It won't matter the AI or not at this point. This has baked and changed production so much that even if AI fell out tomorrow, it'd take years to retool and undo the amount of tooling chip makers have done to commit HBM DRAM.

Like a lot of the tooling that was done was done on the back of speculation. Now that it's done, undoing it would cost a fortune and that price is going to be amortized by the customer. And since we've baked this new higher price for so long, it's going to take forever to cool it back off.

AI or not, these prices are the new normal price. Things like ARM desktops, those are going to be the average consumer computer. Things with discrete GPUs and RAM that is user serviceable, that's becoming niche. There's already been way too much investment in that direction to go back at this point. I mean you even look at DDR6 desktops, CAMM2 is the compromise normal there too. You don't buy 4x8GB, you buy a 32GB block, that's it. You have the one slot, that's it.

The AI thing, it's just pushed a lot of other things past the point of return. While there might be some reduction after the fall of AI, even if chip makers swapped back to desktop product as fast as they can, they've invested so deeply into AI, that fast as they can is years before consumers will ever see relief, if ever.

At this point, I see PCs adopting the Apple way of putting it all in a single chip approach. Just because, that's where a lot of investment has already gone and if RAM tanks, they'll want to hold onto whatever investments they've already made rather try and blaze a new path.

If I wait long enough maybe my backup server with 256GB of RDIMM DDR4 will pay off a chunk of my solar install.

I built my wife a computer with eBay find and marketplace deals. Only because i already had the memory and ssd+nvme i was going to use though. That would have literally doubled the price lol

Thankfully Chinese manufacturers are scaling up. It's a matter of time before memory is cheap again.

Same thing, dude.

That's not likely. What is likely is that computers that can still work with very small memory footprints become more popular. Microsoft is going to scramble. Apple is going to raise prices, and has already started selling cell phones on payment plans. Linux can often be better at running with low-memory setups, and those are going to be more and more popular.

Unless that decade happens go end now. Then you have to be someone who uses hardware for 2 decades.