Why you can’t afford that new gadget
Hi, Elliot here. I work on the team behind Datawrapper’s charting code, and today we’re looking at the rising cost of technology.
Once upon a time, gadgets started off expensive and got cheaper as time progressed. If you couldn’t afford the latest PlayStation today, it might be a better price next year.
In the upside-down world we find ourselves in, the opposite is now true: the likes of phones, laptops and especially games consoles have seen sudden and dramatic price spikes over the past year.
The reason? Artificial intelligence. As big tech companies build out gigantic data centers across the world, they have been buying out global supplies of RAM, or the short-term “random access memory” which takes care of live tasks and processes, used in all modern gadgets.
These manufacturers probably didn’t want to raise prices: more likely, the existing price was no longer profitable as the raw components became more expensive. Sales of the PS5, which now costs around 30% more than in January 2025, are down almost half from a year earlier.
We can get a sense of the economic pressures by looking at consumer prices for memory (which one might buy to install in a gaming PC, for example). These began to rise last summer as the supply crunch began to kick in, and despite leveling off slightly, are in some cases four times as expensive as they were 18 months ago.
While data centers don’t use these types of consumer-grade memory, manufacturers are choosing to divert their capacity towards this AI use, driving up prices across the market. This has also affected long-term storage memory (i.e. hard disks and solid-state drives).
Historically speaking, computer memory has gotten exponentially cheaper over time, in part thanks to technical advances such as increased density of transistors on a silicon chip.
Hopefully the recent trend will reverse itself soon, and gadgets will once again get cheaper rather than pricier over time. I’d really like one of those fancy new Steam Machines — but I’m not sure I’m willing to pay the equivalent of a thousand bucks.
Thanks for reading! Come back next week for charts from Datawrapper's co-founder Gregor.
