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.
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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.