Hana Kiros, writing at The Atlantic:
TrendForce, a consumer-research firm, anticipates that laptop prices will rise by more than a third in the next few years. Computers under $500 will be extinct by 2028, according to a report from Gartner. Put differently, cheaper computers may fall off the map. “The $300 Chromebook and the $150 Android phone were products of a specific era—one where memory was cheap because nobody else was competing for it at this scale,” Nate Jones, an AI analyst, told me. “That era is ending.”
I’ll take the analyst assessment with a grain of salt, but RAM prices are certain to have interesting (bad) second-order effects aside from just more expensive computers. Hopefully my new one will last a while.
If You Need a Laptop, Buy It Now
Electronics are getting more expensive and worse. Blame the AI boom.