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- Apple has raised the prices of almost all their products by $100, $200 or more. The Steam Machine is over $1,000. It's probably supposed to be like 700 bucks. And Xbox? Yeah, the Series X now costs $800. The Series S, you know the cheap one? It's now 500 bucks. Same price as the Series X was back when it launched in 2020 and this is just what happened last week. We've been talking for a while on the channel about how the RAM crisis is about to get bad. Well, it's officially pretty (quacking) bad now.
Sure, a $50 increase on the Switch 2 sucks, but that's not even close to the worst of it. Laptops, gaming PCs, consoles, you name it, and it's probably gone up in price at this point. It really feels like we've hit the tipping point of it's all on fire. And look, while we've been trying to make videos on the positive side of things, on how you can find tech that's not gonna break the bank, there's just no sugar coating this. Things are really tough in the tech space right now and I don't think this is just a few month blip as components like RAM and storage are still rising.
Let's start with the story that even got my mom's attention, Apple. Last week, they raised pricing on basically everything. The MacBook Neo is $100 more, the Air is $200 more, and the MacBook Pro is at least $300 more now. iPads are more expensive by one to $200. They even raised the price of the HomePod mini. What did this little guy ever do to you anyway? - [Alex] Well, what did he do for me?
- The only thing spared are the iPhones, AirPods, and Apple Watch, for now at least. Look, let's be honest, the average person doesn't know what DDR5 is. They're probably busy watching "Love Island," while I'm reading memory market reports and reading AI model cards, because I'm a nerd. - [Alex] Hey, what's wrong with "Love Island"? - Nothing. But everyone notices when Apple, the 800 pound gorilla of the tech space, casually adds an extra hundred bucks to their price tags.
This is what people notice. Tim Cook, the week before the price hike, did an interview with "The Wall Street Journal," basically saying that they tried to avoid raising prices, but ultimately couldn't swallow the extra costs forever. He also said quote, "This is a hundred year flood. I've never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years." I can't disagree. I've spent a lot of time recently talking with friends in the industry and I just can't find a similar analogy to what's happening right now.
I mean, sure, tariffs scared everyone last year, but they ultimately weren't that disruptive. The pandemic did scramble the supply chain, but the wheels kept turning. This is different. Probably the best and saddest example of this is the Steam Machine. This is the first proper competition for the console space in years. The hope was that it would bring magic of the Steam Deck to the living room, but unfortunately it got announced last year right as the RAM crisis started to brew and now that's on sale, it starts at $1,050.
Want a bigger SSD and a controller? That is 1,428 bucks. For the record, last year, I guessed that the Steam Machine would cost about $699. I was only off by $350. At least, I didn't promise to eat a Portal Cake. And it's pretty clear that Valve did not want to charge over $1,000. Pierre-Loup, one of Valve's hardware heads, did an interview with Steve from "Gamers Nexus," recently where he said this.
- Were you able to lock in kind of contracts from memory with the suppliers directly or did you have to jump through a bunch of hoops or. - Look, there's no contracts, there's nothing. Like, they give us a price every month or something and they say, "You can buy that many and it's yes or no." And if we say no, then they never talk to us again. - Look, maybe he's exaggerating a bit, although I kind of believe him, but this should really paint the picture here. The memory companies are absolutely in control. And then, Xbox.
Oh, Xbox. They have now raised their prices for the third time. Now, I'll be honest, the Series S is the one that bums me out the most. I mean, this has been the console if you're on a budget since 2020. At $300 and sometimes on sale, it was such a no-brainer to pair it with Game Pass. Now, technically, the Xbox price hikes don't take effect until August 1st, but pretty quickly the Switch 2 is going to be the cheapest current generation console.
Luckily, it only has a $50 price hike coming. Well, $50 is the plan for now at least. Remember the days when consoles got cheaper over time? Between these price hikes and the nonstop terrible news in the gaming space lately starting to feel less like a bad week and more like a bad era. Three hikes, one week. It's the scariest thing I've seen since two girls. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. (Adriana laughing) So, who do we actually blame for this?
Well, there are only three companies who make the vast majority of memory, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron. Is anyone surprised that they dedicated production to the incredibly profitable RAM for data centers instead of cranking out cheap memory for your PC? I mean, this is really the whole series of dominoes. As long as companies are spending over a billion dollars a day in CapEx to build data centers, there's just no getting around the fact that the rest of us just got to get in line. Can I have some more RAM, please? So no one should be surprised that memory companies are cashing in as some of the most valuable companies on the planet right now. As much as it's easy to paint them as the villains,
these same companies have spent the last couple of years getting their asses kicked. Since the last, say, two to four years, memory has gotten so cheap that a lot of these companies were straight up losing money every year trying to just get RAM off the store shelves. This is part of why things are so bad right now. Memory companies largely have pulled back on building new factories partially because their existing customers were squeezing them so hard in the first place. So is there greed going on right now? Absol-frickin'-loutely. But here's the big takeaway and it's not a nice story. It kind of doesn't change things.
