> Lenovo has begun notifying clients of coming price hikes, with adjustments set to take effect in early 2026.. Dell is expected to raise prices by at least 15-20%, with the increase potentially taking effect as soon as mid-December.. Dell COO Jeff Clarke warned that he’s “never seen memory-chip costs rise this fast,” .. Lenovo [cited] two key factors: an intensifying memory shortage and the rapid integration of AI technologies.. TrendForce has downgraded its 2026 notebook shipment forecast from an initial 1.7% YoY growth to a 2.4% YoY decline.
> The full-year price increase for Samsung’s storage products supplied to Apple in 2026 has been finalized, with DRAM prices rising by 53% and NAND prices rising by 52%. Earlier rumors suggesting an 80% full-year increase for DRAM were inaccurate.. Apple negotiated the prices down to the aforementioned levels and signed long-term agreements (LTAs).. Kioxia also signed a similar agreement with Apple, with price increases consistent with Samsung’s.
The margins on memory for Apple were so absurd that they should have more ability to eat up the costs, if they wanted to. I'm assuming they would, to the extent that they're a device company more so than a service company yet.
Altman should be jailed for this. Single-handedly crashing consumer spending in an entire sector of the economy. At the very least for the reason that that was supposed to happen _after_ they had the AI in hand to supplant majority white collar labor, not before.
This is a dystopia no one really thought about. A handful of people anointed to spend borrowed money on a (so far unprofitable) quest to destabilize the world's economy, alienate the working class and make everything we've enjoyed the past 15-20 years a luxury.
No? Lots of philosophers and writers thought about the problems that happen when capital concentrates to the level that individuals can move nations.
It’s like a whole fucking genre.
What we call capitalism now is just reverting back to monarchism where the handful of rulers decide everything and we stop getting the market to be responsive to reality. Prepare for more absurd and random shortages as our betters play around with their toys
The drive towards monopoly, tendency of the rate of profit to fall, over and under production and cyclical ever worsening crises are aspects of capitalism well studied and understood over a century ago.
Yes? Reports are that OpenAI is buying unfinished memory kits which they have no capacity to complete. It appears that OpenAI is just buying them to remove them from the market and damage their competitors. In United States, that used to be considered against the law if we were actually enforcing such things.
For the sake of argument, what if Amazon decided tomorrow that they would secure exclusive contracts with all food suppliers and then hoard all the food to starve out the people they don't want to have it? Or at least, drive up the price of food so it becomes completely unaffordable? I know people can simply grow their own food so it's a bit different, but hopefully it gets the point across. It's anti-trust on an unprecedented level.
Yes, and I actually think it's a symptom of advanced societal decay that you think this is somehow an unreasonable proposition.
What OpenAI is doing will drive up prices for years, shredding consumer welfare, limiting competition and forcing marginally-profitable products off the market, and they're not even going to use the RAM. They're wrecking supply chains simply because they no longer have any technical advantage now that Google and Anthropic have caught up and passed them, and have to resort to dirty tricks like this and digital heroin Sora to try and justify their valuation. No functioning society would or should allow you to get away with that.
Frankly, much worse things than jail should happen to Altman for this kind of torching of the commons, and jail is the watered-down compromise position.
1. Said "consumer" is effectively hoarding Supply, and thus distorting the Market.
2. Said "consumer" has no effective means to either Deploy nor Utilize said products as neither the Data Centers nor the Energy required to power them are in existence.
3. Said "consumer" has articulated his belief that the Taxpayer should "backstop" his endeavors in some capacity, as well.
If you don't find this offensive in the least and possibly criminal at worst, then I don't understand your thought process.
That contract had little to do with this but I get why it's an easy, neatly packaged, personified scapegoat.
The ram price appreciation began 3 months before October 1st and his contract was about future capacity that has nothing to do with the current equilibrium price in consumer DRAM.
A surprising amount of people are gleefully happy to have their perceived enemies put in jail or worse even if and especially if there was no legitimate justification for it.
A lot of people on HN dislike Tim Cook for various reasons and many would literally “sacrifice” him just to get Apple to stop being so anti-consumer.
It certainly feels like this should fall somewhere along a spectrum of antitrust behavior. It's astounding the degree to which they are able to operate as if money isn't real. Strange circular deals and infinite VC money really fuck with markets and these past few years we've been venturing down a particularly concerning branch of capitalism.
Eh my (anemic) work laptop from 2019 probably won't get replaced for an extra year because my employer won't authorize the big laptop order at inflated prices.
I feel like I got the last chopper out of 'nam buying my G.Skill 256GB 6000MT/s kit when I did. I paid $780 in July and now it's listed at.. $2700, over 300% higher. That and buying a bunch of sticks for some Tyan boards I got on a whim last year with some engineering samples I got working on them.
A year ago, Framework-branded memory for DIY laptops cost, IIRC, 2x Amazon for equivalent specs (not the same modules—the ADATA ones that Framework puts their stickers on are theoretically available retail but in practice complete unobtanium in most countries). Not Apple pricing, but they definitely have some margin to eat into.
