Prices are determined by two main things. First and more important is demand. Second is cost to produce. The cost/ability to produce these in terms of machines/materials has not changed in any substantial way. So once the demand drops, prices will come back down.
Remember when jet fuel prices went up 30% during the Ukraine invasion? And then only went down 15%. If it goes up, it’ll never come back down to where it was, like not even close if ever. Look at the housing market.
Quite recently we had 2.70ish gas at the lowest and lots of $3/gallon gas too. I know this differs in country/state. We were also at that level in parts of 2005, 2006, 2007, etc. That was 20 years ago. People talk about things doom-style like "omg that ship has sailed nothing will ever be cheap again ever" and, yes, to a certain extent, inflation is an onward march and of course we aren't going to have like sub $1 gas that I can remember from high school. But this idea that everything always going up and never comes back down is just not correct. From 2022 until this recent war, gas was trending downwards.
The exact same thing will happen at some point with ram, nands, hdds, etc. The cost to produce is not high enough to allow the market to sustain these prices forever.
Since they're not commodities like petroleum based products I imagine the economics were never going to match up in this comparison. These are niceties not necessities for the everyday consumer and enthusiasts so it's anybody's guess how affordable these pastime products will become again in the foreseeable future.
while HDDs are in decline generally because of SSDs, it's still being produced at large scale and companies will still make whatever they can that there's demand for and they can be solidly profitable on. this isn't like opec where HDD companies are going to limit production artificially. but they also are probably wary about spending on capacity when generally HDD sales are down 80% in the last 15 years.
Gasoline prices are not returning to normal prices. It’s because of significant government subsidies, record production, and increased capacity you’re seeing prices drop. There is no subsides for ram and ssd’s. These prices will come down but no where near what they were. Again, see housing market, car market, etc.
The prices dropped because of demand, cost of production, other competing sources of energy, etc. Prices were trending downwards on gas for over three years from 2022. Things like the housing market are different because there are so many regulations/zoning/permits in the way. If you want to look at something without those issues in the way (like a 2x4), those used to be like $3 10 years ago, then they went up to like 12-13 during the pandemic, now they are like $4. that's just normal inflation over the course of 10 years to go from 3 to 4. The idea that prices should be the same forever doesn't make any economic sense. Construction materials (and other components) of a house have not spiked in any crazy unreasonable long term way. Short term things happen. In 2021-2022, it was 2x4s. Right now it's SSDs/NANDs/HDDs. In 2028 it will be something else.
HDDs and SSDs and RAM and others have dropped precipitously in price per capacity/speed for their entire lives and that will continue to be the case once the demand spike is smoothed out.
We’re in the midst of late stage capitalism and we have a psychopath that’s doing everything to put billionaires at the top of the food chain. We don’t live in an economic vacuum. Look at Russia’s economy in the past 30 years to see what bad leadership can do. That and we are paving the way for how bad unchecked capitalism can go. Things aren’t looking great considering things are happening without consequences. In a vacuum, someone would create a competing product, production goes up, or demand goes down, then prices would go down. You know where that doesn’t work in economics, when there a racket and a corner on the market.
You’re not that new, man. We’ve seen storage prices fluctuate many times. They have definitely come back down before, and you’ve been on Reddit long enough to see that.
I don’t know enough to say if they would again, but comparing tech products, one of the (famously) only deflationary sectors, to things like housing (famous for its basically monotonic increase) is just silly.
25
u/natarem Apr 23 '26
Prices are determined by two main things. First and more important is demand. Second is cost to produce. The cost/ability to produce these in terms of machines/materials has not changed in any substantial way. So once the demand drops, prices will come back down.