Removed from ushering in a technological golden age, artificial intelligence is giving PC {hardware} its most attempting time in years. As big, hyper-rich tech corporations go about constructing resource-intensive AI knowledge centres in pursuit of future wealth, the ensuing memory chip shortages have detonated consumer-level pricing for RAM modules, graphics playing cards, SSDs, and even ancient hard drives.
Doubling or tripling street-level outlays with out harming gross sales would, you’d assume, make a number of gaming gear makers – particularly their accounting departments – very comfortable certainly. However as these chips have turn out to be a scarce commodity on the provider degree, even the larger {hardware} companies are being squeezed as properly, and it exhibits. Razer can’t decide how a lot their subsequent laptops ought to value. Valve are running out of Steam Deck stock and delaying the new Steam Machine. Zotac Korea referred to as the RAM scarcity an graphics-card-manufacturers”>existential risk. However what of the business’s smaller gamers – these producers of the area of interest, the quirky, the retro?
At face worth, you may count on these to have succumbed to RAM malnutrition earlier than anybody. As they inform it, nevertheless, technique and circumstance are permitting gaming’s specialist producers to endure the worst – in the event that they’re even affected in any respect.
One ‘tactic’ has confirmed profitable, successfully, by chance: simply use much less RAM. Launched to gushing reviews late final yr, simply as reminiscence shortages started to chew, the Commodore 64 Ultimate is a modernised however functionally trustworthy tribute to the computer-defining 1982 authentic, designed and constructed by a resurrected Commodore themselves. Chief know-how officer Marc Bilodeau credit the Final’s comparatively meagre RAM specs, simply 128MB of ye olde DDR2, for it by no means having been trampled within the business’s rush to snap up DDR4 and DDR5 modules.
“Our selection of DDR2 as a substitute of DDR5 actually means we have not been impacted that a lot, from the {hardware} manufacturing perspective,” he explains to me. “Though this RAM scarcity completely weighs into our choice on future designs and initiatives… we do not wish to compromise on design in any respect. However on the similar time, we now have to be very strategic and stay value efficient for our merchandise, from customers’ views. So we’re watching this very intently, however for the time being, we’re not seeing the pinch as different producers are.
“That is one thing we’re watching each day, as a result of it is vitally unlucky, in my view, what’s taking place on the market. I imply, I wish to improve my PC, and I am watching these costs and maintain them again due to it.”
One other low-RAM system to have escaped provide ache is Panic’s wind-up handheld, the Playdate. Whereas not as deliberately retro-styled because the C64 Final, the Playdate’s chip starvation is even simpler to sate: its 4GB of Flash storage is joined by a microscopic 16MB of built-in RAM. Its solely current value bump got here in March 2025, properly earlier than the present disaster, and was blamed on the transfer to a brand new manufacturing facility relatively than particular person half prices.
“Getting solely 16MB of RAM per unit shouldn’t be that troublesome as a result of it is such a small quantity,” says Panic’s exterior PR rep Jurge Cruz-Alvarez. “Manufacturing Playdate is all the time a enjoyable journey – getting different components previously, just like the CPU, was a difficulty again when there was a chip scarcity – and dealing with the proper manufacturing facility prepared to work with Panic have been previous issues they’ve needed to remedy, however RAM has fortunately not been one in all them.”
For producers who do must deal in fashionable, extra capacious RAM and storage specs, being just a little fish in a giant, panicking pond can nonetheless have its benefits. Framework specialize in modular, extremely customisable (and repairable) laptops, and not too long ago launched their first mannequin able to high-end gaming: the Framework Laptop 16, which might be kitted out with Nvidia’s upper-mid-range RTX 5070 GPU. That’s not an inexpensive part, and nor are the DDR5 reminiscence choices it provides, however firm founder Nirav Patel reckons that Framework profit from a type of reverse financial system of scale: as a result of they solely want in-demand components in small numbers, their very own prices are decrease, and the modular strategy lets them provide cut-price laptops with no included RAM in any respect.
“We’re in type of a novel place. We’re not at a scale the place we now have these large, long-term reminiscence contract buys with the large gamers,” he says. “However we’re additionally large enough, and credible sufficient, that we now have direct contact with all the important thing gamers we have to. In order an organization, we’re in a uniquely, virtually advantaged spot in some methods, the place at our quantity we are able to exit into issues like spot markets and for $1, purchase chunks of reminiscence that HP, or Lenovo, or Apple would have a look at and say ‘Effectively, that is a rounding error. We’re not even gonna trouble with that.’ So we get to remain in manufacturing.
“The opposite a part of it’s that, due to our mannequin of modularity and upgradeability for our laptops, the reminiscence is all socketed. It is all it is all detachable and upgradable, and we truly promote a configuration of our laptops, our DIY editions, with out reminiscence or storage pre-installed. So meaning for customers, they’ve a number of flexibility, even in a world the place, for no matter motive, we will not get entry to a sure reminiscence capability or storage capability, for instance. Or we’re having access to it at a value that’s increased than we wish it to be, or customers would really like it to be. Shoppers can truly exit into the open market, even leaping onto eBay and seeing, ‘Okay, what’s on the market, what’s obtainable.’ Then decide up the reminiscence that they will on the value that they will, and produce it on their very own and drop it into the system.”
