The average consumer isn't purchasing a lot of products with a lot of RAM every year.
Their 8GB of RAM phones will go up in price a little bit, but people aren't buying phones every year or even every other year.
So if the price of the 8GB of LPDDR went from $40 to $160 and it's all passed on to the consumer buying a new phone every 4 years, that's an extra $30/year in spending.
Most adults I know now use their phone for everything, so they're not buying new computers and laptops. They can wait 3 years for the market to settle before upgrading those, too.
Even I'm a heavy buyer of tech products and RAM, and I would bet you that my family's annual food bill fluctuates by more than what I've had to pay for RAM prices growing.
Many smaller companies will have issues getting enough, but even they could buy something with memory and rip it out. When you're willing to pay a hefty multiple, you can outbid other people. The shortages are not nearly bad enough to escape standard supply and demand.
>Most adults I know now use their phone for everything
You mean the cloud for everything. A lot of phone tasks share their computational and storage workloads off in the invisible ether that has actual computers with real costs behind them. Amazon has no problem with bumping up their costs in order to pay for their fleet of servers. I mean, what business doesn't use the cloud these days.
In the shorter term, you’ll probably see more “base” models on offer with some of the most intensive features disabled. There’s still going to be all of the telemetry stuff that makes them money through third parties though.
Isn’t it just… prices?
Total imports are maybe 14%? But not as highly tariffed.