this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
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Valve describes just how brutal RAM negotiations are in 2026 (www.theverge.com)
submitted 2 months ago by tonytins@pawb.social to c/technology@lemmy.world
146 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Valve’s Steam Machine finally has a price: a whopping $1,049 for the 512GB configuration or $1,349 for the 2TB version. And those are without bundled controllers, which drive up the cost more.

The prices are so high in part because Valve isn’t subsidizing the hardware, and the company has already indicated that the component crisis forced it to reconsider its initial pricing plans. In an interview with the YouTube channel Gamers Nexus, Valve engineers discussed the reality of sourcing RAM in 2026, with take-it-or-leave-it prices as memory and other components remain in short supply, from only a few vendors like Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix.

[...]

Valve, of course, isn’t the only company in a bind over memory shortages, as the crunch is forcing many hardware makers to make significant pricing changes. Even Apple CEO Tim Cook is warning of incoming price hikes for iPhones, Macs, and other devices. And the RAM crunch isn’t projected to get better anytime soon.

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[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 35 points 2 months ago (12 children)

My question is: how far back in time do we have to go to get to where RAM and SSD prices were this high (for a given capacity) in the past? Like 2021?

[–] jordanlund@lemmy.world 47 points 2 months ago (3 children)

The last time we saw a price spike like this was when the Chinese adhesives factory caught fire and burned to the ground, those adhesives were used in all kinds of chips.

2013 - but even then it wasn't this bad.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/sep/06/china-fire-memory-chip-prices

There were also supply chain problems during Covid.

2020-2023:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405896322017293

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That's what I was thinking: early COVID, and it's not so much about the price spike relative to where it was, but the absolute dollars per GB pricing which has been persistently falling for decades - I doubt you have to go past 2021 to get to higher prices per GB, and that was for slower speeds too...

[–] tty5@lemmy.world 10 points 2 months ago

Per gb price of ram is now almost 50% higher than during the peak of COVID price spike that lasted just 3 months. I'm comparing the current gen at the time - ddr4 during COVID vs ddr5 now

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