PCs and phones to get more boring and expensive in 2026 thanks to memory drought The next wave of smartphones and PCs will have less memory and fewer capabilities, yet are likely to cost consumers 14 percent more as AI ambitions eat all available memory supplies, according to researchers at IDC. IDC said that the worsening memory market has caused its outlook to deteriorate just since December. The …
>> The next wave of smartphones and PCs will have less memory and fewer capabilities, yet are likely to cost consumers 14 percent more
Smaller, yet more expensive.
Maybe these less capable phones will make people realise they don't need a new phone every year. I expect the iMob will say say less is more.
Absolutely so, the pressing need to replace a mobile is partly driven by marketing, partly by the human need to have something new, "because it must be better, right?". It's also deliberate withdrawal of support by manufacturers, sometimes for good reasons (security, efficiency) but often because a shrinking user base of Model X doesn't deliver revenue - or, can actually cost more than it now generates.
It's primarily due to deliberate planned obsolescence.
The battery is made as hard as possible to replace in most models, and software becomes either extremely slow or support is withdrawn entirely.
This worked commercially while technical improvements meant the newer versions were significantly better (faster, longer battery life, more RAM, more storage), but significant performance haven't been technically possible for years - and now all the newer versions will be objectively worse.
So quite simply, everyone is going to hang onto their current devices and repair them until 2027-2028 if at all possible.
Microsoft chose exactly the wrong time to try to force PC upgrades, it's going to cause a pretty big spike of Linux desktops. Whether that will be permanent remains ti be seen, of course.
> and now all the newer versions will be objectively worse.
But they have more AI!!!! So the idiots will rush to buy them nevertheless...
To be fair, manufacturers do everything they can to make their older phones obsolete and dangerous to use, simply by not providing security patches anymore for somewhat older models. And of course by making batteries so hard to replace you have to really, really want to keep your old, now unsafe phone...
> So quite simply, everyone is going to hang onto their current devices and repair them until 2027-2028 if at all possible.
Pretty much. That was already the plan for the mobile, the RAM shortage just confirms the plan. It’s an iThing 13, it’ll be 7 years old in 2028. 6-7 years seems a good replacement cadence for phones.
The PC I don’t know yet, maybe 2030-2032. That brings it to 8-10 years old. 10 years seems a good a replacement cadence for PCs.
Perhaps, it's a great time to think "how can we do the same, with less? How can we give the same results more efficiently?". There isn't the option (as much) to deliver 'bloatware', because the devices won't have the same amount of memory as before. This could be an inadvertent, positive outcome of the 'memory crisis'.
I have a 3 year old iphone, I think it's a 13. It does everything I need. It's paid for next month and I go onto a sim only contract. It still works fine and does everything I need so I won't be buying another one unless this one breaks.
Let's be honest, all phone manufacturers are looking for the killer app / feature that will get you to buy a new one.
Except that there aren't really any killer new apps, and if, like me you use your phone for making errr phone calls and texts plus emails then there's no reason to upgrade unless you're one of those people who absolutely has to have the latest features e.g. wanting a folding screen phone or some other such gimmick then where is the incentive to change?
Thus phone makers will become another victim of Artificial Idiocy and the scramble for more memory.
It's the same as any consumer product: the existing version does 'X' perfectly well, but new version 'Y' is automatically 'better' - sometimes that's justified, sometimes not. My existing car gets me from A to B fine, but my intended one will do so a bit more efficiently, with more safety features - but is more expensive. It won't make the journey shorter, but I still feel the need to 'trade-up'!
I only just upgraded from an iPhone 8 to a 12 Mini, I think I will have this for at least the next decade. It does everything I need it for. I also keep an 8 as a backup phone, perfectly functional.
Plus I have a MacBook Air 2015, it’s fine!
No need for new stuff.
The only reason I upgraded from a Samsung A53 to a Pixel 8a was due to the lack of security updates (thanks Samsung, 3 years support is utter crap).
