Your next laptop will cost more, and the reason has nothing to do with laptops. It's about who's bidding for the memory inside it — and you are not winning that auction.
Gartner expects combined DRAM and SSD prices to climb around 130% by the end of 2026. Translated into things people actually buy: PCs roughly 17% more expensive than 2025, smartphones roughly 13%.
How AI ended up eating your RAM
This one isn't a vague "AI is disrupting everything" story. The mechanism is unusually literal.
AI accelerators need High Bandwidth Memory, and making HBM is so intensive that every bit of it means giving up several bits of the ordinary memory that goes into phones and PCs. Same factories, same wafers, same finite capacity — aimed at whatever pays best.
Right now that's data centres, so consumer memory gets whatever's left. Three companies make nearly 90% of the world's DRAM, so there's no fourth supplier to pick up the slack. Hyperscalers building AI capacity outbid everyone. Samsung has reportedly told manufacturers there's simply no stock.
It reaches you two ways
The obvious one is the price tag. The sneaky one is the spec sheet quietly getting worse.
Brands are doing both — raising prices where buyers will tolerate it, trimming specs where they won't. DRAM is the worst-hit component, and cheap devices take the hardest hit. Base-model phones are expected to slide back to 4 GB of RAM this year, quietly undoing several years of progress.
That's the one to watch while shopping. A phone at last year's price might not be last year's phone. The number that moved is the number nobody checks.
This isn't a few bad months
Severe shortages are expected to run into at least the middle of 2027, and the analysts tracking it expect the squeeze to hold for several more quarters after that.
Memory capacity can't be conjured. Fabs take years and staggering amounts of money, and nobody wants to build for a demand spike that might evaporate when the AI build-out slows. That caution is sensible if you're a chipmaker and expensive if you're a person buying a phone.
What I'd actually do
If you need a machine in the next year, buying sooner probably beats buying later. That's a genuinely strange thing to say about consumer electronics, where patience usually pays.
Spend on RAM and storage when you configure it. Those are the parts getting scarce, and on most modern laptops — and every single phone — you can't add more later. Paying once for headroom now beats replacing the whole device in two years because 8 GB stopped being enough.
Read the spec sheet carefully on anything that looks suspiciously unchanged in price, especially at the budget end. Compare the RAM and storage against last year's model rather than trusting that the name means the same thing.
And if your current machine is just sluggish rather than broken, check whether you can add RAM to it. Plenty of desktops and some laptops still allow it, and even at inflated prices a memory stick is a rounding error next to a new computer.
The uncomfortable bit: this is a real shortage, not opportunistic pricing. It ends when capacity catches up or AI demand cools, and neither is happening this year.
Who this actually hurts
The pain isn't shared evenly. If you're buying a $1,600 laptop, a 17% rise is irritating. If you're buying a $200 phone, you don't get a price rise — you get a worse phone, because at that end there's no headroom to charge more. Something has to give, and it's the spec.
That's the quiet unfairness of a component shortage. People at the top pay more for the same thing. People at the bottom pay the same for less. And a phone that ships with 4 GB in 2026 will feel slow sooner and fall off the update treadmill earlier, so the real cost shows up as a shorter life rather than a bigger number at the till. Easier to miss, harder to dodge.
Image: Sergei Starostin, via Pexels
