this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
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459
Valve describes just how brutal RAM negotiations are in 2026 (www.theverge.com)
submitted 22 hours ago by tonytins@pawb.social to c/technology@lemmy.world
116 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Valve’s Steam Machine finally has a price: a whopping $1,049 for the 512GB configuration or $1,349 for the 2TB version. And those are without bundled controllers, which drive up the cost more.

The prices are so high in part because Valve isn’t subsidizing the hardware, and the company has already indicated that the component crisis forced it to reconsider its initial pricing plans. In an interview with the YouTube channel Gamers Nexus, Valve engineers discussed the reality of sourcing RAM in 2026, with take-it-or-leave-it prices as memory and other components remain in short supply, from only a few vendors like Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix.

[...]

Valve, of course, isn’t the only company in a bind over memory shortages, as the crunch is forcing many hardware makers to make significant pricing changes. Even Apple CEO Tim Cook is warning of incoming price hikes for iPhones, Macs, and other devices. And the RAM crunch isn’t projected to get better anytime soon.

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[–] tal@lemmy.today 18 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

Well...but @MangoCats@feddit.it isn't asking about the spike, but about the absolute price.

PC Part Picker's memory trends page unfortunately only shows the past 18 months. But we can hit archive.org's Wayback Engine.

First of all, here's a current level for DDR5-5200 2x16GB:

So about $500 for DDR5-5200 2x16GB.

They only started tracking this category back in early 2022-ish. It looks like it was about $380 then. Adjusted for inflation, that's $435.14 in 2026 dollars. So it's probably never been that expensive.

However, that was also when DDR5 was pretty new, and it looks like it started out expensive.

If we look at DDR4, which might be more interesting, since we can go back further and avoid the initial spike:

Looking at DDR4-3200 2x8GB, it's come down a bit, but looks like it peaked at about $190.

Inflation-adjusted, that's $144 in 2019 dollars.

It looks like that was about April 2019 when DDR4 exceeded the peak from the last few weeks.