Global Memory Shortage Crisis: Market Analysis

https://www.idc.com/resource-center/blog/global-memory-shortage-crisis-market-analysis-and-the-potential-impact-on-the-smartphone-and-pc-markets-in-2026/

57•naves•5h ago

Comments

transcriptase•1h ago

All so people in developing countries can churn out boomer-baiting slop for social media engagement farming and ad views.

crazydoggers•1h ago

What makes you think it’s limited to boomers.. know of just as many millennials that eat the stuff up too.

willis936•1h ago

As a millenial all I see is my generation being repulsed by AI slop. Boomers and zoomers though have a large presence of consumption. It was easy to see this with your own family over the holidays.

crazydoggers•1h ago

I think your sample of Millenials is probably more well informed.

bongodongobob•36m ago

Nah, it's fueled by huge misinformation campaigns. It's going to kill art, put us all out of the job, uses 1.5 million gallons per query, pollutes water, will kill the electric grid, etc. These seem to be the most popular uninformed lines of thinking.

ssl-3•14m ago

We have always been at war with Eastasia.

pixl97•14m ago

Ya we seem to live in the the place where the firehose of falsehood is filling the lake of bullshit asymmetry. The problem with this is uninformed lines of thinking eventually lead to policy.

Forgeties79•9m ago

I agree several of the commonly repeated critiques are really poor in quality and can be emotionally driven/simply parroted TikTok nonsense, but at the other end of the spectrum we have AI evangelists who shriek in anger if you say anything remotely negative about GenAI or suggest maybe we should be having a discussion about the ethical ramifications of these tools. Particularly how they are trained and deployed and who should be guiding that process.

I find it very odd when people proudly proclaim they used, say, Grok to answer a question. Their identity is so tied up in it that if you start talking about the quality of the information they get incredibly defensive. In contrast: I have never felt protective of my Google search results, which is basically the same thing given how most people use these tools currently.

It’s kind of wild how hostile some people get if you attempt to open the discussion up at all.

kubb•1h ago

We musn't be unkind to the boomers. When we're their age, the methods for assaulting our poor old brains will be ever so more sophisticated.

willis936•56m ago

I'm not blaming them. It's really frustrating that old people are taken advantage of. We shouldn't need to be so cynical. This isn't the star trek future we were promised.

Edit: It's similarly frustrating about the zoomers. Parents are derelict of duty by not defending their kids and preparing them for the world they are in.

rkomorn•47m ago

> This isn't the star trek future we were promised.

It is, though. We're just in the part leading up to WWIII.

natebc•23m ago

Yeah, that bit of the Star Trek Universe is something not many folks know about.

You want to be born into the utopia, not before.

kubb•46m ago

Sci-fi will never materialize. But the ones passionate about it are so desperate for the faux future that they won't be able to tell when they're being duped.

Just wait until the next great collapse, a disaster big enough to force change. Hopefully we'll have the right ideas lying around at the time to restructure our social communication system.

Until then, it's slow decline. Embrace it.

pixl97•16m ago

Sci-fi has materialized, we're living in it now. The problem is it's the dystopia edition.

Forgeties79•1h ago

https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/50754-how-different-genera...

willis936•57m ago

What do ads have to do with AI slop?

Forgeties79•38m ago

“All so people in developing countries can churn out boomer-baiting slop for social media engagement farming and ad views.”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46413716

tempest_•53m ago

They will tell you they are repulsed by it if asked but its a toss up if they can identify it. Look at any thread on Reddit/IG/Tiktok whatever and I personally would guess I could manage to identify AI output 20% of the time.

Boomers might be out there consuming those AI youtube videos that are just tiktok voice over with a generated slide show but Millennials think since they can identify this as slop that they are not affected. That is incorrect, and just as bad.

kristianp•1h ago

> potential contraction in the global smartphone market alongside an increase in average selling prices (ASP). In 2026, in our moderate downside scenario, we could see the market contract by 2.9%. In our pessimistic downside scenario, it could be as bad as 5.2%.

> PC market contract by 4.9% compared with a 2.4% year-on-year decline in the November forecast. Under a more pessimistic scenario, the decline could deepen to 8.9%.

RyanShook•1h ago

I see this as a competitive opportunity for Apple. If Apple smartphone specs improve while Androids stagnate it could create more iOS users.

The promised AI metaverse is still a long way off and in the meantime people still want the best smartphone.

layer8•56m ago

Most regular people don’t care about RAM specs. And lately it’s Apple that has been rather stagnating in terms of features.

neutronicus•10m ago

I would love stagnation, the keyboard has always been a dumpster fire but these days it is an actively regressing dumpster fire

rockskon•7m ago

What, because they aren't shoving an LLM in every orifice of their product?

memoriuaysj•49m ago

I have no idea how much RAM my phone has.

