What is that in today's dollars?
What is that in today's dollars?
people have short memories.
2020 (Pandemic Shock & High Demand): $310 — Initial global supply chain disruptions combined with a massive surge in work-from-home desktop builds kept kit prices elevated.
2021 (Gradual Normalization): $270 — Supply lines slowly recovered and manufacturing caught up with demand, causing a steady downward trend.
2022 (DDR5 Inception & Overproduction): $220 — As DDR5 motherboards entered the market, suppliers began aggressively discounting DDR4 components to clear out warehouse space.
2023 (The Cyclical Low Point): $160 — Extreme manufacturer oversupply forced flash memory producers to sell remaining DDR4 inventories at or below cost, creating an all-time pricing valley.
Early 2025 (Pre-Crisis Rebound): $190 — Market prices saw a slight natural recovery as bottom-tier manufacturers stopped making DDR4 entirely, shifting to baseline stability.
Late 2025 (The Structural Shortage): $475 — Major fabs entirely halted consumer DDR4 assembly lines to focus on server-side DDR5 and AI-driven High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). Prices sharply doubled.
August 2026 (Current Plateau): $631 — Retail prices have officially flattened out into a highly expensive, supply-constrained plateau