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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Memory prices per GB were cheaper in 2012.

It’s possible we’ll see a huge price drop on the near term but SSD + Cache + GPU’s seems to have changed the equation where RAM speed is considered more important than size. And from a pure architecture standpoint it makes sense.

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They weren't though when you adjust for inflation. If you took inflation into account, ram is cheaper now by $0.89/GB for DRAM compared to 2012.

Lowest 2012 price listed is 3.7 (2012-10-30) vs highest listed in 2026 is 5.375 (2026-2-1), which overlaps based on the margin for error involved. https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

Even being vaguely in the same ballpark is a wild regression when you consider the difference in density.

So you are trying to compare the lowest with the highest and not the current price. RUn that number with the current price.

The most recent price listed is from a month ago and the prior prices are increasing. So really you can roughly compare years but not Today.

There’s plenty of data to say prices in 2012 and 2016 overlap, which is wild.

It's crazy that a AAA video game cost $60 when I was a child in the 90s and costs $60 today, sticker price! Not adjusted for inflation!

And to think that AAA video game was distributed on cartridge with expensive memory in cardboard packaging with a manual while these days that same $60 game is just a digital download from a CDN.

How is it crazy? The marginal cost to produce a copy of a video game is ~$0 and the market is much larger now then it was so fixed costs can be spread around more. The sticker price was always more or less arbitrary chosen - i.e. to maximize profits, which includes how the number is perceived.

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