You don't have to directly buy RAM to be affected. It's just like oil or electricity...if RAM was part of the economic process that you participated in, then that price increase will be passed down to you. If every datacenter in the US suddenly had to pay double for electricity, how would that affect every operation that is operating in that datacenter? Ok now it's not electricity, it's the RAM.

The headline says "sold out". That doesn't mean prices will go up, that means the memory will not be available at all for many companies and the products they make will not be available to consumers.

You forgot to tack on the rise in prices of SSDs too, so that's $50 per year at least.

>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.

Almost everything we consume is downstream of RAM pricing. I don’t buy a phone every year, but corporate workforces, streaming servers, cars, factories, etc. will all cost more next year.

Remember when car companies couldn’t get the chips they needed to make cars? And so now there’s not enough used cars. And so car companies charge way more the new ones and just stopped making cheap cars altogether?

At the low end, where the vast majority of people are, even in the US, an extra $120 will double the price.