RAM too expensive? Apple’s CFO thinks huge memory price drop imminent

Apple’s chief financial officer thinks the days of sky high storage prices might be coming to an end, meaning that we might see the prices of NAND and DRAM finally come back down to more reasonable levels. 

It’s not been a great time to be a PC hardware enthusiast recently. Between demand for cryptocurrency miners pushing up graphics card prices to insane levels, and RAM shortages pushing up memory prices, it’s getting harder and harder to put together a powerful PC without leaving your pockets completely empty.

While Bit-tech points out that memory manufacturers don’t think the price increases are going to come to an end any time soon (due to manufacturers inability to scale up production), Apple’s CFO paints a rosier picture.

Speaking during Apple’s recent earnings call, Luca Maestri said that he thought a corner was about to be turned for both NAND and DRAM memory prices, leading to an eventual decrease as we move into 2019.

NAND vs DRAM

NAND is what’s used in storage components such as memory sticks and SSDs, while DRAM is more commonly known as RAM, and acts as the short term memory of a system.

While Apple’s executive was making the comments in relation to Apple’s own costs, the observations will be music to the ears of the rest of the PC hardware community, who have been struggling with high hardware prices for the past year.

The news comes hot off reports that GPU orders appear to be decreasing from cryptocurrency miners as they move towards ASIC mining hardware, leading to hopes that GPU prices might also be about to drop.

It’s still not certain that these price decreases will make their way to consumers, but it’s reassuring that the industry seems to be moving in the right direction.

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