Memory Prices Taking An Upturn

While it is never pleasant to be the bearer of unpleasant tidings, we strive to keep our readers well-informed on industry trends that could affect your purchase decisions. For the past couple months, we’ve been seeing a trend in rising memory prices.

Actually, memory costs started going up before Christmas, but supply of memory at the higher costs have been coming into play over the last several weeks. Higher cost for memory equates to higher prices at checkout.

Why are memory costs up?

Real supply issues with the components have resulted in these cost increases. Supply is pressured due to substantially growing demand for the higher density parts and a lack of excess capacity production. It should be known that Micron and Samsung – the largest producers of DRAM memory devices today – both posted 4th quarter losses for their DRAM divisions. When a producer is losing money, they tend not to run up supply.

All is not lost though. It is important to note that today’s memory pricing is still a little less than it was in October 2012, about 33% less than Summer 2012, and about 60% less than what the same RAM modules cost in January of last year.

Memory costs are not static and don’t always go down. Over time, memory costs do trend down; but there are short term deviations to that long term. Memory got really cheap before Christmas because PC sales were below forecasts and that created supply excess that has since corrected with Micron, Samsung, Hynix, etc… reducing what was coming down the wafer line.

Memory is still affordable and your best bang for the buck upgrade… and our premium, top tier memory sets still offer a huge savings over what Apple charges at the factory. So what is our purchasing suggestion? Buy now… if you need it. Prices will most likely go higher as the year goes forward before they start to come down again.

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