• 3 months ago

Because Apple has the capital to take a loss on hardware indefinitely due to the App Store being their primary source of revenue?

wat100003• 3 months ago

Do they have anything like the same volume? Lenovo’s annual revenue is about half of Apple’s annual profit.

havaloc2• 3 months ago

I really don't understand why more companies don't emulate Apple in terms of line simplicity. Look at Dell for a great example of a sprawling product mix. I can't imagine having that many product varieties helps with profitability.

In the consumer space, I recently bought a Sonicare toothbrush, and the number of models and combinations is staggering. 1000x plaque removal, 750% plaque removal, it's ridiculous.

Aurornis2• 3 months ago

All big vendors will place orders some distance into the future. Lenovo does it, too.

You can't lock in prices forever, though. The more volume and stability you have, the more a vendor will be willing to enter long-term agreements with you. Lenovo has less volume than Apple and is not in as great of a financial position, so they don't have as much leverage.

The bigger factor is that Apple already had more margin in their products. The price premium for RAM upgrades on Apple laptops is large, as everyone knows. They could absorb more RAM price increases without being forced to raise retail prices.

bluGill3• 3 months ago

They can lock in. However that is risky too - if prices go down they are locked into the higher prices.

More importantly, if you have a locked in price you can sell your products for more profit - or you can sell the things that you have locked in and not have to make the rest of the widget at all. Sometimes someone will give you a good deal to buy out your locked in contract.

vlovich123• 3 months ago

Because people continuously underestimate just how good Apple engineering and supply chain management is. And since iPhone and portables is such a juggernaut for them, it goes downstream into every other product line that uses the same architecture. That’s why it was so critical for them to pull off the ARM MacBook transition - the only other alternative for them essentially would have been to exit the market or run mostly at a loss.

throw0101c3• 3 months ago

If lenovo is buying a billion chips a year, why can’t they lock in like Apple?

Lenovo controls less of the stack than Apple: CPUs (Intel/AMD), BIOS, operating system, etc. While ostensibly Apple and Lenovo are both selling personal computers, Lenovo is in a (sub-)segment of the market that is commoditized with Dell, HP, etc.

If you need to run Windows and associated (Windows-only) apps, what's special between Lenovo/Dell EMC/HP/etc? How much of a difference is there between Coke and Pepsi?

A lot of vendors hitched their wagon to the Wintel duopoly, and now they're all riding (or being ridden) herd.

zarzavat• 3 months ago

Apple prioritizes price stability over price competitiveness. They will happily charge formerly eye-watering prices for extra RAM and their customers will less happily pay them. On the other hand, Apple rarely change their prices after release except in cases of extreme currency devaluation. They simply raise the price when the new model comes out.

They do this for their own reasons but it's helping them in this crisis. They can simply accept lower margins in the short term, in the knowledge that in the long term these price fluctuations even out.

From the perspective of the producers Apple are a consistent purchaser with deep pockets. AI companies may be willing to pay more for RAM in the short term, but Apple is a safer customer. The current AI bubble may or may not burst, but people will keep buying iPhones regardless. The producers do not want to freeze Apple out because Apple is their hedge against the bubble bursting.

Lenovo may not be a low volume purchaser but they are not at Apple's scale nor are Lenovo's customers willing to pay the premium that Apple's customers are.

dangus5• 3 months ago

I don’t think we’ve seen the lower margins in Apple’s financial reports.

Also, their computers have been getting more storage/RAM competitive as time has gone on. Literally just by time passing and prices staying the same.

Lenovo is beyond Apple’s scale when it comes to PC sales. They are #1 in volume. Apple is #4. Apple sells more iPhones but Lenovo does also own Motorola which is not nothing. We can also look at Samsung: a wildly high volume company who has their own production lines of major components like RAM and displays but they still sell their 2026 laptops at eye watering price increases.

Apple literally buys displays from Samsung.

JohnTHaller• 3 months ago

Apple is also slightly decreasing their margins to maintain price. They can easily do this as their margins are 10x to 20x most of the industry.

dangus5• 3 months ago

Is that showing up in their financial disclosures?

