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I got a deal on this new MacBook Air last year, glad I didn't wait

 

Computers are very cheap right now. It will be a while before you see any effect of the memory shortage on prices. Moreover, most new “AI” laptops use no external DIMM memory anymore, but onboard memory that comes with the CPU board (non-upgradeable), so memory shortages have no effect on their prices.

 

A couple of effects you can see right now is that several computer companies have announced new tiers and pricing and many have rolled back their base configurations from 16GB of RAM back to only 8GB.

Another is that Micron has announced it's completely leaving the consumer market so that it can focus on the data center market. That leaves RAM and nand flash chips to Samsung and SK Hynix.

This is completely wrong. Electronics companies like Dell, Lenovo and Apple do not make their own RAM chips. It is the individual RAM modules made by Micron and Samsung, well, now just Samsung, that are going up in price. This makes RAM go up regardless of the form factor.

The RAM in your next iPhone will cost more than the RAM in your current iPhone, and companies like Apple either have to absorb the cost or pass it along to consumers. The same with your next car. Your next Tesla will have more expensive electronics.

And the problem isn't just the price, it's what's going to cause the price to go up: a shortage. A Tesla with no chips in it is going to be kind of worthless. Same with a chipless iPhone.

And Micron isn't the only company to say their not selling anything to anyone except AI data centers. Even Western Digital says their hard drives are all sold out for 2026 to data centers. There are only like 4 or 5 chip companies that make RAM and storage, and two of them are now sold out to data centers for the forseeable future.

 

The latest “AI” laptop CPUs from Intel, Apple, and Qualcomm usually have integrated RAM, with no user-replaceable external DIMMs. AMD is also adopting this trend.

Lunar Lake—Wikipedia

 

Again, I am not talking at all about laptops. Laptops have very little to do with the subject, other than being another device that needs chips.

It's the AI data centers, huge massive buildings that need tons of electricity and chips to work, that are buying up all the chips creating another chip shortage.

And soldered or DIMM RAM also has nothing to do with the equasion, as RAM chips are RAM chips. If you don't have RAM chips to solder on the mother board or to solder onto the DIMMs, you don't have RAM chips.

In reality, even if all computers came with soldered RAM from now on, it wouldn't matter, this would still be a problem. And what is more, soldered RAM might even be making the situation worse. This is because computer companies have announced that they're going to start "pushing" 8 GB RAM laptops and desktops as their main bread and butter computers. Imagine if your next Mac Mini came with 8 GB of RAM for the price of a 16 GB model, but the 16 GB model were much more. People will buy the 8 GB, then be more likely to want to upgrade in the following months and years leading to even more demand for chips, because SINCE THE RAM IS SOLDERED ON, you have to buy the entire computer with many more chips than just RAM chips.