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Phone companies have been differentiating their models based on RAM for a decade. As have laptop and desktop sellers. The reason your router sometimes randomly crashes could very well be a result of not enough memory. The reason it takes such a long time to launch some programs repeatedly is because you don't have enough memory to cache it. Swapped from your browser to an app on your phone, but when you go back to the browser the site has reset and you lost everything you were working on? Not enough memory. Etc.

I think a lot of people care about the downstream effects of memory prices, but I agree with you that they may not realize that they happen because of memory prices.

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>The reason your router sometimes randomly crashes could very well be a result of not enough memory. The reason it takes such a long time to launch some programs repeatedly is because you don't have enough memory to cache it. Swapped from your browser to an app on your phone, but when you go back to the browser the site has reset and you lost everything you were working on? Not enough memory. Etc.

That might be true at micro level, but at the macro level more memory just means developers get more lazy with their optimizations, causing apps to get more bloated, eating up any gains in extra memory. There's no reason why slack needs 1+GB to run, yet people are perfectly happy to put up with it.

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> How many people, outside of tech geeks and megacorps care about RAM prices?

They don’t care about RAM prices, but they do care about the price of things that have RAM in them (or even NAND), and all of them are increasing way faster than inflation.

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Everybody has a phone, they're costing 25% more. GameStop is selling second hand PS5s for $1400. RAM prices affect most people.
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