Link: https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/26/memory_price_hikes/

Ballooning memory prices are forecast to kill off entry-level PCs, leading to a decline in global shipments this year - and a similar effect is going to hit smartphones.

Analyst biz Gartner is projecting a drop in PC shipments of more than 10 percent during 2026, and a decline of around 8 percent for smartphones, all due to the AI-driven memory shortage.

Some types of memory have doubled or quadrupled in price since last year, and Gartner believes DRAM and NAND flash used in PCs and phones is set for a further 130 percent rise by the end of 2026.

The upshot of this is that the budget PC will disappear, simply because vendors won't be able to build them at a price that will satisfy cost-conscious buyers, according to Gartner research director Ranjit Atwal.

"Because the price of memory is increasing so much, vendors lose the ability to provide entry-level PCs – those below about $500," he told The Register.

Don’t worry, there’s lots of ram in the cloud. Use a cloud OS. We promise we won’t watch you.

Maybe a positive side effect will be OS and applications beginning to be more conscious of their RAM consumption. I am absolutely certain that due to the era of cheap memory storage, applications (browsers especially) have gotten insanely bloated.

Keep AI models out of your web browser and core operating system, and maybe 4GB can still cut it.

I bet this will make people to hang on to what thay have for longer and thus force software companies finally create better optimisations and stop making everythung more resource hungry. Alternatively people would just have to drop off the crazy train.

Keikaku doori

Hah. They will just make more things cloud based, unfortunately

Which the whole point of this, anyway.

If no one can buy personal computers, they’ll have to rent compute from corporations who have hoarded all the computing hardware.

You’ll own nothing and you’ll pretend to like it, or else they will cut you the fuck off. Please drink a verification can.

You have to have a thin client device to access the servers out on the Internet, which is...kind of what a sub-$500 low-end PC or budget smartphone would be.

I suspect that it's more that a lot of people are going to defer upgrades at the low end of the scale, use an older device for longer than they otherwise would have.

Might not be great for security; smartphone OSes won't get security updates after N years, and Windows 10 is EOL.

Well. When masses opt out from newer equipment and companies revenue needs them to use theur services, they just need to revise end of support date.

I myself will not ever use thin clients.
If that ever comes to reality, I will just drop my phone off.

I also think that as Google is closing it's android ecosystem next september and the phones will be more expensive there will emerge need and supply for lighter and open chips to build alternatives to ios and android.

Laptops on the other hand seem to have reasonably long lifespan. My oldest still on use is from 2011.

Unfortunately not likely going to happen since AI is used more and more to write software, and AI doesn't tend to write very efficient software.

(Keikaku means plan)

Plan doori