Ok, so this slows down consumer offerings in general as price creeps up, which means less people upgrade. That means there's a stabler hardware target for software devs to, well, target and optimize for. Of course this time will be rather taken to implement more IAP and AI or some other horseshit that nobody really wants.

 

RAM prices in W Europe are pretty stable at the moment (+310% compared to November '25, peaking at +340% in January). Price increases for SSDs (+100%) and HDDs (+60%) continue unabatedly and steadily.

Hard to tell where the journey's going. SK, Samsung say they're expecting the current situation to extend into the 2030s.

 

Via Korea Herald:

Samsung Electronics appears to have overtaken Nvidia (and Apple) to post the world’s largest quarterly operating profit.

Samsung said Tuesday its preliminary operating profit for the April-June period surged 1810.3 percent. Revenue jumped 129.3 percent.

Samsung generated more than twice its entire 2025 operating profit in the second quarter alone, extending a record-breaking streak that began late last year as surging AI server investment lifted prices for memory.

Samsung shares fell sharply Tuesday, as investors questioned whether the AI-driven memory boom can continue at the current pace. SK hynix also dropped, reflecting broader profit-taking in Korean chip stocks after a steep rally.

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Via Tom's Hardware/SamMobile: Samsung's Q2 profit is expected to reach 85.5 trillion KRW, surpassing its cumulative earnings over the past 40 years. The surge is driven by AI memory shortages and rising DRAM and NAND prices. Chip sales accounted for 94% of Q1 profits.

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Via TrendForce: Samsung Reportedly Seeks Up to 20% 3Q26 DRAM Price Increase; LPDDR Hikes May Exceed 20%

(Note: This would put RAM prices at more than 500% of 2025 levels.)

 

Some synths use standard DIMM or SODIMM modules (not sure if there´s gear with DDR4 or DDR5) and 2.5" SATA SSDs, HDDs, or M.2 NVMe drives are also used. But I think just the issue with a lot of hardware ressources going to AI applications and data centers already is a problem for music gear manufacturers. It can throw off development and/or can cause problems with manufacturing which in turn can mean price increases.

 

Last edited: Jul 7, 2026 at 2:48 PM

It is not "another bubble".
It is one bubble AMONG a global bubble bath.

Take a look at any market and you will see it globally falling down.
Even car sells, growing a lot in some parts of the world, represent a small 0.3% global growth.

The big bubble is coming ... and it is the last one.
This production system is already dead.

 

I'm glad that I still have all my hardware

 

the name tells all you need to know regarding whose orifice's it should be going up

 

It's not only about the prices of RAM going up, it's also the new software requiring more and more to run. Back in the day, CPU usage was an issue with most of the music software users; Nebula was highly criticized at that time for that reason. Now the new plugins, especially bad implemented NAM profiling requires way more processing, making Nebula look like a 2001 Waves Bundle. Sometimes they sound worst than Waves TBH.

 

So maybe we take a pause in obsessing about the latest piece of computer hardware (I too am guilty) and concentrate more on being creative?