Lenovo Warns High Memory Prices are Likely the 'New Normal' and Might 'Never' Return to Normal - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 01 July 2026 / 13,332 Views
The shortages and high demand for memory and storage have caused a number of price increases in the video game hardware market. Lenovo has warned memory prices might never return to the prices before the current crisis.
Lenovo executive director Martin Hiegl at the ISC conference in Germany, via Computerbase, told attendees the DRAM and NAND prices will likely "never" return to their previous levels during early 2025. The higher prices could become the new normal moving into 2030 and possibly beyond.
Xbox is increasing the price for a third time since May 2025 in August with the cheapest model - Xbox Series S - going from $300 before any increases up to $500, while the Xbox Series X will hit $800.
Sony has increased the price of the PlayStation 5 multiple times as well with the Digital Edition going from $400 at launch up to $600 now, while the model with a disc drive has gone from $500 to $650. The PS5 Pro has increased from $700 to $900.
Nintendo is increasing the price of the Nintendo Switch 2 worldwide on September 1 from $450 to $500, while the price has already increased in Japan. The price of the Switch 1 increased in August 2025 with the Lite going from $200 to $230, the original model from $300 to $340, and the OLED from $350 to $400.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
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It's only a new normal if we buy them. If we don't, the new normal will quickly become the old normal.
We have about zero impact on memory prices, because memory prices are currently driven by data centers. The only thing we have impact on is whether we're willing to pay insane prices for hardware containing memory, and even those prices are probably largely affected by business device needs.
The data centers are also in a stronger position to negotiate better prices. Consumers like us are squabbling over the crumbs falling from the plates of the big boys.
Demand is going to drop because of these prices. -_-
Not for data centers, which seem to make up the bulk of the demand... But for everything else, definitely.
I hope you're right. I'm not gonna buy any new tech until prices drop.
What else are we supposed to do, blow up data centers?
unironically there have been people saying crazy sh*t like that too. No. There is nothing that you can do. I would at most go along with "don't support or sign up for anything subscription based to access ai/datacenters". Let them all go unused or make no profit.
Lenovo would say that to convince people to not wait with their purchase.....of Lenovo
That doesn't mean they will always stay at current levels. Just that they might not reach the same lows as before again.
We can still try. I'm not buying anymore modern tech until prices drop.
you will become a dinosaur them my friend
We'll see.
i do not see prices going down, but it would be nice to see
We gotta try.
The price per GB drops about 30% annually on average, historically speaking. If we are back to 2024 prices per GB by 2030 that could still count as "never recovered" even if technically speaking we're back to paying the same as before.
Micron goes from making 23% profit margins, to making over 87% profit margins... in like a year.... And we're just told "things will never return to normal" again? Wtf? The greed.
That's just the free market doing its thing, for better or worse. If production capacity increases, that will either slow down the price increases or even drop the prices, but last I heard, I got the impression that manufacturers aren't too eager to increase production capacity because they're not sure if the situation is going to go on for long or not. If they increase production capacity (a costly affair) and demand drops, they'll have increased production capacity for nothing. Until then, high demand allows them to raise the prices and maybe eventually increase production capacity as well.
I hate when these big companies try to convince me a bad situation is the "new normal". "Stop complaining and just purchase!". So disrespectful.
It's like they're blaming their own customers.
God we simply cannot stop winning am i right?
I am more than happy to completely give up modern gaming if prices never come down. PS6 will not come close to even hitting 50 million units sold at $1000 plus
At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if it's north of 1K.
Build up that retro collection. That's what I did. I have enough bunker-games, carts/discs and systems right now to last until the end of my life. I'm prepared lol
Same here!
A 1.000 dollar PS6 will not even hit 15 million, it will sell as well as the Wii U
Kepler_L2 says PS6 BOM is $960 (taken with a grain of salt). I have no idea if this guy is reliable.
Kepler_L2 is considered to be very accurate and reliable.
The Switch 2 is probably going to be my last console. I already have more games than I will ever play and see the ending credits for before you all start playing my ending credits.
I am just importing some Chinese companies SSD/Ram etc. They all are increasing production.
Are the Chinese ones as good as the usual parts?
Corsair have started using CMXT made ram, same prices as their other Micron/Hynix ram.
That good or bad?
Talking about quality yeah they are atleast good some would say extremely good but I am no expert in it. Just saw the last few months more people talking about it.
Also something I should point out:
Apple is lobbying the Trump administration to get its blessing to buy memory chips from CXMT, a blacklisted Chinese company.
For us it makes no difference, at the moment anyway. CMXT revenue has increased a lot, so I am guessing they are charging more or less the same as the other ram manufacturers.
