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Yep, I’m just as tired of writing about RAM prices as you are reading about them — the cost is indeed ludicrous, and it’s starting to hit more devices like Meta Quest 3, all PS5 models and Samsung Galaxy phones. But MediaTek’s Head of Global Sales Eric Fischer has said the company is “cautiously optimistic” that things will get better later this year.
A couple of weeks ago, I offered a light at the end of the tunnel: a market correction showing that memory prices had dropped by over 20% last month. But you’d be hard-pushed to find it with RAM still at $400 on Amazon. This is the Great Thaw of 2026, as prices are eroding at the speed of a glacier.
And that’s what makes Fischer’s thoughts (and the tech industry as a whole) seem a little weird. It’s cautious optimism, but the average joe is stuck between agonizingly slow price drops on Amazon and a tech industry that has officially lost its mind (looking at you, Allbirds).
Article continues belowSo I wanted to take a beat and just look at where we’re at, and I still see the signs of a war of attrition that the people will eventually win, and the significant red flags of an AI bubble that may improve things.
MediaTek’s ‘cautious optimism’ vs your bank account
I’ve got to go a bit corporate here, because while Fischer may talk about a “slowdown” in companies raising prices of their products in the second half of 2026, we are talking about a silicon giant that is (to put it mildly) doing rather well with $19.1 billion in revenue.
Their secret? By “locking up capacity agreements” early, the memory is there. But in his own words: “from the pricing perspective, things are a little bit more challenging.” This is the corporate version of the frustration we see on the likes of Amazon or Newegg — the supply is there, but the price tag is a moving target.
And this is the source of MediaTek’s cautious optimism. Fischer notes that the high demand for memory-heavy products (that Q1 jump in PC sales reported by IDC for example) could just be an illusion of people buying now before prices get worse. If true, that means we’re well on our way to hitting a ceiling where “the consumer’s ability to spend” breaks. To Fischer, that moment is looking to arrive in the second half of this year.
The Amazon slow-burn
If you’ve been keeping a 32GB DDR5 kit or a laptop in your Amazon “Save for Later” list, you already know you’re locked in psychological warfare. And with this tiny pullback, it’s clear this isn’t a firesale, but rather a standoff. Because sure, the prices are technically getting better, but it’s still significantly more than what we were paying before all this mess.
Market analysts call this “plateau noise” or “trading noise” — retailers are testing the ceiling of what we’re willing to pay, and given the strong computing sales in the first part of this year (driven largely by panic buying), that’s where the dark times got worse.
But now that the panic has subsided and turned into people increasingly voting with their wallets by not buying until the numbers make sense, you’re starting to see a slow-burn. A calculated attempt to find just the right price where you’ll finally hit buy.
Put simply, it’s a waiting game that MediaTek has called out, so keep holding on!
The tariff refund wildcard
Remember those tariff refunds? Well, U.S. Customs and Border Protection is set to launch its portal to distribute up to $166 billion back to companies on April 20. Starting this Monday, over 330,000 importers can begin to receive payments.
Now here’s the ultimate question: will we actually see this money at checkout? In one word, no. Chances are they’ll absorb these “I owe yous” to make their balance sheets look better for the shareholders. And as Asus’ Director of Technical Marketing, Sascha Krohn, said back in January, no company “wants to be the first one to lower prices.”
If anything, this’ll be a tool in the arsenal used in conjunction with your diamond hands — holding until the numbers make sense. Don’t expect a Tariff Refund Sale on Newegg next week, but watch those prices closely over the next few months, as we may start to see how the refunds fuel this slow-burn of price drops.
The Allbird in the coal mine
I’ve been waiting for a chance to talk about this — the sign of a very healthy speculative market (stop asking about it). In a move similar to Long Island Iced Tea just throwing Blockchain in its name, Allbirds ditched its footwear business and put on a Silicon Valley disguise by rebranding to NewBird AI. And by simply doing that, share prices went up over 600% in a single day.
It feels like a fever dream, right? While we struggle to find affordable computing gear, a struggling footwear brand is outbidding developers for GPUs for AI compute. But history tells us how this ends, and fuels MediaTek’s (and my own) cautious optimism, because I believe we’re in the “Pets.com” stage of the 2020s.
We might not have cheap RAM yet, but it seems like we're approaching that post-AI hangover: the bubble pop. Need proof? By yesterday, that knee-jerk reaction had dissipated, as analysts questioned the substance of the pivot and Allbirds shares plunged by 36%.
Outlook
The hardware market is a surreal landscape where companies like MediaTek are swimming in record billions, a shoe company is LARPing as a GPU provider, and the RAM in your Amazon cart is dropping in price at the speed of a dial-up connection. Where does that leave you?
I still stand by what I recommended before: wait until back-to-school season to see what the impact of a lot of these developments actually are. There are, of course, other factors I didn’t mention here like the conflict in the Middle East or new Chinese RAM suppliers being certified by laptop makers, so that gives all these levers some time to see which are pulled and whether they help your bank balance.
That being said, there is a non-zero chance that you may see a few savvy tech retailers launch sales on April 20 to compete for your stimulus-adjacent dollars. Don’t expect prices to go back to normal, as hardware is being treated like a volatile commodity — gold with a heatsink.
However, I’d keep that “Save for Later” list open and your wallet closed. Don’t let marketing FOMO dictate your build, because if the “consumer spend challenge” Fischer predicted actually hits in the second half of 2026, retailers will be forced to slash prices to move inventory.
It’s a war of attrition, and it may look bleak right now, but the wind is in our sails.
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