Then why?
Doesn't the president simply declarae RAM prices shall come down?
Thank you for your attention to this matter
DRAM it! Cheap PCs being priced out of existence as memory cost bites
Fewer Americans are buying PCs as rising component costs mean the sub-$500 bracket is rapidly disappearing, with laptop makers favoring higher-end machines – and things are likely to deteriorate throughout the year. According to stats compiled by Omdia, unit sales to US distributors plunged 7 percent year-on-year in Q1 to 15.8 …
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Friday 3rd July 2026 08:06 GMT hx
They have a goal
The end goal is that nobody has access to a personal, private, unregulated, and unsanctioned computer. You can, instead, rent a "very expensive" computer, that will be tied to your name and bank account so that the advertising companies can know everything about you, and also so that various government agencies can track you down because you didn't like the color they painted the sign outside of town. You will own nothing and be happy, or they will take you to one of the camps they claim doesn't exist.
I'm not sure if I'm serious or not.
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Wednesday 1st July 2026 17:32 GMT Long John Silver
My suggestion being implemented?
On occasion, I have posited that surveillance states like the USA, UK, and Australia, will move towards preventing ordinary people from owning Internet connected devices over which the user has considerable control. Dumb terminals with little onboard memory and no provision for attaching external memory shall be the norm. ISPs must connect customers to one of a handful of government approved cloud services; in turn these services will provide memory store (falsely claimed to be heavily encrypted), plus subscription access to such as Microsoft and Netflix.
Thereby, two birds are killed with one stone: the provision of unassailable surveillance, and the knock-on of total protection for so-called 'Intellectual Property'.
Governments or, at least, any wily advisers they employ, will recognise that surreptitious introduction of what are to become unavoidable restrictions, begets less chance of successful protest when compulsion is applied.
Thus, pricing current PCs out of existence for plebeians leaves a gap to be filled by cheap dumb terminals. These devices could be made very attractive to the impecunious by (initially and for a short while thereafter) bundling-in 'free' access to cloud-based software vended by Microsoft/Apple and their 'trusted partners' such as major games merchants, streaming services, and gambling emporia. The WEF intention that nobody should 'own' anything, but rent it instead, would be boosted.
Dystopias are at their best when not obvious to their occupants. 'Ninety-eighty-four' overkill is not required. As an example, consider how well Neoliberalism has been accommodated by ordinary people; initially there was bribery (e.g. cheap council houses and share issues in formerly state-owned businesses), then the next generation accepted it as 'normal', i.e. unremarkable, economic and social policy.
There is a way to go yet. However, creatures like the late Ayn Rand, and the soon-to-be 'late' Soros would welcome the progress.
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Wednesday 1st July 2026 21:45 GMT cyberdemon
Re: My suggestion being implemented?
I upvoted you, but was severely tempted to downvote on the grounds of "stop giving them fucking ideas". Or worse: This is already happening and apparently it's all Long John Silver's fault!
It is happening though. First we had Cloud storage, then Cloud document-editing, then Cloud gaming, Cloud desktops and the ultimate surveillance cake: Cloud thinking! The product of all the statistical analysis of your online existence. Reveal your deepest secrets to someone else's computer so it can shit out what you are supposed to be thinking..
My ISP is rolling out 2.3Gbps internet for £25/month. 2Gbps! Faster than a HDD! Who besides a server host could possibly need that eh? 20 years ago 2Gbps was the backbone for my entire university, and that was considered fast.
In 5 years time perhaps they hope nobody will want local compute (and anyone who worries about privacy must be a wrong'un, right?) and we will all be using something like the RISCV ESP32-P4, which has just about enough power to run a thin client terminal (supposedly a microcontroller, but with 32MB RAM, 32MB flash, Ethernet, USB host, Raspberry Pi style CSI/DSI display/camera interfaces, and of course a black-box encrypted ROM) and costs about £5
There will be a massive financial crash from all this excessive AI/cloud buildout though, far worse than the dotcom crash. I just hope it is big enough to spell the end for the morlocks this time.
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Thursday 2nd July 2026 14:16 GMT ChrisC
Re: My suggestion being implemented?
"My ISP is rolling out 2.3Gbps internet for £25/month. 2Gbps! Faster than a HDD! Who besides a server host could possibly need that eh? 20 years ago 2Gbps was the backbone for my entire university, and that was considered fast."
20 years ago we still bought games, music, video etc on physical media. 20 years ago our digital cameras weren't routinely generating GB's of image/video data during a single shooting session. 20 years ago we weren't having to download GB's of patch data for stuff we already had installed on our systems (and 20 years ago, the definition of "systems" in this context was rather less expansive). 20 years ago, the average user didn't need that sort of bandwidth, because the average user didn't have a use for it.
It was 26 years ago when I got my first home broadband connection, a 512Kbps ADSL link, which was genuinely more than fast enough for my needs at the time. These days I wouldn't even bother trying to get online if I knew my connection was that severely constrained, because it'd be an exercise in extreme patience and ultimately futility in trying to achieve anything of use.
Times have changed...
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Friday 3rd July 2026 15:55 GMT Sudosu
Re: My suggestion being implemented?
20 years ago we still bought games, music, video etc on physical media.
I wonder if any PlayStation users who had their media stolen by Sony are going to go retro and buy physical from now on.
Games are a bit tougher as they pretty much force you to connect to a service to open and work.
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Wednesday 1st July 2026 20:30 GMT Anonymous Coward
as stated on here the other day there is a cartel of companies fixing the prices in order to increase profits, meanwhile someone well know has become a billionaire in the last year betting on these companies that he controls.
Don't worry there's no conflict of interest there, it's just pure luck, just like picking the right number on roulette every time for the whole night,.
Oh I'll have one those caps and a couple of bibles to go.
Mount Etna called. It wants its orange back, hang on just need to fill a few more bottles of spray tan and then it's all yours
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Wednesday 1st July 2026 20:58 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
And these three Chinese / Taiwanese / S. Korean companies who could all make a $Tn if they cheated are all being completely trustworthy by keeping their hidden stockpiles of ram locked away?
Alternatively, in a market where semiconductor prices halve every 18months almost as a law of nature, nobody is buying stock in advance and so were all caught on the back foot when the hyper-scalers offered the fabs $$$$ for wafer runs to make much more profitable devices. But nobody believes that sort of conspiracy.
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Thursday 2nd July 2026 10:35 GMT Lon24
But it isn't happening in the way we hoped. Last year you could buy a N100 8/256GB or 16/512GB box for less than £70/110. Now they are charging £160+ for the barebone box instead of £50 the implied cost last year. Much worse than the storage price hikes. Figure that one out!
AliExpress prices.
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