It’s a single math question but here is the text of the article:

Prices of solid state drives and DDR4 and DDR5 RAM have doubled and tripled in price respectively over the past three or four months, thanks in part to the AI industry’s seemingly insatiable appetite for new servers. 32 GB of DDR5 RAM is currently selling for $350 US or more. Four months ago it was selling for around $100.

This has of course increased the prices of new laptops and pre-built desktop PC’s–although not by as much as one might think, at least not yet, judging by their current prices on Amazon. Perhaps, computer manufacturers are paying lower prices for these parts than consumers? Or, maybe they are still selling computers left over from the Summer, in which case, computers will likely rise sharply in price soon when they run out of unsold stock. Perhaps one reason computers have not increased as much as would have been expected is that many PC’s that would have sold with 32 GB of RAM or more are now selling with 16 or even 8 GB of RAM.

Another potential source of computer parts cost increases that few people seem to be talking about is China’s stricter export restrictions on rare earth minerals earlier this year in response to US tariffs. On April 11, however, Trump exempted China from tariffs on computers, and China suspended its restrictions a few months later in November. This suggests and any price increases due to China’s restrictions may only be temporary. Still the politics associated with tariffs may be causing manufacturers some anxiety about the availability of both parts and raw materials, and that could still be factoring into prices.

The news of parts price increases has been blowing up on YouTube over the past two weeks, and I have seen some scary predictions. Some are saying prices will be high for the next four to ten years. Others are significantly more optimistic, insisting this should be over by the end of next year. Adding to the anxiety is Micron’s announcement that it will discontinue its Crucial consumer brand of RAM and a leak that Samsung will soon end the production of SATA SSD’s forever and afterwards sell only NVMe drives to consumers. Many believe these events will further drive up the prices of parts.

The interesting thing to me is that none of this seems to have noticeably affected the prices of old computers with DDR3 RAM or the price of DDR3 RAM itself. Nearly as soon as I learned of the RAM price increases, I went out and bought all the DDR3 RAM I thought I would likely ever need. I bought 32 GB two weeks ago for $57, a little more than one seventh of the price of new DDR5 RAM. In my mind, the still low price of DDR3 adds support for my belief that consumers have no understanding of the fact that perfectly good used computers are available to anyone who is fed up with the high prices of new computers and parts. They don’t seem to understand that they don’t need a new computer to surf the Internet, write a letter, or talk to their friends on social media. They can do all of that easily with a good 8-12 year old laptop running Linux.

My newest computer, age-wise, and the one I am typing this article on right now is a Dell Inspiron 3647 from 2014. It worked just fine for me two weeks ago with 4 GB of RAM and a Core i3-4130 CPU running Parrot OS and would take me safely anywhere I needed to go on the Internet with recent versions of Palemoon and Firefox. I have also been using it to write PHP code in the vi and Gedit editors for my social media site Blue Dwarf (which will, by the way, work just fine with any 25-year-old computer you can manage to dig out of a landfill or with just about any old device that is capable of running even an ancient web browser). I have written quite a lot of Blue Dwarf code over the past three-and-a-half years, more than thirty-five thousand lines of it. Early last year I paid $43.20 US on EBay for this computer, including shipping and taxes. Contrast this with many professional developers who insist they simply can’t get by with less than a $3000 laptop containing 64 GB of RAM. To be fair, many of them are dealing with unbelievably inefficient development software at work, so they may actually need ridiculously fast CPU’s and piles of RAM. I upgraded my Inspiron to 16 GB of RAM last week (at a cost of $20.52, including shipping and taxes) to increase the likelihood that I will continue to be able to use it for years to come, and I can always upgrade its CPU to a fourth-generation Core i7 for next to nothing if I need to. Why should I buy a new computer at twenty times or more the price to do the same things I do with this computer, or possibly pay $250 for 16 GB of DDR5 RAM alone?

The ability to use dirt-cheap computers is only one of the many benefits of buying widely-available upgradeable general-purpose computers whenever possible. I have been warning for years that everyone should very carefully consider whether using locked-down devices is in their long-term best interests, and this makes as good a time as any to repeat that warning. Those of you who use locked-down cellphones as your only computing devices are now facing corporate and governmental control via the big online app stores like we have never seen before. That control evaporates as soon as you purchase and learn to use a general-purpose computer, because Apple, Microsoft, and others no longer have the ability to prevent you from obtaining and running whatever software you like. This frees you to visit any banned or age-gated social media site you choose via whatever VPN or other type of proxy you like, and it insures that access can never be taken from you by taking away your software. Even in a worst-case scenario where all social media disappears from the Web, you can still resort to decentralized and peer-to-peer social media via software like the Tor Browser, Tails, and Secure Scuttlebutt clients that governments have great difficulty blocking. You can also make digital copies of as many of your movies and books and as much of your music as you like and actually own it rather than in effect borrowing it from Apple, Amazon, or a music streaming service. And finally, your pictures will no longer be searched for child pornography or anything else. Owning and knowing how to use a general-purpose computer virtually guarantees that freedom-hating governments and companies around the world will not be able to significantly affect your online freedom or your ability to own your media and data.

The huge price increases in RAM and SSD’s have caused me to think once again about the optimal time to buy new (not used) computer parts. I could wait to buy parts until I absolutely know I will need them, and possibly find myself in a situation where I am forced to pay ridiculously prices like we are seeing today. Or, I could stock up sufficiently to meet my needs for years to come when parts are dirt cheap and run the risk of not using some parts before they become obsolete. That has never been an easy decision for me to make. I passed up buying Optane storage last year because I wasn’t sure I would ever have a use for it. Now, I am thinking maybe I should have bought at least one or two Optane drives, just in case. On the other hand, I have been buying mostly small extremely cheap, yet good quality SSD’s almost as frequently as I have been buying toilet paper over the past few years, and now I have a large stockpile and no worries about today’s over-priced SSD’s. I could go for years without needing to buy another SSD.

Over the past year, as everyone around me has rushed to buy new PC’s in anticipation of the end of Windows 10 support, I have been contemplating again how oblivious they are to the fact that they don’t need to use a Microsoft operating system at all. Linux works well for me and would work just as well for many people, if not most, if they would just give it a chance. Instead of trying something new, however, they allow Microsoft to force them to buy new increasingly locked-down un-upgradeable computers whenever it decides the time is right. One would think consumers would eventually wise up and make their own computer buying decisions, but most never do. As a result, many people today are still on the computer-buying treadmill and are or soon will be forced to buy a new computer at today’s or tomorrow’s high prices, rather than buying a quality used computer for perhaps 10% of the cost of a new one. This is despite the fact that purchasing a new computer is completely unnecessary, now that Moore’s Law has been dead for twenty years, an entire generation of human beings. Why are they still on the treadmill? The answer most give is simply, “I want a new computer, not a old one.” How can one argue with a want that has nothing to do with logic and is oblivious to the cost of bad decisions?

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Oh god, I thought it was like a checkbox or two, but yeah, I don’t want to solve puzzles to access a site.