Thread · HN Continuity

Right now, every company that can is ramping up their RAM production as much as humanly possible. There is such outrageous and growing demand, that it's like printing money if you can manufacture more RAM chips. And that massive financial incentive is driving huge investment in manufacturing capacity.

But someday, that demand will stop rising.

At some point, most people will have enough RAM. And they just won't need to buy more.

The inventories of RAM will become overfull, in warehouses and stores. And suddenly the manufacturers, middlemen, and even retailers will all find the price they can sell at keeps dropping.

But you can't shut down a huge manufacturing facility overnight. You can't shut down a years-in-the-making retail distribution system overnight, either. You can't even shut down a facility that is halfway finished with construction. They'll keep producing and selling RAM at lower and lower profit margins, until the day comes they finally accept they're losing money with each sale.

And when that happens, we'll all have more RAM than we know what to do with. It'll be cheaper than we have all ever experienced in our lifetimes.

I don't expect this to happen soon. But demand cannot keep exponentially rising forever. There will come a point, probably in the next 5 years, when demand at least levels off, even as production capacity is still rising.

And it will be interesting to see what's possible at that point. We'll be able to create software that is not doable right now, because it will no longer be constrained by memory. And even cheap laptops will massive amounts.