Your Next Laptop Costs More Because AI Got There First
What Happened
If you've shopped for a laptop or a phone recently and thought prices looked worse than you remembered, you weren't imagining it. The industry has a nickname for what's going on: RAMageddon.
Memory chips — the RAM in your laptop, the storage in your phone — are in short supply. AI data centers now absorb an estimated 70% of the world's memory chip output. Apple has already raised prices on MacBooks and iPads and cited memory costs. Analysts at Gartner expect memory prices to climb roughly 130% by the end of 2026, which they estimate could push PC prices up around 17% and smartphone prices up around 13% compared to last year. Other forecasters are less dramatic — IDC models average PC price increases closer to 4% to 8%. Either way, the direction is the same.
Why It Matters
Three companies — Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron — make more than 95% of the world's DRAM. When those three decide where to point their factories, the entire consumer electronics industry finds out afterward.
And they've pointed them at AI. High-bandwidth memory for AI accelerators sells at margins several times higher than the ordinary memory that goes in a laptop. Any rational company would make the same call. But factory capacity is fixed in the short run, so every wafer that becomes AI memory is a wafer that doesn't become the RAM in a mid-range phone.
Things have gotten strange enough that older DDR4 memory has at points cost more per gigabit than cutting-edge AI memory — the technology equivalent of a used car costing more than a new one. SK Hynix's chief executive has said 2027 could be the worst supply year in the industry's history.
The Concept: Input Costs and Pass-Through
An input cost is what a company pays for the raw materials and components that go into its product. Memory is an input cost for every laptop maker on earth.
Pass-through is how much of an input cost increase gets handed to you rather than absorbed by the company. Firms with fat margins can eat some of it. Firms selling $200 phones have almost no room, which is why budget devices get hit hardest — the same reason the cheapest models sometimes just quietly disappear from the lineup.
Watch for the second version of a price increase: the one that isn't in the price. When a company can't raise the sticker price, it can hold the price and give you less — the same phone as last year with the same amount of memory instead of an upgrade, or a base model that used to include something that now costs extra. Economists call this shrinkflation. It shows up in electronics as specs that stop improving.
Why Teens Should Care
You're one of the most affected groups here, for a boring reason: you buy at the low end. Students buy $500 laptops, budget phones, and used consoles. That's exactly the segment with no margin left to absorb a cost increase.
Some practical things that follow from this:
- If you need a laptop for college, buying earlier is probably cheaper than buying later. This is the rare situation where waiting for prices to fall is the losing move — forecasters expect supply to stay tight into 2027.
- Buy more memory than you need now. You usually can't upgrade RAM in modern laptops, and the upgrade will only get pricier.
- Refurbished and last-generation models get relatively more attractive when new devices are the thing rising in price.
The larger point is worth sitting with. The AI boom isn't only reaching you through news about chatbots and jobs. It's reaching you through the price of a physical object in a store, because a few thousand data centers decided they wanted the same components you did. That's what it looks like when an economic story stops being abstract.
When you can't figure out why something costs more, look at who else is buying the parts.
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Sources: Gartner and IDC forecasts; CNBC, CBC News and CNET reporting, February–July 2026.