The Pixel 8a gets a claimed 5 years of security updates through to 2031, so barring catastrophic damage or total failure I'll be hanging onto it for as long as possible.
Newer devices don't offer anything that would make me want to upgrade, and I have no interest in more AI sludge infesting my phone. It's been enough of a fight disabling Gemini's functions in Android on this one.
Samsung listened and the A54 has 5 years of support. Infact most of their range now have 5 years of support. And quite a few Android major version upgrades as well. This is a double edged sword, cos most versions of Android seem to be worse than the one before in some way.
If all the makers of RAM are going full tilt to supply the fancy computers required for this AI boom, what about the makers of other components? Maybe regular CPUs, regular hard drives, regular motherboards, regular power supplies, regular cases keyboards mice monitors etc, maybe those prices might fall? If there are less regular devices being made because all of the RAM is going into fancy AI servers, maybe there will be some relief from the oversupply glut of all the other regular componnents?
I reminisce about RAM extension boards for ancient computers. Maybe somebody will come up a unit you can fill with dozens of old pieces of RAM and plug into a modern motherboard.
Economics doesn't work that way.
People are buying less of these "regular components" while the manufacturer has the same costs. Prices will go up as its not the cost of the motherboard/cpu that's the issue, its the cost of memory constraining purchases.
For example one of the big case manufacturers are talking about a 40% drop in demand since October - they've already said prices will be going up as their base costs remain largely unchanged.
Hard drives aren't one of these "regular components" you speak of. Western Digital has sold the entire output of 2026 already and most of 2027's (& part of 2028) output is likewise allocated. None of it is going to consumers.
"a 40% drop in demand since October - they've already said prices will be going up"
Oh is that how economics work. We can't sell all of these things we've got lying around - I've got a great idea, let's raise the prices!
ps I've heard that actually works in some situations. A restaurant can increase the price of a glass of wine and end up selling more because who wants a glass of cheap wine, but some fancy expenisve stuff might impress a girl. I can tell you a "fancy" computer case will not impress a girl.
20 years from now. Daddy what is a PC?
it is a CPC that could use other OS than Windows at home and you could store your data at home only and could expand its memory and storage. . i think i have one in the attic. now all the worlds data goes through microsoft cloud. the EU and other countries were too stupid to see this coming, so here we dont have have our own infrastructure. Chinese and Tawain manufactures only make parts for CPCs and data center servers. Desktop and notebook CPU dont exist anymore, they were all replaced by CPC processors.
Those downvotes are because that doomsday scenario is about as new as it is realistic. It's not realistic that memory prices would stay high forever, and none of these technical things could get you to that scenario. The only thing that could is legal prohibitions on functioning computers, but this article and the comments are not about these.
Somehow we'll get to a situation where computers can't run anything other than Windows. How? Linux runs more efficiently than Windows in many cases, so if RAM prices did that, then you'd expect it to go the other way. So maybe Microsoft will do what phone manufacturers have done and lock the computers down. That's been suggested for about three decades and they've still not done it. That doesn't mean they can't ever try, but it does become unfair to accuse them of it when they've had more opportunity than anyone else to take away those freedoms and, compared to everyone else, they've done much less than those others. For example, it's hard to install an arbitrary version of Linux on any ARM machine because their boot processes are all custom and mostly locked down. Unless it's an ARM machine Windows runs on, in which case it's standard and open. Check what it takes to install Linux on an ARM Windows machine and an ARM Chromebook before complaining about Microsoft.
Unfair? To M$? FUCK THEM.
I owe them nothing and never will. Nor any goddamn corporation. They deserve, nothing. They can fuck go themselves.
And to say they haven't tried and aren't trying to turn every PC into a locked down dumb terminal is fucking laughable. Run along back to M$, shill.
