The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

simonw

The headline here under-serves the article in my opinion: this is a fascinating, deep explanation of how the memory market works and why increased demand for HBM (used by big GPU racks) hurts the availability of wafers for DDR and LPDDR (used by laptops and phones).

sys_64738

I can't say I've noticed specifically. I have two tracfone accounts and a Cricket account so used to use the Android phone with Cricket after two months - a free phone. But tracfone was bought by Verizon and they being them immediately changed the unlock period from two months to a year. So that to me kills my use case of free smartphones as I don't want to spend any money on phones.

mrandish

The deep dive on memory market dynamics and the LLM bubble distortion is great. But another cause of declining smart phone sales is simply that the devices have matured and aren't improving at nearly the same rate. From 2008 to around 2015, upgrading every two years could make a meaningful difference. From ~2015 to ~2020 upgrading every three years might be worth considering. I just upgraded my top of the line flagship after nearly six years. And I actually looked for compelling reasons to buy a new phone every year since 2023. There just weren't any. Frankly, this latest flagship phone is pretty underwhelming. It's slightly faster at a few things. The battery lasts a little longer. The screen can get a little brighter. The camera is supposed to a little better. But those are just the claimed improvements. I haven't actually noticed any of them in daily use because they weren't issues with my 2020 flagship phone either. Otherwise, the new phone is almost exactly the same size, same weight, same resolution, same look and same capabilities. I only upgraded because I was long out of contract and it was a only a couple hundred bucks for a $1400 MSRP phone with a new contract and a trade-in of the old phone.

aurareturn

The MacBook Pro on which I’m writing this piece needs memory that can keep up with a powerful processor running many programs at once: so it uses a standard called DDR, “double data rate,” which runs at a reasonably high voltage and offers high bandwidth. The processor on my iPhone is less powerful, so it needs less data at any given moment; but voltage matters enormously, since every milliwatt allocated to memory is drained from the battery. So smartphones use LPDDR, “low-power double data rate,” a variant of DDR engineered to operate at lower voltages. The last MacBook Pro to use DDR was in 2019. All Apple Silicon Macs use LPDDR.

jimbokun

This article expanded my understanding of the memory industry dramatically. For anyone who doesn’t follow the market closely, this is about a good a primer as you could hope for.

blehn

But aren't there plenty of used expensive phones from the last 5-7 years that are more or less equivalent replacements for new cheap phones? Apple alone sells 250 million phones a year.

LeifCarrotson

What was most surprising about all this to me was this line: > So modern DRAM manufacturing is an extraordinarily complex and expensive process. Building a single state-of-the-art DRAM fabrication facility, a “fab,” will cost you about $15 to $20 billion; acquiring all the necessary equipment, like lithography tools and etching machines, will cost you another few billion; and then it’ll take you a few years of producing substandard and defective memory chips before your yields start to look competitive. Extraordinarily complex and expensive! And yet I look at all the money being shuffled around between Nvidia and Google and Microsoft and Amazon and Apple and can't help but think that this is a tiny amount in comparison to what they're moving around on the stock market buying shares in each other. Apple in particular has $20B in its couch cushions and is very vertically integrated and hardware-focused. Apple silicon is currently made by TSMC, but it seems they'd be a prime candidate to spin up their own memory fab. I suppose the biggest problem to current executives at each company is the "few years" until that investment yields results, in the short term it's better to pay through the nose and buy GPUs with HBM at any price.

WarOnPrivacy

I'm a newborn shill for Ulefone. They come unlocked and the manufacturer supports rooting. The devices are rugged, heavy on features and are (still) reasonably priced. Pics: https://duckduckgo.com/?ia=images&origin=funnel_home_website... Two other underappreciated handset brands are Doogee and Blackview. Gorgeous devices and solidly built. From what I recall they're friendly to root.

ls612

I’m really wishing I had overbuilt my NAS last year. As it stands I feel lucky to have even built it at all given I bought all the parts in the last week of September. My 4090 and 12900k are gonna have to last till 2029 at this rate won’t they…

Viacol

At Xiaomi's latest smartphone launch event, Xiaomi founder Lei Jun said that memory prices are likely to keep rising over the next two years, which could drive smartphone prices up as well. His conclusion was pretty direct: everyone should just replace their phones now. Kind of a depressing story.

