Why Is RAM Suddenly So Cheap? It Might Be Windows

jfruh writes: The average price of a 4GB DDR3 memory DIMM at the moment $18.50 — a price that's far lower than at this time last year. Why is it so cheap? The memory business tends to go in boom and bust cycles, but the free availability of Windows 10 means that fewer people are upgrading their PCs, reducing RAM demand. Analyst Avril Wu said, "Notebook shipments in the third quarter fall short of what is expected for a traditional peak season mainly because Windows 10 with its free upgrade plan negatively impacted replaced sales of notebooks to some extent rather than driving the demand for these products." And prices might stay low for another two years.

Comments

Re:Cheap you say?

[jon3k]

This might not apply to you, but thought I'd share it, because it's a common misconception. So here's my computer right now. Notice the yellow arrow? Looks like I'm only using half of my 16GB of memory right? Now, notice the blue arrow? That's the total actually available memory. The rest is currently in use as cache. The reason windows shows it as free is because it could be freed if something actually needed to use it.

Worth mentioning, the only thing I have open in that screenshot is Chrome with ~20 tabs. Point being, a lot of people see memory usage below 100% and assume the memory isn't being used by the OS. The reality is, more memory might actually improve performance significantly even though you're not "using" 100% of your system's memory.

Re:RAM is not cheap

[Solandri]

RAM has some of the slimmest margins in the computer industry (typically around 1%). So its price is highly sensitive to supply and demand. Manufacturers try to predict how much demand there will be 3-6 months in the future and produce an appropriate amount of RAM. If they underestimate, there's a shortage and price increases. If they overestimate, there's a glut and prices will actually drop below manufacturing costs. But the long-term trend has still been towards lower prices.

Free upgrade prompted me to BUY RAM for 6 machines

[williamyf]

Bollocks!!!!!

I have been as of late upgrading the Laptops of my brother's firm, mostly as a favor to mother earth (to keep them out of the landfield, and to avoid buying new ones, increasing resources usage) and as a favor to him.

Sadly, he is a fan of Toshiba (but then again, it could be worse), the models are:
One A1235-S2386, one A135-SSP4108, one A135-S4527, one P200 and two P105-S6062.

All of them were on WinXP (on some, it came, on some, it was a Downgrade). Every single one of them was moved to Windows 10 (with some trickery). Every single one of them got the latest BIOS, an SSD, and more importantly for the article THE FULL AMOUNT OF RAM THEY SUPPORTED (all DDR2, some pc4200, some PC5300).

That means all the machines went from 1 or 1,5GB to 2GB (in the A series case) and from 1,5 or 2GB to a full 4GB (in the P series case).

I, personally use a Mac. My current Air has the full 8GB apple ships, my older MacBook has 6GB from the Original two (and an SSD instead of the original HDD). Again, the fact that OS upgrades are free, does not mean LESS sales of memory.

So, as some other commenters have said, the article has flawed logic, the fact that an OS upgrade is free does not mean that RAM sales volume will diminish. If anything, the fact that the upgrade is free means there is more "share of wallet" available to buy RAM and other upgrades in order to make an upgraded machine more snappy.

Re:Cheap you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

With Vista Microsoft used to show the memory directly as in use, but the amount of ignorant people that complained about Vista using insane amounts of memory (even on this supposedly technical forum) was insane, so with win 7 they changed it to not directly report the cache as in use memory unless you know what you are looking for. I think those vocal idiots that complained did everyone a disservice as now people think anything above 4GB is simply unused.

Now here is why it may be relevant to you

[dbIII]

Now here is why the above example may be relevant to you - several popular image editing programs do a lot of operations on the working data from your current image on disk instead of in memory no matter how much memory you have. Put it's cache on ramdisk and some operations speed up by an order of magnitude or more and let other operations happen.
I've seen a machine lock up for twenty minutes rotating a large TIF file despite having a lot of free memory because it was thrashing the disk flat out.

Re:Cheap you say?

[Khyber]

"Since when is harddrive I/O the limiting factor when it comes to frame rates?"

Since the days of live-streaming the fucking world from the disk - e.g. GTA V