Why have the prices of memory more than doubled?

[ShallowHal]

I bought a stick of 256mb PC2100 for 37 bucks shipped from Crucial in December.
Currently 88 bucks. What gives?

 

[Amused]

<< I bought a stick of 256mb PC2100 for 37 bucks shipped from Crucial in December.
Currently 88 bucks. What gives? >>



The price wars that sold memory for just a fraction of overhead costs has ended. The weak died and the strong survived... and are now trying to charge enough to make money again.

 

[AGodspeed]

<< I bought a stick of 256mb PC2100 for 37 bucks shipped from Crucial in December.
Currently 88 bucks. What gives? >>

Simply put, supply and demand.

People like to make it more complicated than it is (like saying Micron and Hynix are trying to corner the market or some crap like that), but it's really simple actually.

To give you a quick synopsis here...With Intel's DDR enabled i845 chipset about to enter the market in December of 2001, memory makers rapidly ramped up production of DDR DIMMs. Why? OEMs like Dell, Compaq, and the rest were going to be selling A LOT of i845 motherboards (because they're cheaper than i850 boards), and they obviously needed a lot of DDR DIMMs to accompany each i845 board. So since massive orders of DDR DIMMs were occurring, memory makers decided to charge higher prices (and therefore make bigger profits) when they saw this huge rise in DDR demand.

When there was relatively little demand for DDR in the months preceding the flood of i845 motherboards, prices were low, because demand was low. Memory makers simply cannot charge high prices for DIMMs if there isn't a high demand for them.

In general, it's very simple economics.

 

[ShallowHal]

Thanks AmusedOne and AGodspeed for the responses.
I guess I should feel lucky I bought memory in December.