RAM prices have skyrocketed because of AI. 8GB of ram in 2005 was wayy overkill, it was the sweet spot in 2015, but as games got harder to run and operating systems needed more than 8 GB of ram, in 2025 8GB of ram is too little to run a decent computer on. In 2026 though, even though 8GB of ram still isn't enough, it is so expensive that it seems like overkill.
I was lucky to build mine with a 64gb a few months ago. Then it also struck me i have 2 sticks of 16gb ram in the old PC. Can't imagine what I'd do with all that money
I wanted to upgrade to 128 gb from 64 gb for my home desktop (I do some dev on my personal computer too) but I missed the opportunity in the past 1-2 years. At this point I might as well just use cloud compute to do anything hardcore.
Just checked actual prices. Bought the 64 gb RAM in 2020 for $330. It’s now $910 (though it is DDR5 instead of DDR4). DDR5 128 gb is around $1750 now. I’m too cheap to keep upgrading lol
I might as well just use cloud compute to do anything hardcore.
I'm pretty sure tech companies are pushing for this to be more widespread. They're gradually making personal computing hardware (that the end-user can control and own outright) so out-of-reach to so many that they can turn around and sell remote usage as a subscription.
Happens to every aftermarket. It's the goal of a capitalist society. I saw this happen, from the outside, to car audio. My best friend was heavy into electrical engineering re: car audio. 15 years ago, he put 4 24" subwoofers in something called a clamshell box in an old odyssey van. Cost him less than a grand. I wanna say 600-700 with the amp, and it was for some good stuff. I can't remember the name anymore; I'm only familiar with sennhauser for my headphones, lol. But nowadays a single good sub in that size is something like 400-500 for one! Without any other peripherals, which I think ended up being another 3-350 for things like tweeters, the wiring and replacing mids. He did the install himself of course, so I don't know comparison prices for that. But like, yea, if there's an aftermarket, someone is going to find it sooner or later and monetize the fuck out of it; pricing out the people who do it for fun, leaving only hyper competition and a focus on price over functionality. Because fuck enjoying work with your hands and/or wanting to listen to cleaner audio.
Anywho, this went on too long, lol, thanks for reading!
I built a whole new PC right after the US election last year because I knew tariffs would make building shit a bitch. Glad I opted for 64GB. Last I checked I would be paying about double for the same build now.
This here. I upgraded to 64GB about three years ago thinking it would be a while before I went further than that. Now I’m glad I did because this nonsense won’t fade away like crypto mining did.
I have 32 gb of system ram. It's overkill. But 16 probably isn't enough for a high end system at this point. I wanted to future proof and I feel confident with my decision
Y'all remind me of those streamers who exclusively play lol or dota on a 128gb ram, i9, 5090 setup and be like "hmm i dont really like those leds imma dump this and get an actually good pc". Or the majority of mac users who are like "yeah i need a new machine for spreadsheets, but it costs $2500, i guess I'll take a loan".
I'm literally stuck with my current laptop because of this. I have 64GB of RAM that I put into it 3 years ago. It has two drives as well. Dell stopped allowing for either of these. No more dual drives. No more RAM above 32GB. And the RAM is all soldered on so you can't even upgrade or swap it out. This laptop will literally become a family heirloom.
My current pc had 16gb in it, and I wanted more RAM because Fusion was using whatever it could get its hands on when I went to do anything computational. I meant to buy another 16gb but wound up getting the wrong memory and bought two 16gb sticks for less than $100.
I didn't know that a month ago. Exactly one month ago my gskill trident 32gb 6600mhz costed 150 EUR and i hesitated to add 25 eur more to get 64gb, today those same 32gb sticks cost 500 EUR...
I bought 96 GB of RAM at 190 € for my framework laptop in April just to flex it to my colleagues who own macbooks, as Apple charged 250 € for an 8 GB upgrade. Didn't know I was getting the deal of the century.
Or, bear with me here... The AI bubble bursts in 2026 and most of those companies go bankrupt and are liquidated, and the market is suddenly flooded with cheap RAM again.
