Prices for RAM, Flash, hard disks and graphics cards keep rising and rising. The AI bubble keeps inflating and it’s anyone’s guess when hardware prices will return to sane levels. This definitely has an influence on my buying behavior but interestingly enough, in both directions: I buy some things right now because because I expect that those things will get more expensive, and I’m holding out at buying other things which I would have otherwise bought, because I have enough in stock, or because they are good enough. I haven’t made an exact calculation, but overall I think I’m spending less, despite buying things now.
Let’s have a look first at the ‘I’m buying now’ category:
A Lenovo T14 Gen 6 instead of Gen 7 – It’s the RAM!
I recently bought a Lenovo Thinkpad T14 Gen 6 for two reasons rather than waiting until I really need it: First, it is likely I will need a new notebook in the next two years and second, it is equally likely prices for storage and RAM will not drop. The T14 Gen7 has recently become available as well, but it doesn’t use DDR5 SODIMM RAM, but a new form factor for DDR5: LPCAMM2. There’s only one module in the Gen 7, so upgrading from 16 GB of RAM to 32 GB of RAM means replacing instead of adding more. In addition, buying 32 GB of RAM today is prohibitively expensive and it’s still hard to even find LPCAMM2 modules on the market. So I’d rather buy a T14 Gen 6 right now at about the same price I paid for my T14 Gen 4 two years ago, and get two DDR5 RAM slots that I can use with the DDR5 RAM I already have.
A Pixel 10 instead of waiting
Equally, it’s likely that I will need a new phone in the next couple of months. So instead of waiting until then, I decided to buy a Pixel 10 now and put GrapheneOS on it. The Pixel 11 has been released a few weeks ago, so Pixel 10’s are now on sale for half the price of a Pixel 11 with pretty much the same specs. Also a no brainer.
What I don’t buy right now:
NVMEs and hard disks
Fortunately, I stocked up on NVMEs and hard disks before the current hardware crisis started, because it was ‘so cheap’ at the time. Little did I know how expensive these things would become. Long story short, I have enough in stock to last me for a while, so I now have enough hardware in this domain that I can use slightly more creatively to make them last longer. Before, I would have probably bought just a few more instead of economizing for little extra benefit.
The Graphics Card Dilemma
And finally, it would be time for a new graphics card and simulation PC. My current one is around 4 years old and has an Nvidia RTX 3080. I would already have gone for a new system one year ago, and upgraded to an Nvidia RTX 5090. The performance improvement would have been significant. But frankly, at today’s prices, I am very much inclined to hold onto my 3080 for another 2 years or so, almost doubling the life-span of the system. Sure, I would have sold my old system if I had bought a new one, but at current prices, the delta is still to much for me to justify an upgrade.
And there we go, two interesting trends that in the end make me spend less than more in the mid-term, despite significantly increased hardware prices.
So how about you?