Thanks to the memory shortage crisis, anything that uses them has seen their prices steadily go up since the shortage began. This naturally includes phones, and brands have been considering raising prices of their wares, if they have not already done it. Carl Pei, the guy behind the Nothing brand of phones, says that prices will continue to go up into next year.
In a lengthy post on X, Pei said that “memory is now the most expensive component in a smartphone”. Things have gotten so bad that it can make up over 50% of the total hardware bill. This means that memory alone can cost more than things like the processor and screen combined. Which is a very wild thought to wrap around, considering those two were historically the most expensive parts.
Providing context, Pei says that memory costs for the Nothing Phone (4a) doubled “between when we decided to build the device and when it launched”. And it has since doubled again. He notes that this is a trend, and prices will “keep going up into next year”. His post closes with “if you’ve been waiting to upgrade a device, the best time was yesterday. The next best time is now. This year’s sale season won’t have the discounts people are used to”.
One estimate by memory maker SK Hynix was that the memory shortage could last until 2030. Making things worse is that, by next year, memory makers are only expected to meet about 60% of demand. Putting these two together, and chances are prices will continue to rise until 2030, or at least until whenever the supply and demand equation evens out. But while that will stabilise prices, that will unfortunately be another new normal that the industry will have to get used to.
(Source: Carl Pei / X)
