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Why Is RAM Suddenly So Cheap? It Might Be Windows

Posted by Soulskill on from the 16gb-ought-to-be-enough-for-anyone dept.

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.

2 of 209 comments (clear)

  1. huh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "The average price of a 4GB DDR3 memory DIMM at the moment $18.50"

    It is? Newegg is all in the $21 - $23 range. Looking at CamelCamelCamel, it's about the same price it was around this time a year ago.

    2x8GB DDR3 is still in the $80 - $90 range, same place it's been for months.

  2. Re: Cheap you say? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The point is that bad web design nowadays require an absurd amount of RAM (and CPU cycles).

    It really is quite easy to hand write rich looking designs. But instead of doing this, most web developers tend to use a metric shit ton of linked script libraries, make stupid non-optimized calls from these non-optimized libraries and generally just make bad design decisions. I puke in my mouth a little every time I see a web design that has jQuery (or even multiple versions of it) and several third party libraries linked *just* to produce something equivalent to a newsletter subscription overlay popup. This means there will be a lot of unnecessary HTTP calls for something that could be done in a one single GET and a result that could be produced with maybe five lines of pure JavaScript.

    My customers have been amazed at how fast I can make my sites run even though they look "complex" and more often than not have a lot of graphical elements embedded throughout the design. It's just a question of optimization and having a tiny clue about what you're doing.