Even if the CEOs of all the memory companies decided to crank out more RAM tomorrow, it's just not physically possible. You can't just flip the manufacture more RAM switch. I mean, building new factories takes years and billions of dollars before a single chip comes out the other side. And put yourself in their shoes for a second. You are currently printing money selling to AI data centers right now. I mean, sure, some of the big companies are making a bunch of noise about trying to build more capacity, but it will take years to get this online
and who knows where demand will be at that point. Meanwhile, they're set to sit back and rake in those sweet, sweet profits, baby. Money, money, money, money, money, money, money. So with more supply only moderately helping and arguably not even keeping up with increased demand, things get even worse. A huge chunk of the memory that is getting made right now is already spoken for, locked up in long-term deals, years before it actually is created. So even if AI demand does dip tomorrow, something I wouldn't bet on, a ton of that supply is already paid for.
There's just no easy answer here. This might sound like a doomer take, but I think this is the actual reality of things here in 2026. Lenovo, one of the biggest computer manufacturers on the entire planet, flat out called these prices, quote, "The new normal." Not for a few months, they're talking about until 2030. Uh-oh. But you know what? Companies love to lower prices and give up their profits as fast as they can.
Oh, wait, what? Oh, no. Oh, prices that rise rarely go back to where they used to be? Ah (quacking). And the money guys agree. Jefferies is projecting that memory prices could climb another up to 50% next quarter with no real drop until maybe 2028. So, that is the why. The supply moves slow and a huge amount of money is already locked in, which leaves the only question anybody actually cares about.
Is there a way out of this at all? Here's the hope everyone's holding onto, the AI bubble! You know bubbles, right? They've got to pop. Any day now, people will realize this whole AI thing was stupid and everything will go back to normal, right? Well, this is largely the conversation we had on This Is just about the other day. And look, I'm not gonna sit here and tell you that the AI bubble can't pop. Maybe it does. Although, everything I'm seeing seems to show things still accelerating, not slowing down. But look, I'd love to be wrong. But here's the real (quacking).
Even if that bubble popped tomorrow, like we just went over, there's no overnight fix. Best case, you're still waiting a long while for everything to trickle down to the price of your laptop. And be careful what you wish for. If the AI bubble does pop, it's a worldwide depression kind of thing. Although to be fair, I think the RAM crisis is causing a worldwide depression for gamers right now, Ba-dum-tss. Let me give you the realistic version of what happens next. The memory inside your console, your PC, your phone, that keeps climbing at least through the end of this year. But the hope is that these price hikes have factored that in.
No company should actually raise the price of a console every couple months, right? I say that with nothing but hope in my heart. I would like to say that we've already seen the worst of things. More price hikes to come, sure. But something in the neighborhood of 20 to 30% price hikes seem to be where things are landing for now. The hope is just that it doesn't go much further than that. And while shortages are bad, it is worth remembering. Memory is a big slice of what's in your Xbox, but it's not the whole thing.
RAM doubling in price doesn't double the price of the console. So here's where I land and up front, this is my prediction. It's not fact or anything, but I think we're cooked for 2027. I mean, sure, there's some hope that Chinese memory fabs are able to fill the gaps, but in the best case, that keeps memory from continuing to rise. Not enough to actually bring things back down. I think 2028 is when we can hope to see things start to drop a little bit. But even then, I just don't think that we'll ever see prices go back to quote, unquote, "normal."
Like over the last few years, memory was unusually cheap. Let's not forget, there was a huge oversupply where memory companies were literally losing money. That's not normal. We just got spoiled by 32 gigs of RAM costing less than 100 bucks. The normal we keep wanting to go back to kind of wasn't sustainable in the first place. So, what do you actually do? Well, besides subscribing to your buddy Austin, who let's not forget, reads a lot of memory reports and AI model cards for you, but really it's just time to make that hardware last a little bit longer. If you're buying new,
grab stuff before price hikes are fully here or look at sales for refurbished options to help bring prices down at least a little bit. Maybe it's also time to dust off that Steam back catalog. Now, if this video helped you to understand the RAM crisis, consider sharing it with a friend who maybe doesn't understand why that new MacBook is suddenly more expensive. If you enjoyed, make sure to subscribe to the channel and ring-a-ling that ding-a-ling. I'll be hear my friends, cranking out tech videos that I promise are usually not this sad, usually.
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