#dram-wafers

#dram-wafers

"We're making this change because the cost of building high-performance VR hardware has risen significantly. The global surge in the price of critical components - specifically memory chips - is impacting almost every category of consumer electronics, including VR."

At least two of the company's upcoming machines could debut a little later than the company initially planned, referencing the refreshes to Apple's desktop and its laptop that's expected to get a touchscreen.

What we didn't really find in our testing was evidence that the extra 64MB of L3 cache meaningfully improved performance beyond what the regular 9950X3D can already do.

The flagship models of the Surface Laptop and Surface Pro now cost $1,499 - $500 more than they did at launch in 2024.

With shares going for more than 38.0 times trailing price-to-earnings (P/E), I'm personally in no rush to chase the stock, especially with quarterly earnings just under a week away. That said, some big-name analysts have been bold enough to stay in the bull camp. And that's despite the hot, seemingly overheated run, the relatively stretched multiple, and uncertainties clouding the future of AI.

DRAM contract prices are now expected to rise around 90 to 95 percent quarter-over-quarter. NAND flash similarly sees a huge jump, with expected prices ballooning by 55 to 60 percent compared to Q4 2025. Specifically, PC DRAM prices could more than double even from their elevated positions late last year. This will invariably result in overall price increases across all product categories, though varying in significance depending on component costs.

AI-driven memory and storage price hikes have been the defining feature of the PC industry in 2026, and hobbyists have been hit the hardest-companies like Apple with lots of buying power have been able to limit the price increases for their PCs, phones, and other gadgets so far, but smaller outfits like Valve and Raspberry Pi haven't been so lucky.