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New Delhi: The price of RAM and storage chips has been rising for the past year, and is sparing some consumer electronic products. Manufacturers are having to pay more for the components, but some are also looking at the price increase as grounds to extract a higher price increase than they should.
The smartphone, desktop computer, tablets, gaming consoles, and laptops are all made with the help of some of these major components: RAM and NAND flash memory. Demand for them, the AI-powered devices, as well as for high-performance electronics, is rising, and so is the price of memory chips. But experts note that by the time they show up at the consumer’s door, price increases are often larger than the price increases simply for memory. One of the most common examples can be found in storage upgrades. The availability of 1 TB in the smartphones or laptops markets comes with a huge cost premium of many smartphone/laptop manufacturers for the upgrade from 256Gb to 1Tb or 512Gb to 1Tb. The extra charge to the customer for the added amount of storage space may be disproportionately large compared to the added cost to the manufacturer.
One other example of consumers paying more than they need to is with regard to upgrading their RAM. The half-life of the huge load of data that 8GB of RAM can hold is much shorter than that of the 16GB or 32GB that is present in the device. This means that replacing 8GB RAM with a 16GB or 32GB RAM can raise the retail value of the device dramatically. In many cases, the manufacturer has to pay a comparatively small additional price to incorporate it into their product, and buyers pay a higher price.
The trend is particularly visible with high-end phone and laptop products. Some manufacturers have released newer versions with relatively small performance, design, or camera changes that have resulted in relatively small price increases. Some factor behind these pricing increases is that the cost of memory is rising, and companies often cite that as a factor, but analysts say that doesn’t account for all the increase.
Laptops that are focused on AI have also seen an uptick in prices recently. While touted as the next-generation personal computer, some consumers feel that the “AI PC” is being promoted as an up-charge tag for devices without many hardware changes.
The trend is the same with the prebuilt desktop computers. When building a system, a lot of system builders charge a lot of money for increasing RAM storage, even though there’s only a minor increase in the components themselves. For customers, it is best to make thoroughly informed decisions on precisely what they are buying. Sometimes it’s more cost-effective to purchase the lower spec-up version and add RAM and storage later. The memory costs are expected to increase, and technology products are expected to become costly as well. But everyone in the industry recommends consumers to count carefully every increment of the upgrade price since not all price hikes can rely solely on the cost of additional RAM and storage.
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