amazingamazing

Maybe if we're lucky we get more memory efficient software. ehh who am I kidding.

stego-tech

This is the biggest memory repricing cycle I've ever seen in my life; some degree of high price/limited availability and "free RAM with purchase of Doritos" cycle is always expected, but this has been the worst one yet. As other commenters have pointed out but I might have missed in the article, compute maturation is amplifying memory constraints right now and making it worse. Device upgrade cycles are getting longer because most compute-based products have matured, with CPUs not seeing substantial gains and memory usage really only expanding at the absolute top end of workloads pre-LLMs (3D and HPC in particular). An iPhone 14 still has almost all the features of the iPhone 17, because the compute capabilities are remarkably similar; Geekbench shows a performance delta of ~25-30% between the 14 and 17 Pro Max models, which is pretty paltry considering the devices are separated by four years of manufacturing improvements. This extends into desktops, laptops, tablets, STBs, and more, with only VR devices and larger ARM/RISC-based kit seeing more substantial uplifts as general designs improve. So with compute stagnating and memory constrained, my money is on vendors taking this as an opportunity to gradually shift away from a yearly release cadence and slow down to a biennial cycle that alternates between budget and flagship launches every other year. Even if LLMs fail spectacularly and all that memory capacity becomes available, HBM memory likely isn't to find its way into many consumer devices (just ask AMD how it worked out for them on consumer GCN GPUs). The name of the game, especially for consumers, is efficiency - "potato builds", as I've been calling them. Software and services optimized for lower power, smaller-specced devices of increasing age instead of pandering to flagship devices with poorly optimized code or engines for the sake of new shinies (like Raytracing). Between the memory shortage, shifting geopolitics, rising costs, and stagnant wages, consumer purchasing power is going to be squeezed like a vice for the foreseeable future, and businesses will need to adapt around that reality.

TheOtherHobbes

It's impressive that somehow, as if by coincidence, we're seeing the biggest inflationary drivers for decades, perhaps for centuries, all happening simultaneously. The Iran war is spiking the price of oil and will likely cause shortages of pretty much everything if it isn't ended. The Ukraine war is helping with that by destroying Russian refining capacity. The memory shortage is set to do the same to consumer electronics, which are absolutely essential to the modern economy. Meanwhile the AI fad is seeing huge layoffs. At the same time as the AI Big Cos are beginning to show signs of ending the subsidised free lunch phase and moving to a utility model, which will raise prices for every company that is hooked on AI. Also tariffs. Although I'm not sure if anyone knows what's happening there. And farms are failing. Climate change will accelerate that, so there will be food shortages within a few years. If it's not cynical and deliberate, it's an astounding confluence of (literally) catastrophic mismanagement.

xinayder

Maybe it's time to go back to the time where computers and entertainment were niche and develop efficient resource-constrained devices.... I hate it that we had decades of progress to have computers become a very expensive hobby because some dudes high on fentanyl think some text prediction model that destroys the planet is worth a trillion dollars.

DaveZale

I've been buying a "new" used iphone for $100-150 now, every few years, for over a decade. My "new" used Dell laptop I bought a few months ago for $40 which became a linux system in just an hour. All good here.

doodlebugging

I appreciated the detailed breakdown of the memory crunch and how it will affect parts of the industry and consumers. Very good article. I'm not one of those people who chases all the new great things. I wait until things wear out or become completely obsolete before upgrading. I just get comfortable doing things the same way every day and see no reason to waste money on SaaS shit or anything else wastes my time or money. I think the memory shortage will present opportunities for those willing to take advantage of the situation. A lot of DRAM is going into GPUs for data centers in AI work. Those units have a limited lifetime online and they will be rotated out and replaced with new units as performance degrades. I think this will be a lot like Li-ion batteries in that many of these GPUs will be perfectly fine for home pcs or small business workstations or for other less intensive use cases and the RAM will be performant enough that a viable recycling industry should arise from this AI buildout. Funny enough, one day the local AI noise-making, power-wasting, water-wasting data centers will be the best places to score high-tech components and many of us will have one right down the road. That should set a lot of people up as recyclers redistributing reconditioned components to those who build their own systems.