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But it's literally not cheaper than it was ~15 years ago? Right now RAM is the same price per GB as it was in 2007 and prices per GB look to continue to rise.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ram/scientist-say...

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Nobody would like to use DDR3 right now though, you can get cheap DDR3 DDR2 if you want some
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It physically will not fit a modern motherboard.
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>Right now RAM is the same price per GB as it was in 2007 and prices per GB look to continue to rise.

...when looking at nominal prices (ie. not adjusted for inflation). If you adjust for that the furthest back you can go to get that price is 2011. What's more is that because RAM prices are subject to boom and bust cycles, that price has also been reached in 2015. So just by tweaking two parameters we went from 19 years (2007) to 11 years (2015).

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That is correct, DDR5 today is in real US$ slightly cheaper than DRAM was in 2011, 15 years ago.

For more than 15 years in the past, the price in real US$ of DRAM per GB was always higher than today.

During 2014, there was a brief price peak when DDR3 (the standard current then) was slightly more expensive than DDR5 is today.

Still, the fact that now the price per GB is the same as 15 years ago, is bad enough, and it can still become worse.

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We had modern programming toolkits that traded some efficiency for ease of use 20 years ago, along with GPU compositing for maximum smoothness. And that's when Vista came out requiring a whole 1GB to run properly. And other than doubling for 64GB that didn't change through 7, 8, 8.1, 10.

Electron was never a great idea but more and more basic things keep moving to it and the result is a disaster. When you use it for several little things at once it turns from annoying waste into massive waste.

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moder engineers.
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15 years ago 4GB was comfortable and 8GB was abundant.

Today 8GB is bare minimum.

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The sad thing is that usability of computers has not improved. More RAM has bought us absolutely nothing when it comes to UI/UX.
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Exactly, isn't that nuts? Especially when we're now paying 15-years-ago prices per gigabyte. What are we getting for that additional space?
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You are destroying the subtle mechanism of corporate enrichment.
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But we went from 1080p monitors to 5k monitors and so we are pushing 7x the number of pixels and at roughly twice the bits per pixel.
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51% of people are still on 1080p according to the July 2026 steam survey.
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True, but I don't really think that accounts for the increase in memory usage.
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No but it's the biggest one that's easy to forget.

Feature factory work increases the surface area of every API you touch, and the proliferation of pre-written APIs expands the number of APIs you touch. The combination of the two is not quite O(n²) but the exponent is more than 1, so it's still geometric.

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