Historical memory prices 1960-2026

fernly

Says, not inflation-adjusted. With reason; adjusting those 1960-1980 prices for inflation would make the graph a lot taller. Pricing "per GB" before 1990 is unrealistic, though; nobody thought in GB or purchased GB quantities, or conceived of GB systems. I remember a moment circa 1973 when I saw an IBM CE about to do an upgrade on a 370 system at Cal Berkeley. He had a box with several carefully-packed, large circuit boards. "So, is that a megabyte?" I asked. "Yup, that's a meg."

bpavuk

turns out things are not that bad! we just rolled back to 2010. oh, wait, now every app is a browser instance. shit. EDIT: so, how did I arrive at 2010, you ask? I looked at DDR5 pricing and found the closest pricing per GB in the past. this turned out to be DDR3 memory. I think it's totally fair since it was the latest and greatest thing back then, much like DDR5 is now. although, if we compare DDR3 to DDR3, we still roll back pretty far - a very close to current price was spotted in 2018, '17, 15, '13, and '11.

DoctorOetker

is multi-level DRAM worth considering? storing multiple voltage levels per DRAM capacitor?

chvid

You could also do a computing pr dollar graph - which would be a similar sharp decline over the past decades - however it won’t show anything like the memory price spike of the past few years.

anonymousiam

It certainly doesn't look as bad as it really is when presented on a log scale chart.

WithinReason

So a price per GB today is about the same as it was in 2010. 16 year regression, wow!

Dibby053

One could also blame crypto and AI (they're clearly responsible for some of the volatility in the graph), but I can see the curve flatten in the 2010s, just as Moore's law ended.

sime2009

aaah, the 90s price crash. Good times.

gruntled-worker

Look at it this way: while the upfront cost to scale up production is huge, prices are now high enough to justify it even if demand is expected to drop abruptly later on. So if you can wait 5 years for your next PC, 1TB RAM might go for what 64GB would have cost without the AI demand spike. Granted, if you need a new system before then, you're SOL. One thing to look out for is supply capacity curiously going offline in 2030 or whatever. That would hint at market power or collusion.

Mistletoe

“All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.” -Edward Gibbon My fellow humans, we have retrograded.

toofy

this is interesting. but i’d be more interested to see a graph starting at the point when developers got their own computer. then the price of ram over time for whatever the daily functional workstation a developer would have needed then. i mean this is a graph of the price of GIGS of ram from a time period when the space shuttle needed like 1 MB.

H4lcyon

A perfect example of how graphs are often misleading. $/GB is a totally useless unit value because it's an arbitrary size. The unit needs to be tied to the relative usefulness for its time. The y axis should be something like $/average workstation memory or $/requirement for common compute task. It's obvious that ram is expensive right now, but it's not expensive per GB. It's expensive relative to what you need to accomplish a useful task.

fHr

DRAM and chill

jaoks

the problem with this analysis is that it doesn't account for memory speed, which doubles with each generation of ddr

Fr0styMatt88

Were we really paying more for RAM per GB in the late 2010s than we are now? Just really doesn't feel like it. Interesting.

mancerayder

If my memory serves me correct (no pun intended), when I was a kid I remember bugging my mom to buy me like 2 or 4 1 MB modules, it was at least 50 bucks or 100 bucks each. Now everyone's going to talk about how cheap everything is by comparison - but someone needs to talk about how oppressively hungry browsers and OSes are compared to in the past. This is no HIMEM.SYS

linzhangrun

Note that the chart scales by powers of 10

bilsbie

It’s weird to see supply and demand battle moores law.

altairprime

Unfortunately, this is unadjusted prices, and this failed to annotate where the cartel years and when the cartel was 'broken up'. Not a bad assignment's work but clearly lacking the domain awareness necessary to report the complete story through graphs.

SilverSlash

This is extremely misleading and not very useful. It makes little sense to use pricing per GB during decades when RAM was at most in MBs. In that case, why not talk about price per TB or PB? Then the line will look pretty much flat and horizontal.