And if you think that somebody buys an iPhone because they compare the specs with Android :)))))

Maxion•25m ago

Basically if I have to start comparing iPhone specs to Android phone specs I might aswell just buy an Android. The point of iOS is that you don't have to.

arcbyte•22m ago

I agree with you and have agreed with you for a long time. However, I definitely see the writing on the wall. More than one person in my circle have traditionally been Android users and the lack of innovation from both Apple and Android have them comparing devices on specs MUCH more. I include myself in this lost on my next upgrade. I'll be looking largely at specs on the next upgrad because honestly there's not much day to day difference in usage between apple and android anymore

oezi•7m ago

The competitive advantage comes from Apple having the supply chain contracts in place to not be affected by the 2026 price hike as much. The Android phones will be more expensive and thus will capture less market share.

root_axis•10m ago

> if Apple smartphone specs improve while Androids stagnate it could create more iOS user

Nah. The marginal utility of more smartphone ram is near zero at this point. The vast majority of people wouldn't even notice if the memory in their phone tripled overnight.

kllrnohj•6m ago

How is it an opportunity for Apple? They are a customer of Samsung and Micron RAM modules just like everyone else is. They aren't in any unique position other than their user base is already used to paying extreme markup for RAM. Now whether Apple just eats the cost in their profit margin or charges even more for RAM remains to be seen.

kelseyfrog•50m ago

I welcome this. Anything that makes consumer electronics more expensive acts counter to the Baumol Effect.

How scarce does memory have to get before it makes health care half as expensive?

Avicebron•48m ago

Where do you think the IT costs for doctor's workstations are going to be redirected?

kelseyfrog•17m ago

I always thought it was more about differences in productivity between sectors. If the Baumol effect made service sector wages increase, would wouldn't ineffencies do the inverse?

bongodongobob•38m ago

It makes all electronics more expensive. This makes every service more expensive as well.

TrackerFF•21m ago

Imagine a future where a resourceful computer will be unobtanium, because AI companies decided to outbid consumers. Your PC will be just powerful enough to work as a terminal, with all the heavy lifting done by cloud compute data centers.

Every functionality be will subscription-based. You'll own nothing and you'll be happy.

pixl97•18m ago

I mean this is one of the risk factors in AI safety that's been communicated for a long time. It's not just computing, but potentially everything. Energy resources, land resources (like those used to grow food for us meat bags), transportation resources. Suddenly humans find themselves outbid by AI as AI has pushed us out of the economy.

The economy says nothing about requiring humans to exist.

nialse•5m ago

That is the logical conclusion. The era of personal computers is coming to an end. It had a good run though.

IAmGraydon•19m ago

Article completely misses the true cause of the price increase - Sam Altman/OAI made a deal with Samsung and SK Hynix get 40% of their RAM wafer production for the 2026 period. This was economic warfare against OpenAI's competitors, and the competitors along with the data centers responded by buying up every bit of DDR5 in sight. This price increase was engineered.

The deal was inked on October 1, 2025, and rumors of it started swirling in September. Take a look at the RAM price charts. Anyone who attributes this just to "AI growth" has no idea what they're talking about. AI has been growing rapidly for three years and yet this price increase just happened exactly when Altman signed this deal.

https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/

It's also worth noting that IDC, who published this report, is wholly owned by Blackstone, who is also heavily invested in OpenAI. It would be prudent to be cautious about who you believe.

aunty_helen•15m ago

After the dns entry, the stockpile of ram may be the most valuable asset that company has.

hinkley•13m ago

One of the things I’ve been hoping for every time a new EC2 instance comes out is for them to unpin the memory:core ratio a bit. I don’t expect they have enough r# and c# users to completely balance things out so what they’re really doing is selling people more CPUs to get the memory they need.

It would be nice if it were creeping up generation to generation. But if this keeps up I fear the opposite.

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Building a macOS app to know when my Mac is thermal throttling

Replacing JavaScript with Just HTML

Learn computer graphics from scratch and for free

Never Use Pixelation to Hide Sensitive Text (2014)

Designing Predictable LLM-Verifier Systems for Formal Method Guarantee

One year of keeping a tada list

tc-ematch(8) extended matches for use with "basic", "cgroup" or "flow" filters

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2D Signed Distance Functions

Doublespeak: In-Context Representation Hijacking

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