Why has the price of RAM literally doubled since July of 2016?

Why has the price of RAM literally doubled since July of 2016?

Is there some new factory flooding that I haven't heard of?
You used to be able to max out your ram for no more than the price of a motherboard and now 32GB of DDR3/DDR4 memory from even the shittiest manufacturer is now $220.

Smartphones.

Ohhh, I think I read about this. There's some kind of material shortage.

There was earthquake at location of theyr supplier of microtransistors so now there is single company giving them needed part.
It is expected to go higher in price to 140% of current price and then drop to 75% in next 2 years.

the manufacture of most parts, in particular RAM and HDDs, relies on a pretty tightly contained region that's overly prone to floods and earthquakes.

It happened a few years ago with hard drives (and I think again recently?) where 500GB drives were $50, and then they shot up to $90 and took an entire year to get back down

The floods were just an excuse for the NSA to buy up all the RAM and hard drive supply available in the world at the time, it was right around the time they were finishing up construction of their new data center in utah.

Coincidence?

Nope it is same reason why you can not buy any rx580,NSA bought all ram,gpu some ryzens
and now they play epic games at 150fps in 4k resolution at theyrs headquarters.

I 100% Confirm because I'm Presiden Donald Duck.

why is there only like one ram manufacturer world wide that actually matters?

Because It is not easy to get in to ram industry,even the biggest manufacturer need 8 years to go from ddr3 to ddr4
Imagine starting fresh.
It could be nice 10years of research itself.

Not just that, but expense as well. Even if you had R&D done and ready to go, manufacturing facilities cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

Couldn't someone just get a production license?
Isn't there laws against monopolies?

Price fixing, business as usual in the computer parts industry

The startup costs for a DRAM semiconductor company is immense.
This is what happens when there's literally only 3 companies that supply all the ram.
samsung, sk hynix, and micron have effectively stopped competing with each other and prices have stabilized.

Price fixing.

you can buy rx 580 - in an imac.

and those rx580s are the better bins because Apple ordered that shit

Psst
Buy DDR3 ECC user.
It's cheap AF.

Does that come in laptop flavor?

You COULD get unregistered/ unbuffered laptop ECC for a premium and stick it in with your core i series no fucked given but it's only cheaper for desktops because DDR3 is flooding the market as the enterprise drops it for DDR4 ECC.

>want to buy a cheap laptop with an IPS display and ideally a Celeron or Pentium AKA not an Atom
>none of the Can buy a $120 IPS monitor and a $230 laptop for $350 but no $350 comes with an IPS monitor
>phones and tablets all come with IPS displays are have resolutions >1366x768

What went wrong? Why is this allowed?

>Anime
Go to hell.

nice projecting