What you are describing is something different… that is “close enough” to Moore’s Law for all but the most pedantic.
The (I forget the proper economics term so) base price of RAM/Storage does indeed go down as new processes and economies of scale are developed. But the cost of a “laptop hard drive” remains pretty steady in the sense that a couple hundred MB was enough back in the day but you REALLY want at least 500 gigs now. The price per byte does indeed drop rapidly but the price per “drive” is far more stable (not fully stable due to inflation and how many people are buying them, but within spitting distance).
Its why a good rule of thumb was to always just spend roughly the same on storage during an upgrade and that would result in faster technologies and larger capacity drives and so forth.
That isn’t what is happening with RAM in 2025. A much better comparison is GPUs because… it is the same problem. It is ridiculously high demand from businesses (often startups pouring dump trucks of VC money into their only hope… well, VC money or drug money in the case of miners but they matter a lot less these days) driving this. A quick search didn’t yield an easy graph and I can’t be bothered to go dig through Gamers Nexus’s twelve videos on it, but the price of an “entry level” GPU has drastically changed in the past decade.
But just for two-ish data points?
The GTX 980 and 970 had an MSRP (probably) of 550 and 330 USD, respectively, back in 2014
While there is some other bullshit involved, the RTX 5080 and 5070 have MSRPs of 1000 USD and 550 USD in 2025
Adjusting for inflation, the 980 and 970 would still only be about 753 and 451 USD in 2025 dollars
And let’s not forget that basically no cards were sold at MSRP back in early 2025…
The last point being what is, by all accounts, going to be the new normal. Barring outside impacts like… RAM going through the roof. Vendors will sell the cards for the ACTUAL MSRP rather than the inflated demand prices. And they will still be considerably more expensive as a result.
All of which is to say… my current card is definitely good enough but having a hard time deciding if I do one “final” upgrade for the decade. But I am an AMD boi so those are at least “reasonable” in terms of price per performance.
What you are describing is something different… that is “close enough” to Moore’s Law for all but the most pedantic.
The (I forget the proper economics term so) base price of RAM/Storage does indeed go down as new processes and economies of scale are developed. But the cost of a “laptop hard drive” remains pretty steady in the sense that a couple hundred MB was enough back in the day but you REALLY want at least 500 gigs now. The price per byte does indeed drop rapidly but the price per “drive” is far more stable (not fully stable due to inflation and how many people are buying them, but within spitting distance).
Its why a good rule of thumb was to always just spend roughly the same on storage during an upgrade and that would result in faster technologies and larger capacity drives and so forth.
That isn’t what is happening with RAM in 2025. A much better comparison is GPUs because… it is the same problem. It is ridiculously high demand from businesses (often startups pouring dump trucks of VC money into their only hope… well, VC money or drug money in the case of miners but they matter a lot less these days) driving this. A quick search didn’t yield an easy graph and I can’t be bothered to go dig through Gamers Nexus’s twelve videos on it, but the price of an “entry level” GPU has drastically changed in the past decade.
But just for two-ish data points?
The last point being what is, by all accounts, going to be the new normal. Barring outside impacts like… RAM going through the roof. Vendors will sell the cards for the ACTUAL MSRP rather than the inflated demand prices. And they will still be considerably more expensive as a result.
All of which is to say… my current card is definitely good enough but having a hard time deciding if I do one “final” upgrade for the decade. But I am an AMD boi so those are at least “reasonable” in terms of price per performance.