this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2026
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Valve describes just how brutal RAM negotiations are in 2026 (www.theverge.com)
submitted 2 days ago by tonytins@pawb.social to c/technology@lemmy.world
164 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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[–] tty5@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Much longer than that. There was a spike in 2021 that brought high end 2x8gb ddr4 kits to about $180-200 but that's still significantly less than what you pay for decent ddr5 now. I think you'd have to look to back to early DDR3 or even further to DDR2 prices to get higher per gb amounts.

SSD prices were this high briefly (2-3 months) mid-2021. Before that you'd have to look all the way back to times where 1tb was the largest consumer grade SSD you could buy

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 1 points 2 days ago

On the DDR4 RAM front, it looks like pre-2019 is where RAM was higher than it is today, in (broad market measured) inflation adjusted dollars.