If you were hoping for some relief from the RAM pricing crisis, April hasn't delivered on that front. Actually, there is a caveat attached here, in that there has been one more positive development of late – although it has a sizable sting in the tail, as we'll see later. But before that – and sorry to do this to you – we must wade through the quagmire of negative news that's been a running theme this month.
In fact, we only need to focus on the past week to see multiple developments that underline just how bad things have got with the RAM situation. Previously, we've heard about stock shortages of the Mac mini (and Mac Studio) theorized to be down to the lack of RAM supply, and then on Wednesday, the base model of the Mac mini completely sold out on Apple's online store. That's the M4 model with only 16GB of RAM, whereas before, it was the versions more heavily loaded with system memory which were (understandably) in trouble.
We also witnessed the launch of the Framework Laptop 13 Pro, dubbed the 'MacBook Pro for Linux users', which went down a storm thanks to many of its design decisions — with a notable fly in the ointment. That was the asking price for this notebook, with wallet-worrying starting prices, particularly in some regions where there are higher, much dearer baseline configurations. Naturally, those prices have been driven up by the rising cost of RAM and storage (along with other PC components besides, including CPUs and GPUs).
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Surface downer
Another major downer was a rumor that Microsoft's next-gen Surface devices are likely to be, well, shall we say expensive. Or to quote the leaker in this case: "Prices are probably going to be so bad, no one will be able to afford the things anyway."
Yikes. And guess why? That's right, good old RAMageddon. And yes, okay, this is just a rumor, but we have already seen huge price hikes for existing Surface models, and those are very real. When they happened last week, they were taken as a sign that next-gen Surface hardware would also be a lot pricier, so that adds weight to this week's rumor.
And on top of all this, a further blow was dealt in the form of ASRock's new HUDIMM memory. While on the face of it, this was billed as a clever innovation for producing more affordable DDR5 memory, it does so by cutting performance levels considerably. Still, that doesn't mean it's not a useful choice to have for budget builds, because it is.
However, with companies coming up with longer-term solutions like this for the ridiculous pricing that's plaguing the memory market, this suggests the crisis really is here for the long haul (as in the rest of the decade). Which some analyst firms, and indeed memory manufacturers, have already said is the case — but this kind of development underlines it.
Continued bad news about SSD price hikes rather compounds all this, as that hardware is, of course, part of the pain regarding shaky memory supply.
Consumer refusal
So, that's the latest miserable mire of bad news on the crisis — but what about the glimmer of positivity I mentioned at the outset? This is the fact that we've actually seen some sizable drops in the price of DDR5 RAM, and by sizable I mean in the order of 10% to 20% (and there looks to be some relief with DDR4, as well, albeit in a much more limited way).
While that sounds great on the face of it, hold your horses, because the price of RAM has shot up by a ridiculous amount — to the tune of 300% or more (and it's far worse than that for some DDR4 modules going by recent reports). So those kind of 10% or 20% reductions aren't all that significant against this backdrop.
Furthermore, this price drop isn't a result of improved supply for RAM, but as the analyst company that highlighted the DDR5 drop pointed out, it's a softening of consumer demand. In other words, prices have got so silly that consumers are just sighing, giving up and refusing to buy, in the hope that prices will come down. And, of course, that's part of the supply and demand equation which will indeed cause prices to drop.
In short, it's not a positive thing in terms of better supply and stock, but a negative factor attacking prices and forcing them down, regardless of inventory levels of RAM in warehouses and on shelves.
Really, it's just another depressing facet of the reality of the RAM crisis. It also begs the question: is this ebbing demand due to the sky-high cost of memory our best, or indeed only, hope of price tags coming down?
From where I'm sat that seems to be the case. And what's more, this slump in prices due to buyer refusal is likely to have a limited impact, when all the fundamental issues that caused the RAM crisis in the first place remain in full force. Extra manufacturing capacity at memory makers is not going to meaningfully spin up to a greater level for a long time yet – that won't even start until 2028 – and AI demand for RAM looks as relentless as ever.
This week, we also heard again that AI's insatiable hunger for memory isn't going to be solved by Google's TurboQuant tech, clever though it is. The CFO of memory maker SK Hynix (via Wccftech) recently said: "Although memory-efficiency technologies may appear to reduce memory usage per individual device, in reality they are evolving in a direction that maximizes the amount of context that can be processed per unit of memory."
This is something I wrote about recently, and to sum up, what it means is that 'memory-efficiency tech' like TurboQuant will be used to drive better performance for AI, rather than saving memory (while delivering the same performance) — which will lead to more AI usage, and increased demand for RAM. So, there's no escape route there.
The optimism that is around, then – and it's very thin on the ground anyway – doesn't have much in the way of substance or foundations.
For now, it's true enough that as consumers, we can do our part in suppressing demand by refusing to buy – where that's feasible – and hope to see this make a continued impact on the currently lofty prices of RAM.
It's a slim and wispy hope, but it's about all we seem to have. Save for keeping our fingers crossed that somehow the AI bubble might burst, but never mind wispy, that feels like an extra-planar possibility, and not one that there's any chance of manifesting in this particular reality.
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