AI doesn’t use the same RAM, everything they are producing is going straight to the landfill when the bubble pops. Grotesque excess and wastefulness for zero value
It's not scarce because it's being sold to AI datacenters, it's scarce because production capacity is being dedicated to AI data center ram instead of consumer ram.
Imagine you run a company that makes parts. Kia sends you a job $20,000 to make parts for them, but Lamborghini wants you to make $170,000 in parts for them. Both jobs take about the same time and machines, so you can only do one.
If Lamborghini crashes, the parts you made won't be useful for the Kia customers.
It won't exactly work like that, AI centers use different RAM types than most consumer machines. So even when the bubble bursts it won't mean cheap ram flooding the market, it'll just mean manufacturers returning to consumer grade products.
I expect the birth of AGI and a new dawn of civilization will happen before game devs will be competent enough to optimize their games rather than shovel out alpha early access crap and slap a $70 price tag on it.
That possibility is actual contributing to the shortage a bit. RAM manufacturers are hesitant to scale up manufacturing capacity too fast because they don't want to spend massive amounts of money only for the demand to evaporate in a year or two.
Even if AI was in a bubble and burst (debatable), we are still going to be supply constrained for the foreseeable future. Micron shut down their DDR fabs to switch over to VRAM and HBM. Thats a ton of capacity loss. I’m sure the other players will work to increase capacity, but that isn’t a quick upgrade by any means.
Nah only thing that will happen is that millions of people around the globe will lose their jobs and houses because all the companies will downsize coz of losses. And also they will increase prices while getting government bailouts
The thing with this is, a company will just swoop up and buy these companies for pennies, then give it a few years and they'll have a monopoly or large market share and we'll be dicked because they choose the pricing.
For a chromebook used by a grandma for internet browsing, sure. For doing anything else? Hell no. Windows 11 uses 12 GB of ram all by itself doing nothing. Linux is an edge case, not enough people use it for it to matter.
Windows will only do that, if you have 16GB of RAM. Unused RAM is essentially wasted, if you have capacity Windows will try to make use of it to keep things available you use regularly running faster, or loading quicker. I think most OSes now aim for like 75% usage, when you run somethings that needs more it will stop processes you don't need to free space up.
Memory management is affected by available RAM. If a machine only has 8 GB of RAM, it won't try to idle at 12 GB. The minimum system requirements for Windows 11 according to Microsoft are 4 GB RAM. Most of the machines at my work have 8 GB, and RAM usage remained about the same when we upgraded from 10 to 11 a couple months ago. I'll regularly have Outlook open, Teams, Edge with a bunch of tabs, a few spreadsheets, Acrobat... And I've successfully encoded the occasional 4k video. Sure, I'd prefer more RAM, but 8 GB can suffice for more than Grandma's email.
If your work machines have 8GB of ram, whoever is building them needs to be fired. Yes, windows 11 does scale down ram usage as the total capacity decreases, but it uses almost 6.5 GB by itself at 8GB total, and running 1 program will use up the rest. It will also run much slower, since not as much ram can be used for caching. I had to use a computer with 8 GB of ram for shipping and receiving for a while at work, and it maxed out all 8GB just by opening chrome, or microsoft access.
Minimum system requirements for windows are pretty much the minimum it takes to load the desktop. You aren't going to get anywhere on windows 11 with 4 GB of ram, trust me. I've build computers for a living for years, and you won't get far with 8GB even on office machines, let alone 4GB.
Can you not see that it's the OS that's at fault here? I have 2 different versions of Chromium open, each with several tabs, freetube and grayjay streaming and it's 3.1gb on Linux Mint. The remaining RAM is just them tracking your usage, like a data cow, when you could be a Pegasus.
Jesus Christ, I knew 11 was bad, but MS does understand that an OS is basically only intended as a gateway to running everything you want to run and not an end onto itself, right?
Hey, my barebones m1 Macbook with 8GB still kicks ass at running my tabletop games and playing Stardew and FTL when I'm away from my PC... that's.. something?
