Dell announced price increases for its commercial PCs, sparking worries about the potential impact on customer demand.
The price hikes were reportedly driven by a shortage of memory components, with some estimates suggesting increases of up to 30%. This development led to unease among investors about the affordability for business customers and its potential effect on sales.
2 replies (most recent on top)
Meh, this is all part of the post China 2027 invasion fiasco coming and the AI tech bros doing another dot bo-b grift driving DDR5 demand. DDR4 is only put down in China now as they don't have EUV steppers for good HBM or DDR5. By ki-ling DDR4 the existing EUV customers shape the market for instant profits while hurting the Chinese. You pay more for a PC and phone, while paying for higher electric bills. AI bros pulling the same grift as Walmart moving into your county and the politicians don't calculate drainage, road, police and fire costs into their property tax subsidies.
Yup, get ready for PCs with 8GB of memory, with upgrades to 16, 32 or more, costing an absurd amount of money. Since the new PCs use DDR5, we're competing for memory with all of the AI server vendors, so Dell will need to get in line, and grab whatever the vendors are willing to sell us, with the obvious priority being servers, not PCs.
If you build or upgrade your own PC, the sudden exit of the memory vendors from the DDR4 market has led to ridiculous price increases. During the summer, I upgraded a few laptops for college kids to get them to 32GB. Those kits used to cost like $45, today, they're about $150. Just insane, but with the switch to DDR5 by the vendors, DDR4 memory is now a scarce resource and suppliers are reaping profits from the old supply and demand model...