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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

The extreme DRAM market has had an unexpected side effect of triggering a lot of panic buying. I know several people who delayed PC upgrades for years but then panic bought new systems in this market. The trigger was seeing all of the "It's only going to get worse" and "This is the end of personal computing" headlines.

They're already regretting spending so much now that prices have started to tick downward.

I keep telling everyone: If you don't have a pressing need to buy right now, please wait 6 months and check again.

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wasn't "panic" buy but I built a new comp early 2025, cuz at worst case would be complete supply crash and at best case it was going to be more expensive.

Def don't regret doing that, though I regret not springing for the extra RAM.

Same. I got 64gb for my new build the day this whole thing started but I kind of wish I had gotten 128 just for bragging rights.

That's actually a reasonable response to market volatility and illiquidity. It's not just high prices, but prices that still fail to be representative of the actual market stance despite the rises.

It's not a reasonable response. If you don't need a PC right now, buying in the middle of a demand spike is the worst time to do it.

It's only a spike if it comes down. Every RAM chip is a lottery ticket with a plausible chance of giving one lucky winner fabulous prizes like absolute dictatorship of the entire world and physical immortality. What else are the billionaires going to spend their money on? Arms races can absorb unlimited resources.

What’s interesting is mini pcs are dirt cheap. The RAM for them costs as much or more than a barebones Ryzen 7 mini pc.

In January I bought a barebone ASUS NUC, which is relatively expensive among mini-PCs, but I need to run it 24/7 for many years, so I made a choice based on expected reliability.

After adding to it DRAM and SSDs, the cost of the barebone remained of only 40% of the total, so the price of the memories was 50% higher than the barebone computer.

At that time, the memories were still cheaper than today, so now the price ratio would be even worse. (The barebone NUC had an Intel Arrow Lake H CPU and it cost $500, while 32 GB DDR5 + 3 TB SSDs cost $750.)

>They're already regretting spending so much now that prices have started to tick downward.

Where?

Last month I "panic bought" a $999 Macbook Mini (32G) so I could run small models, Image Generation, and Voice synthesis on it. I don't think I regret it yet, despite the fact that you can get a 16G for $599, which is honestly a much more efficient price per Gig.

I think it is interesting that, at least thus far, Apple has chosen not to raise the price of their comps despite presumably the price of RAM going up multiples.

Tipping point for me: It will be a pretty kickass media server for at least a decade.

Didn't they eliminate the highest tier Mac Pro and raise the price of the one under it?

I panic bought a Macbook Pro M5 Max with 128 GB ram. I yolo'ed because I don't think ram prices get better in 18 months so this might be the last time we see "cheap" memory, even though the laptop cost me $5000.

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