I never said you owe them anything; you don't and I don't. I asked you not to lie. Would you like to defend your assertion? They've done lots of things to hate. They piled plenty of completely working Windows 10 machines on the ewaste pile. They've jammed advertising and telemetry where it doesn't belong for their own benefit and AI where ... it doesn't even seem to help them. But the fact remains that, if I buy an Android phone or a Chromebook, it's very likely I can't unlock its bootloader or, if I can, it would be difficult to make something that could install correctly, but if I buy a Windows machine, I don't have to and a single image boots on pretty much everything. I don't have to give Microsoft credit for that especially because "that" is just a negative thing they didn't do and you don't get credit for avoiding doing a bad thing, but when people pretend that Microsoft has done something which many other companies have done and they have not, that is not honest.
Just for giggles I installed Linux on a retired laptop last week. The tenacity with which that thing clung to its MS operating system was astonishing. EFI settings that would not stay set; hotkeys during boot which mysteriously did bugger all; hard reboots that turned out to just be hibernation events. It dug in its fingernails and did not want to let go of that festering heap of bloat it called its OS. It got better when its SSD was reformatted.
Most of those don't make sense to me. EFI settings not staying I can see, though it has little to do with Windows, but the fast startup feature hybernating when you don't want it to is not new and has no effect on whether Linux can be installed. If you're erasing Windows, it doesn't matter whether it stored a copy of RAM on the disk before you erase it. That only matters if you're trying to write the Windows partition from in Linux, and switch that to "mattered" because Linux has been able to deal with the unclean NTFS filesystem for a few years now, so even that can be done.
As for function keys that don't work, that's unfortunately common in my experience because a lot of bootloaders only seem to check for newly pressed keys at some stage they don't announce so you have to press the key repeatedly and hope you've hit the right time. I don't know why that is, but that's been true of many computers I've had and is far from new. It's still much less effort than it takes to boot to something else on a Chromebook, some of which involve disassembly or downloading unverified scripts and hoping they work or at least will detect if they don't before they write too much.
> The tenacity with which that thing clung to its MS operating system was astonishing.
Sorry but that's not my experience: When I bought my latest laptop it had Win11 preinstalled (obviously), which I decided to keep for firmware updates. So I shrunk it down to the minimum, and used the freed space to install Linux. Worked like a charm, the laptop reliably boots to Linux, and I never had any unexpected Windows burps. For the record same thing happened with my previous laptop: Initially on Windows, shrunk, added Linux, no problems.
As already stated, hotkeys on boot require repeated hitting. AFAIK that's a BIOS quirk, since it all happens before the OS gets anything to say.
I wonder if this will slow the cycle of new models and really, the cycle of when older phones drop out of support.
While the fruity company has generally been pretty decent with how far back they support phone models, the slowdowns experienced often made that moot.
Now they may have to dig out the old virtue of *gasp* optimisation and trying to fit more into less memory, like we did in the 80s, or even early 90s.When we still knew there was a "register". The C language option, not that obscure, irreverent tech website.
Despite this shrinkflation and the almost inevitability of massive price hikes for computers and smartphones, it won't stop the sheep from queuing outside Apple stores waiting to buy the next iPhone that will be almost the same as the previous iPhone apart from a couple of upgraded features that will be used a couple of times and then forgotten about.
And if Microslop is thinking about rolling out Windows 12 either this year or next, it had better think again when it comes to picky hardware requirements as their punters simply won't be able hop on board yet another expensive upgrade journey
If you want to know what the future looks like, keep an eye on the interviews that these execs are doing where they say they want an end to affordable computer parts and a permanent price hike. Then look at what has happened in the automobile market in the US, where people are either keeping cars for 10+ years or taking out 8-year loans.
The only real hope is that the Chinese spool up new factories and fill the void, cutting the Taiwanese/Koreans/etc manufacturers off at the knees when the AI bubble bursts. Barring harmful (to local citizens, not China) tariffs, this will happen in the automobile market as inexpensive and well-made BEV and PHEV cars undercut US and EU car makers who want to sell only high-margin and low quality products, leading to the same effect the US auto markets saw in the 70s when they had to buy in to foreign companies and captive imports or go out of business.
Just an astonishing lack of foresight, or hindsight.
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