I was thinking the other day...around three years ago, hard drives cost
about a buck a meg, a nice 386 system was around $2000, a nice 9600 baud
modem was a couple hundred dollars, a 300dpi postscript laser printer was
around $1500, and ram was around $40 a meg.
 
Today, hard drives are around $0.30 a meg, a nice Pentium system is around
$2000, a nice 28.8 modem is a couple hundred dollars, a 600dpi postscript
laser printer is around $1500, and ram is STILL around $40 a meg.
 
Everything else is like a third the price or four times as powerful as it
used to be, but memory hasn't moved!  I realize there was some polymer
shortage for a while, and demand has grown exponentially, but it's been long
enough that it seems like supply should have caught up by now.  What the
heck gives with memory?  Is it related to the gov't intervention against
imports?  Some things I can see why the price doesn't go down (computer
cases, for example), but not memory.

5 responses total.

I bought 4M RAM (PowerBook) for $94. Seems like prices are creeping down
here and there, but maybe not "wholesale".

RAM is like gold in the computer industry.  I'm a bit surprised it didn't
go up more than it did when the earthquake struck Japan.

<< but that earthquake +produced+ a surplus of chips ...>>

Broken shards, maybe...but chips?

The current price has a lot to do with the determination, a few years
back, by the U.S. gov't that foreign manufacturers were engaged in
product dumping -- selling their RAM in the U.S. at prices below cost.

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