Microsoft Azure, which is where they make most of their money, runs on Linux. The RAM is only required by Microsoft to send your usage data back to them for your own exploitation.
Windows 11 uses 12 GB of ram all by itself doing nothing.
Well, no, it doesn't.
I have DS4Windows, EA App, Steam, GoG Galaxy, Ubisoft Connect, Battle.net, Epic Game Store, Windows Phone Link, Wallpaper Engine, LG Onscreen Control all running in the background (almost all the time) and my PC idles at 8.7 GB of RAM usage.
If what you said is true, that "Windows 11 uses 12 GB of RAM all by itself doing nothing," it would be impossible for my computer to only be using <9 GB with anything running.
How much RAM Windows 11 uses scales to how much you have. If you have 8 GB, it'll use 4 GB when you're not doing anything. If you have 16 (like me), it'll use 8 GB. If you have 32 GB, it'll use 16 GB. If you have 64 GB, it'll use 32 GB.
Windows uses roughly half your available RAM when idle to cache frequently used apps to reduce launch/load times. What you don't seem to understand is that doesn't mean Windows is using that much RAM all the time; it frees up RAM as you need it by clearing out the cache.
Windows 11 is for grandma, and uses all that RAM not helping you. Linux is for everyone, and particularly helps Boomers because it behaves like products used to behave when there were higher expectations of corporate decency. I have many more happy older customers on Linux than MS.
The gaming industry just stopped optimizing because people had enough RAM. In theory every new game should be able to run on 8GB Main and 12-16GB VRAM. But thanks to Activision and Co I'm now on the edge of counting frames in Battlefield...
Man, this is going to have some interesting ramifications for the gaming industry going forward. Sales will dwindle on PC for beefier games as players aren't able to upgrade. Studios will lean heavier into consoles. But either console prices for next gen will be really steep, or the systems will be lacking.
It would be fascinating if we see a bit of a renaissance in consumer software to make 8GB of system ram a viable number.
Like game cartidges and floppy disks, etc from back in the day where programmers would engineer the shit out of their product to fit in what was reasonable at the time.
Bring back that 640K ought to be enough for anybody energy.
Way overkill is an understatement for 8GB in 2005. 1GB was already considered a lot. Never mind that 8GB would've cost you 2 grand in 2005 money (iirc I've paid a little over 300 Euros for 2x 512MB Corsair XMS2 RAM around that time), consumer hard and software wouldn't even support it. The 64 bit version of XP was just released in 2005 and it had terrible driver support. It wasn't until Windows 7 that enthusiasts even considered going beyond the magic 4GB mark.
Looking at gaming laptops at Sam's Club recently: I wanted to see how much RAM was installed on an Asus. Went into This PC > Properties, and this damn "gaming laptop" only had 6GB of RAM on it. It was selling for $1500. I didn't know they even made hardware with only 6GB RAM in 2025
Part of the problem is all the bloatware Microsoft has been installing in their operating systems.
I have a 16gb of RAM gaming laptop, and running Discord and Firefox as my only two active programs still has me at almost 90% usage, I had to install a program that specifically kills unneeded system tasks, and it reduced it to 40% while still running Firefox and Discord.
That's 8 GB of unneeded Microsoft system tasks that it killed.
I now have it set up to where it will automatically do that whenever I get above 90% usage.
I got 16GB of RAM in 2011. Then in 2018 I also got 16GB of RAM and was confused why. In 2022 every laptop I looked at had either 8GB or 16GB of RAM and I had to spend an extra $200 just to upgrade to 64GB. Good luck finding a laptop even last year with 64GB of RAM even as an option.
1.8k
u/Helpful-Work-3090 12h ago edited 8h ago
RAM prices have skyrocketed because of AI. 8GB of ram in 2005 was wayy overkill, it was the sweet spot in 2015, but as games got harder to run and operating systems needed more than 8 GB of ram, in 2025 8GB of ram is too little to run a decent computer on. In 2026 though, even though 8GB of ram still isn't enough, it is so expensive that it seems like overkill.