Literally bought 96GB (4x24GB) of DDR5 5600Mhz (edit: RDIMM ECC) just 5 days ago, fearing the prices would go up even more moving forward. Paid 1500 EUR for it in total :/ Southern Europe FWIW.
Yikes, I hadn’t realized this was that big of a problem. The same exact G.skill z5 64Gb ram I bought 4 years ago is well on its way to being double the price. Does this have more to do with Crucial ending consumer product lines or tariffs?
And also because Korean companies apparently fear US retribution if they start producing DDR4. I don't feel like "OpenAI bought half the supply" tells the entire story when the companies that used to produce DDR4 with the left over machines no longer dare to do so. Probably the prices wouldn't spike as they're doing right now if the ones who used to produce the older RAM generations actually continued doing so.
The toilet paper thing didn't really happen though because there is so much shit people can produce at a time and the demand never increased if you scaled it to a 2 weeks period. There was enough stock in warehouses that 3 days later every store had a full stock again and the prices never increased.
The end of Crucial is a symptom, not a cause. Crucial is merely Micron's factory brand. Nothing is stopping OEMs like G.Skill or Kingston from buying DRAM chips from Micron and putting them on consumer RAM sticks.
Well, that's the theory at least. In practice it's more accurate to say that Micron had cut down their consumer allocation that not even their factory brand can get enough chips to survive.
What is this estimation based on? I'd think once the bubble pops pricing would start to return to normal levels and the general consensus seems to think the bubble won't last that long.
In my opinion we are witnessing the market influences of a new type of public-private "Phoebus cartel" except at a total global scale where anti-terrorism laws require pricing businesses and individuals out of owning their own compute forcing them to rent compute from multinational hyperscaler cloud businesses who are integrated with military intelligence operations. Computing technology after all is a weapon of mass destruction and the peaceful are being punished for the non peaceful. It is too dangerous for governments around the world to allow individuals to posses the immense power of computing technology. Call me chicken little but we are witnessing the end of publicly available private general computing. Market changes influencing cost effectiveness analysis to favor public cloud is a deliberate goal to secure national critical infrastructure. I also think this coincides with the limits of MOSFET scaling and RISC-V permissive licensing. My only credentials for this is 15+ years working in fintech I&O for a US Fortune 500 company.
It certainly feels like we are being squeezed from all sides. I think the push to require ID verification for websites is also part of the plot - it all feels too coordinated, like governments all over the world have the same exact agenda to destroy our privacy. At some point you will have to verify your ID to use any computer system, and it will act just as a terminal to the cloud.
I guess we will get the future that was seen in Sun Microsystems with their Ray thin clients after all, but in a way that will provide complete control over population rather than mobility.
What is in cards for us is complete slavery to digital systems.
Anti terrorism laws will compel society into smart cities, continuous attestation of very high confidence subject/applicant identity. It is the only way to accomplish the mission. You can see it has already happened with "Know Your Customer" rules in banking. Mobile banking adds continuous "Know Where Your Customer Is". As our digital twins are distilled from social media via age verification this adds "Know What Your Customer Has Done". Then as we interact with AI chatbots with very high confidence identity this adds "Know What Your Customer Is Thinking". The fusion of these data points will enable our digital twins to be simulated into "Is My Customer A Terrorist" and then we will all have to deal with the quality and reliability of these systems. There will also be an unprecedented opportunity to optimize banking and marketing. The only problem I see is consent of the people however this is what we have collectively decided as a society long ago with United States v. Reynolds, 345 U.S. 1 (1953) allowing the state to ultimately not require our consent or even awareness of its actions. Without having all the information it is impossible to come to any rational conclusion. We are out of the loop! Total Digitization is happening for better or for worse.
I thought Apple would get around and improve their memory prices with time, I guess it's the opposite: all manufacturers are now becoming Apple given these raises.
They are not becoming Apple. They are updating the prices of their components to the underlying market costs. Framework lets you replace the memory modules.
Apple is a fashionable brand that commands a price premium. They can charge much higher prices and will charge the amount that will maximize their profits.
BMW charges to enable heated seats. They know their customers have money and will pay. Apple is the same.
Framework has to competitively price. They're being forced to update pricing to reflect the reality of supply and demand.
There's also this:
> Due to [Framework's] memory pricing said to be more competitive below market rates, they also adjusted their return policy to prevent scalpers from purchasing DIY Edition laptops with memory while then returning just the laptops. The DDR5 must be returned now with DIY laptop order returns.
I bought a couple of terabytes of RAM and now I feel like one of those crypto-whales haha. It's just sitting there in the corner. One was a lucky one, too, because I tried to negotiate a guy to sell me a system with less RAM but he wouldn't discount it much. Now it pays for most of the cost of the damn thing.
These spikes do happen. I remember one for hard drives after a storm. The surprising thing for me is how cheap a super-powerful Epyc is these days. But then you need to fill the 12 RAM slots and that becomes more costly. Funny times.
You don't NEED to fill the 12 ram slots. My personal 1U has an Epyc 9124 and only 4 of the 12 ram slots filled. I figured, ram will only get cheaper with time so I can fill the remaining 8 slots in the future. Turns out I was wrong, but regardless, the server runs fine on 4 sticks.