Procuring round for higher RAM costs can be one thing Framework do themselves. Patel provides that “Creativity and adaptability, I feel, is the important thing. It actually does return to scale – we’re on this very attention-grabbing center floor the place we are able to do issues that the larger gamers cannot, however we now have entry that the smaller gamers do not have, and so we get to be creative in how we supply. Our provide chain crew is extremely succesful, and has ears on the bottom all over the place to make it possible for we’re in a position to proceed getting the provision we have to preserve our merchandise obtainable.”
For some, nevertheless, these manoeuvres are about mitigation relatively than avoidance. Scarcity woes have nonetheless struck unbiased {hardware} corporations, and struck acutely: the Pi Basis, creators of the palm-sized Raspberry Pi computer systems which have powered all the things from retail signage to wire-strewn DIY initiatives, have bumped costs up twice previously three months. Whereas the Pi Basis didn’t reply to a request for remark on this piece, on both occasions, the give trigger was reminiscence prices. Framework, too, have raised costs throughout their vary. A repeatedly updated blog post by Patel is a grim journal of those hikes, which embody reminiscence modules, storage drives and motherboards. For Patel, although, these posts – which have additionally covered the chip shortage more generally – are supposed as informative PSAs.
“One factor we have finished that’s, I feel, a bit completely different for many different corporations, is that we have been fairly clear about it,” he says of those blogs. “And each time we try this, we additionally publish on our social channels, we publish in our neighborhood, and I feel particularly for our clients, the varieties of people who find themselves all for Framework merchandise, they admire that transparency. That is a big extent of why they need our merchandise to start with.”
As disagreeable as it’s to each share and obtain dangerous information, it’s onerous not to have a look at the candour with which Framework and the Pi Basis introduced their changes – typically together with particular costs or share modifications – and see it as one thing the main producers could possibly be doing higher. Plans to jack up costs or alter availability are sometimes buried in non-public-facing sources like investor calls, in the event that they’re even revealed in any respect, leaving mass-produced PCs, laptops, and elements with no seen warning of an imminent dangerous time till they’re already been made costlier. Or, stripped from cabinets. And when a public-facing announcement is made, it’d nonetheless solely deal in vagueness, as did Valve’s post declaring that the Steam Deck would value extra (however we don’t understand how a lot) and could be delayed (however we don’t know till when).
In any case, one widespread view amongst these specialist producers is that RAM shortages and all their unwell results will proceed unaddressed. “I do not see the scenario getting any higher,” says Bilodeau. “AI is making some, I feel, great advances, and serving to make life simpler for lots of people. However personally, I’m holding off on upgrading.
“The best way I have a look at it’s there may be different alternatives to improve the system, perhaps by the CPU, perhaps even changing your video card. And with reminiscence, stick with the earlier technology, if attainable, till, you recognize this blows over, which I do not consider it is going to in a yr. The truth is, I feel that this difficulty will proceed by 2026 perhaps even 2027. It is simply these AI corporations are so hungry and increasing so shortly and making so many inventions that you recognize that they will take these assets, and people reminiscence corporations are going to fortunately promote it to them first.”
Patel shares the evaluation of an unstable market, although thinks it’s nonetheless attainable to make good buys within the present circumstances – even when he’s, as he places it, “chatting with my very own ebook” and recommending modular {hardware} that may be extra simply tweaked later.
“The reminiscence market goes to proceed to fluctuate. I do not know, a yr from now, what reminiscence pricing goes to appear like,” he admits. “However [I’d suggest] selecting up a product the place you should buy the reminiscence you want now, for no matter use case you could have as we speak, with the flexibility to do this improve sooner or later when capitalism will catch up.
“Finally the provision will meet the demand, although – due to the lead instances for standing up new capability – that could possibly be an prolonged time frame. Finally the market will stabilize and normalize. And so my recommendation for customers is to consider upgradability and take into consideration modularity.”
PC house owners are, in fact, no strangers to both. However regardless of the alternatives for smug gurning every time the Xbox Sequence X will get much more costly, or Sony allegedly delays the PlayStation 6 for one more yr, we – as particular person component-buyers – can’t precisely take advantage of the PC’s piecemeal capabilities when an honest DDR5 equipment prices £400, or half the graphics-card”>greatest graphics card fashions are MIA.
Maybe, that may simply carry us again to low-end gaming machines just like the Playdate or the Commodore 64 Final. Does this breed of much less graphically highly effective but way more reasonably priced {hardware} have the prospect to step in the place fashionable tech is sort of actually developing quick?
“That is a troublesome query,” Bilodeau says, “simply because we have gotten so used to a number of the trendy pc improvements nowadays that there aren’t issues that we can exchange. However I do must say that we enable individuals to take that step again and do away with all of that exterior noise and truly take pleasure in utilizing computer systems once more.”