GeekyBear• 3 months ago

Apple doesn't only benefit from volume discounts on commodity parts, they also benefit from not having pay a margin on all the parts they designed in-house.

It's not like designing your own part is free, but Qualcomm charges a very healthy margin on top of their manufacturing costs.

Apple also invests in designing the tooling and processes used on their manufacturing lines.

For instance, they cut way back on how much CNC time was required to produce the Neo.

BirAdam• 3 months ago

Shrinkflation is the diminution in product quality and/or volume to resist raising prices due to inflationary pressure. This has been happening in the USA since roughly 2001. Gadgets largely improved anyway though the market transitioned from metal and wood casings to brittle plastics, and there were other sacrifices made.

This, however, isn’t shrinkflation. This is supply chain, demand, and uncertainty.

MrBuddyCasino2• 3 months ago

It’s partially that the value of the dollar has been diluted a lot over the decades, and people are in denial about it. Earning 100k is no longer „a good salary“.

cyanydeez• 3 months ago

OK, every time I see a comment about income on the internet, I have to assume that the person commenting has zero IQ if they mention nothing about COL.

The same happens when someone mentions something about the Average income as opposed to the median income. The average income is meaningless if the top 1% keep going up while the rest of the system stays the same. The average would look like people are earning more money when they're not.

Same thing with Market economics and the price of items. If I got a choice to sell a boner pill for $1 to a million people and $1 million to one person, those are equal value propositions. So whenever a corporation raises prices, they don't care how many customers they cut off as long as the remaining ones are whales. That's particularly sharp with all the AI costs being shoved into the pipe.

So, that is to say, you really shouldn't just produce a single number about anything and treat it as some benchmark across the world.

drstewart• 3 months ago

Nobody is in denial about a well known behaviour that happens to every currency

bluGill3• 3 months ago

100k is still a good salary. However is used to be a great salary, and most people are not in touch with how inflation has changed the value.

sandworm101• 3 months ago

100k is almost double the average. That makes it a great salary even today. We in tech so easily forget how hard life is for the vast majority of workers.

throw0101c3• 3 months ago

It’s partially that the value of the dollar has been diluted a lot over the decades, and people are in denial about it. Earning 100k is no longer „a good salary“.

A "good salary" (or at least the median) used to be $5000:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Median_personal_income_af...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...

As the 'dollar has lost value' people have demanded more dollars in their salary. (Whether the two have kept up with each other is a matter of debate/concern.)

thrance• 3 months ago

My definition of shrinkflation doesn't require its purpose to be "resisting price inflation". Rather, I would bet that more often than not it is just a cheap lever to boost margins.

clickety_clack• 3 months ago

It feels to me like the nadir of gadget material casing quality was around 2010. Back then _everything_ was cheap ticky tacky plastic. Now the midrange of everything seems to be metal and glass, or at least a high grade, solid-feeling grade of plastic. The low end range of goods is obviously allowed to be as cheap as it is my using much cheaper materials.

HWR_142• 3 months ago

This, however, isn’t shrinkflation. This is supply chain, demand, and uncertainty.

It most certainly is shrinkflation. It's rising input costs decreasing the product quality.

zaphar• 3 months ago

That is an unusual definition of shrinkflation. I always understood it as quantity going down not quality.

throw0101c3• 3 months ago

Shrinkflation is the diminution in product quality and/or volume to resist raising prices due to inflationary pressure. This has been happening in the USA since roughly 2001.

This has been happening in the USA way before 2001:

In 1967, the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act (FPLA) was enacted to ensure that consumers had enough information to make an informed choice between competing products. The Act requires each package of household "consumer commodities" included in the FPLA's coverage to have a label that includes the net quantity of contents in terms of weight, measure, or numerical count (measurement must be in both metric and inch/pound units).[10]

* https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/page-one-economics/2...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Packaging_and_Labeling_Ac...