I was curious with this spike and while the amazon listing for 2x48GB DDR5 that I bought a year or so ago has indeed almost tripled the ebay resale value for similar packages sold recently is all over the map with some close to what I originally paid and some as much as double but probably on average 30-50% increase which is nowhere near the amazon listing.
Readit News
> Lenovo has begun notifying clients of coming price hikes, with adjustments set to take effect in early 2026.. Dell is expected to raise prices by at least 15-20%, with the increase potentially taking effect as soon as mid-December.. Dell COO Jeff Clarke warned that he’s “never seen memory-chip costs rise this fast,” .. Lenovo [cited] two key factors: an intensifying memory shortage and the rapid integration of AI technologies.. TrendForce has downgraded its 2026 notebook shipment forecast from an initial 1.7% YoY growth to a 2.4% YoY decline.
https://hanchouhsu.substack.com/p/overview-of-the-memory-mar...
> The full-year price increase for Samsung’s storage products supplied to Apple in 2026 has been finalized, with DRAM prices rising by 53% and NAND prices rising by 52%. Earlier rumors suggesting an 80% full-year increase for DRAM were inaccurate.. Apple negotiated the prices down to the aforementioned levels and signed long-term agreements (LTAs).. Kioxia also signed a similar agreement with Apple, with price increases consistent with Samsung’s.
It’s like a whole fucking genre.
What we call capitalism now is just reverting back to monarchism where the handful of rulers decide everything and we stop getting the market to be responsive to reality. Prepare for more absurd and random shortages as our betters play around with their toys
The drive towards monopoly, tendency of the rate of profit to fall, over and under production and cyclical ever worsening crises are aspects of capitalism well studied and understood over a century ago.
For the sake of argument, what if Amazon decided tomorrow that they would secure exclusive contracts with all food suppliers and then hoard all the food to starve out the people they don't want to have it? Or at least, drive up the price of food so it becomes completely unaffordable? I know people can simply grow their own food so it's a bit different, but hopefully it gets the point across. It's anti-trust on an unprecedented level.
What we should really be asking is, why did we ever stop jailing wanton criminals like Scam Alt-Man?
What OpenAI is doing will drive up prices for years, shredding consumer welfare, limiting competition and forcing marginally-profitable products off the market, and they're not even going to use the RAM. They're wrecking supply chains simply because they no longer have any technical advantage now that Google and Anthropic have caught up and passed them, and have to resort to dirty tricks like this and digital heroin Sora to try and justify their valuation. No functioning society would or should allow you to get away with that.
Frankly, much worse things than jail should happen to Altman for this kind of torching of the commons, and jail is the watered-down compromise position.
1. Said "consumer" is effectively hoarding Supply, and thus distorting the Market. 2. Said "consumer" has no effective means to either Deploy nor Utilize said products as neither the Data Centers nor the Energy required to power them are in existence. 3. Said "consumer" has articulated his belief that the Taxpayer should "backstop" his endeavors in some capacity, as well.
If you don't find this offensive in the least and possibly criminal at worst, then I don't understand your thought process.
The ram price appreciation began 3 months before October 1st and his contract was about future capacity that has nothing to do with the current equilibrium price in consumer DRAM.
A lot of people on HN dislike Tim Cook for various reasons and many would literally “sacrifice” him just to get Apple to stop being so anti-consumer.
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Dead Comment
Well, that's the theory at least. In practice it's more accurate to say that Micron had cut down their consumer allocation that not even their factory brand can get enough chips to survive.
Prices are not expected to recover until 2028.
The RAM I bought last year has more than tripled. 2x32 DDR5 kits, $240/kit, now $820.
They might pull it off , but hell off a way to bet the economy dominos all on black.
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I guess we will get the future that was seen in Sun Microsystems with their Ray thin clients after all, but in a way that will provide complete control over population rather than mobility.
What is in cards for us is complete slavery to digital systems.
I wonder what Apple's next move will be :-)
EDIT: Spelling
Apple is a fashionable brand that commands a price premium. They can charge much higher prices and will charge the amount that will maximize their profits.
BMW charges to enable heated seats. They know their customers have money and will pay. Apple is the same.
Framework has to competitively price. They're being forced to update pricing to reflect the reality of supply and demand.
There's also this:
> Due to [Framework's] memory pricing said to be more competitive below market rates, they also adjusted their return policy to prevent scalpers from purchasing DIY Edition laptops with memory while then returning just the laptops. The DDR5 must be returned now with DIY laptop order returns.
These spikes do happen. I remember one for hard drives after a storm. The surprising thing for me is how cheap a super-powerful Epyc is these days. But then you need to fill the 12 RAM slots and that becomes more costly. Funny times.
I was curious with this spike and while the amazon listing for 2x48GB DDR5 that I bought a year or so ago has indeed almost tripled the ebay resale value for similar packages sold recently is all over the map with some close to what I originally paid and some as much as double but probably on average 30-50% increase which is nowhere near the amazon listing.
Haha, if I did sell I'd probably sell on /r/homelabsales which is a much more pleasant place to interact.