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

Cheap you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I've already got 16GB in my home PC and I don't seem to use more than 3 or 4GB of it, but I guess I could squeeze in another 16GB...

Re:Cheap you say?

[Xenx]

However where do you draw the line? You could cache your whole hard drive in ram...

Right there. That would be amazing.

Re: Cheap you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The Eye of the Storm

[sexconker]

It's DDR3 being shuffled off the stage because DDR4 is now well-established.
Prices for DDR3 will bottom out and then shoot back up and plateau, and you won't care until you need to upgrade an old system.

Re:The Eye of the Storm

[cpt kangarooski]

Yet you can still buy new production 12AX7 and other vacuum tubes!

Yeah, but try getting vacuum to put in those tubes -- there's nothing available.

huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Faulty logic

[kuzb]

This is broken logic. Giving away Windows 10 doesn't impact PC sales at all. What IS impacting PC sales is the fact that the need for a more powerful machine is slowing way down. Instead of computers becoming obsolete in a year or two, computers can often go for much longer before they need to be replaced. It's not uncommon to find people who have had the same PC for 5 years now because there's simply no benefit to them to move to more powerful hardware.