In fact, it was the humorist Art Buchwald who was among the first to sound the alarm. In a column entitled “Packaged Inflation” published in 1969, he lampooned the growing tendency to conceal price increases. Tongue in cheek, he praised American industry for “devising new methods to make the product smaller while making the package larger.”

[…]

In late summer of 1974, for example, Woolworth’s offered a packet of pencils at its back-to-school sale for 99 cents – same price as the previous year. But as a sharp-eyed reporter at The New York Times observed, the packages only contained 24 pencils, six fewer than the previous year. The same strategy affected packets of construction paper (24 sheets, not 30).

* https://mikesmoneytalks.ca/shrinkflation-is-an-economic-mons...

And in recorded history for centuries:

* https://archive.ph/https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/...

pseudohadamard• 3 months ago

Yup, one of Ea-nāṣir's other tablets complains about small blocks of copper in large crates that mislead about their size. The table is held in the Museum of Northern South Yorkshire, but you try and tell the young people of today that and they won't believe you.

sylos2• 3 months ago

This is unbridled greed, nothing more.

havaloc2• 3 months ago

The MacBook Neo proves that gadget "shrinkflation" is largely a choice. I own an Neo and I continue to marvel at how capable, nice, and yet inexpensive it was.

functionmouse• 3 months ago

You have to keep in mind, the less capable you are with computers, the more computer you need. You might get by just fine on 8 GB, but Grandma, with her three anti-malware suites, two active malware infections, corporate spyware, and fake version of Google Chrome which reports all browsing usage to the Neilsen corporation, is going to slow to a crawl, at best, even on 16gb. Normal people computers are different than yours or mine.

sterwill• 3 months ago

How does grandma install all of that on macOS?

jfrbfbreudh• 3 months ago

Yes, we are vastly superior with our enormous brains.

albert_e• 3 months ago

If a brand decides to release a budget version of their expensive product with a value-for-money proposition ... that is not shrinkflation IMO. (whether that value-for-money proposition is mere marketing hype or well received and is closer to reality ... is secondary)

If seemingly the "same" product -- in this example say 'MacBook Pro' base model for current year -- delivers less goodness, less value compared to its price year-on-year. If the price appears to stay more or less the same but the product is made weaker in service of higher margins for the seller. THAT would typically qualify as shrinkflation ... in my understanding.

This is more objectively measurable in comsumer goods where you can see the packaging being tinkered with over time so consumer thinks they are getting the same SKU but this year's packaging has less of the product tghan last year's, at similar price point so it doesnt register as price inflation.

pclowes4• 3 months ago

RAM prices experiencing a spike due to a demand shock is not shrinkflation. Its a single COGS line item not a broad increase across all line items.

Note: some single item shocks can lead to broad inflation (eg: oil) but that effect takes awhile to play out.

andor• 3 months ago

The RAM/SSD price spikes are not shrinkflation, but the article gives examples of shrinkflation happening due to it:

* Google's upcoming folding phone is going to have less RAM than the current model.

* Motorola has both increased the price on their Razr flip phone and downsized the minimum storage

* Sony reduced storage on the PS5 Slim

...

flutas2• 3 months ago

All of those could also be classified as "they learned consumers didn't need that much."

JSR_FDED2• 3 months ago

The article is wrong with their Apple example. The cheapest Mac mini with the smallest amount of RAM is no longer available, but the next larger config is available at the same unchanged price point.

dawnerd• 3 months ago

"is available" assuming you can find one in stock.

zemo• 3 months ago

tech peaked at the PS Vita and I am not joking

LaurensBER• 3 months ago

As much as I love my Vita having access to Chinese handhelds with decent screens that can emulate almost everything under the sun (including PC, Switch and some Vita!) is pretty damn awesome!

throwaway5752• 3 months ago

Crazy suggestion - maybe there is some space for a more efficient compute software / device combination ecosystem and companies. I don't really need or even want the AI features being pushed on my devices. I don't want to pay for ever more absurd camera specs on phones. I don't need 8k or even 4k displays on small devices. I don't need or want browser security container features to safely run and render obnoxious adds - I just want them suppressed. I don't need 4k streams or want to pay for the bandwidth.

