the consumer price barely matters for the perspective of the company evaluating wherever they can enter the market, because thats just a tiny fraction of it. And the largest piece of the market buys directly from the producer, SK Hynex, Samsung and Micron.
For consumers wanting to buy RAM sticks the difference is academic, i give you that. But for the capital that decides wherever to invest millions if not billions into getting a factory up and running - the price they can set for the b2b sales is the more important factor.
If it wasnt already proven to be basically whatever number they feel like setting... the opportunity would be a lot less obvious.
The idea that companies should have priority price controlled access to memory puts us even deeper into a situation where we can never afford local compute ever again.
I actually like Clojure more but even with GraalVM AOT it still tends to take significantly more memory than even naive Rust code (e.g. using Clone everywhere). If you’re looking willing to spend time abusing the borrow checker you can often get memory usage down to like 5% of what you’d get out of Java stuff.
If the manufacturers decided to keep the price constant that would NOT stop the price that most people pay from going up. It would just mean that the people who managed to buy from the manufacturer before the supply ran out would resell on the secondary market for a giant profit.
But you've no evidence that that "giant profit" would be more than the increase that the suppliers would apply.
Arbitrage allows the market to find an agreeable price; a middleman arbiter with a warehouse of RAM has an incentive to agree a price with a buyer because he's stuck with that inventory if he doesn't shift it, and he has costs related to financing it.
A supplier has no such incentive, they can just jack the price up and if sales drop off they run the machines at a lower rate, or sack employees. But sales aren't going to drop off, because the baseline for demand has been lifted
Once this "RAM Crisis" is over, what reason would manufacturers have to reduce prices?
Literal empty shelves. And resellers on Ebay making bank.