We actually don't need all the ram. Everyone was fine in 2010. The devices were fine, the internet was productive.

We have all just seriously fucked up in the software and hardware space. We are super-sizing devices and software just as surely as the car industry has done in massive pickups and SUVs and the food industry has done with portion sizing.

jmyeet• 3 months ago

So I randomly ended up buying a lot of computer gear last year because I killed a perfectly fine 4 year old PC and couldn't decide what I wanted to replace it. I thought at the time "this is an expensive mistake" but you look at the prices I paid for parts a year ago and it's mind-blowing eg:

- 4TB Samsung Pro 990 SSD for $150 (now $940)

- 64GB DDR kit for a laptop $180 (now $700)

- 64GB DDR5 CL30 kit for a desktop $200 (now $950)

- 9800X3D/5070Ti PC $1800

- 2TB Samsung Pro 990 $95 I think? I honestly don't even remember why I bought this

It's really depressing now. Normally at this point in the NViida product cycle we'd be expected a 50x0 Super series. I think it's all but confirmed we won't see those until next year. I think the 50x0 series will last a lot longer than the 40x0 series.

So it's going to be interesting to see what happens when this hits phone makers who also need RAM. There certainly won't be a RAM increase this year and there'll likely be a price bump. Apple may be able to absorb this to some degree because of anyone I expect them to have long term contracts.

Still, Apple has temporarily delisted the base 16GB Mac Mini and removed the 512GB Mac Studio so they aren't unaffected.

But I think this SSD/RAM price hike has basically killed the Steam Machine, which is sad. Valve obviously didn't lock in long-term contracts before announcing it. Woops. The Steam Deck is also a hard find as a result.

We've seen an almost unprecedented price hike on the PS5, which is an almost 6 year old console at this point. I wouldn't exxpect a PS6 before 2028 at the earliest.

We've had RAM price spikes before, usually because of supply crunches (eg years ago I seem to remember a fire taking out one of the major suppliers).

I honestly don't expect any of this to get better until we have an increasingly likely global recession and the AI bubble pops. OpenAI and Anthropic may not be able to cash out in time to avoid all this.

beAbU• 3 months ago

I bough a unifi access point on the ubiquiti store today, and on checkout they slapped me with a €5 "memory surcharge" on checkout.

rsync• 3 months ago

Anecdote: The ‘zfs send’ capable accounts at rsync.net have always had a 5TB minimum size because they require a full blown virtual machine with resource guarantees and IP address, etc.

We just changed that minimum to 10TB last week and it was specifically the RAM prices that forced us to re-calculate that value proposition.

pzo• 3 months ago

I really hope we will have some innovation with LLM that would remove such demand for RAM. Any ideas what is more likely?

ASIC LLM?

inference inside SSD?

bigger 1-bit trained models?

better MoE so we don't have to load all experts?

m4rtink• 3 months ago

Bubble popping, useless AI hardware sold off to creditors and scrapped to RAM sticks in SSDs for actual real world use case ? And eventually maybe later in a few years some actually useful and profitable real use cases for the current LLM generation are found.

Alternatively "AI" gets such a bad name regular people will go and burn it all down as long as it has "AI" even just in the name.

Fire-Dragon-DoL• 3 months ago

Shrinkflation is when a product for the same price gives you less while pretending to be the same amount, e.g. get 450g of pasta per pack instead of 500, same price, sold in the same boxes.

This is the same product at 5x the price. It sucks but it's not shrinkflation

estimator7292• 3 months ago

My company has tens of thousands of people on a waitlist for our new product. We had planned to ship this year, but we simply can't get enough memory at any price. Even if we cut the installed memory to bare minimum functional requirements, the unit cost goes up by a few hundred dollars and functionality is drastically reduced.

So, we can't ship. This could kill our business. Thanks, Sam.

RAM prices are forcing companies to choose higher prices, worse specs, or both

Related Stories