So what else can we do about RAM and memory prices hikes besides not buy new tech?
Not buying tech at the moment is the only thing we as consumers can do and hope prices come down in the future.
The next generation of consoles need to be made cheaper.
If demand stays high, there will probably be production capacity increases, which in turn will drive down the prices sooner or later. I'd not sure if it's economically viable, but I wouldn't be entirely surprised to see memory consumers start producing their own memory if data centers keep the prices high for too long.
Why would they return to normal. Once that cat is out of the bag, it doesn’t go back in. Just look around at everything that shot up in price because of COVID. They never fell back.
I wanna punch Sam Altman in the face for kickstarting this bullshit.
Until China or other companies come to the playing field
Should be cheaper now that china has entered the market of manufacturing
Ok this article is embarrassing.
LENOVO IS NOT A CHIP MANUFACTURER.
THEY BUY CHIPS TO PUT IN COMPUTERS AND OTHER CONSUMER ELECTRONICS THEY ASSEMBLE.
Maybe just maybe if you decide that memory commodity prices is a topic you want to cover, you actually need to understand the basics of that topic and cover it intelligently. That would probably entail reporting on actual memory producers schedules for new fabs etc. Good places to start would be Chang Xin (CXMT) and Yangtze (YMTC), not to mention other smaller Chinese memory manufacturers scaling up now. Of course, Samsung, Hynix, and Micron are also expanding production capacity. Most people would say that active processs of production expansion are highly relevant if you want to discuss forecasts of pricing, but what do they know?
BTW, way more meaningful than this article would be Micron's announcement of 3-5 year contracts with major customers. Is that just being nice to favored customers, or is that a business decision based on belief that prices will not only rise, but will fall some time toward end of those contacts?
How about:
Low hardware sales are likely the "new normal" and might never return to normal
BS.
100% disagree and feel like that's just corporate talk to try to sell products with higher margins later on.
The AI rush is not sustainable, there won't be an ever lasting drive for it, it'll reach an oversaturation point because money is not infinite and there simply can't be as many billionaries without a vastly higher spending/working force.
Prices will come down a lot, the question is when, not if.
Sony and Microsoft are going to need to be willing to sell next-gen hardware at heavily subsidized levels like gen 7 then. PS6 and Project Helix are just not going to be able to build up a decent sized install base at $1000+. If they decide to release that high, selling at cost or profit levels, they are going to be lucky if they move like 30m PS6's and 10m Xbox Helix's the whole generation. Gaming is a luxury, not a necessity, plenty of people are going to be happy just sticking with older generations of consoles they already own, and a developers will be forced to keep supporting PS5 and Series X with games because the install bases on next gen will be too small to support next-gen exclusives anyway.
Xbox and Sony are going to need to be willing to sell their hardware at a $200 or more loss, subsidizing it with their 30% cut of all digital games sold on the platform, as well as accessories that sell at profit (Sony and Microsoft make like $30 on each extra controller sold for instance, and even more than that on official headsets and most other official accessories). They also need to use 1 TB drives on their base models to cut SSD costs as much as possible, which means they need new compression algorithms so that game sizes don't increase any higher than this gen even though they have higher resolution textures and such than current gen games.
Given how much both companies have poured into their game divisions with questionable gains, I doubt that their stockholders are going to stomach heavily subsidized hardware. Even Microsoft, a multi-trillion dollar company, isn't willing to subsidize gaming hardware after they spent $100bn on acquisitions. Their investors want to see profits from the Xbox division.
At this point it's looking like either they subsidize, or their $1000 or more consoles sell so few units that their install bases are too small to even support next gen exclusives, let alone console exclusives. If you look at previous generations, the combined next gen install base of Xbox and Playstation needed before most 3rd party devs drop cross-gen releases and move next gen only is like 50-60m, I just don't see PS6 and Project Helix selling at $1000, even combined, moving 50m units until at least4 or 5 years after both have released.
In theory early gen sales at $1000 should be less than half the early gen sales at $500 for PS5 and Series X, it's just too high a number in this economy.
Manufacturing costs of PS6 seems around 1000$.
https://wccftech.com/ps6-bom-nears-1000-delay-unlikely/
Makes sense, the main cost drivers right now are RAM and SSD, the specs that leaked for base PS6 are 32 GB of GDDR7 RAM and a 2 TB SSD, each double that of the PS5. Assuming they are going though with those specs instead of lowering to like 24 GB of RAM and a smaller SSD, the manufacturing and shipping price should indeed be around $1000. So now we will see if Sony is willing to sell at a loss ($800-900), at cost ($1000), or at a profit ($1100). Hopefully at a loss, subsidizing their hardware losses with their 30% cut of all game sales and accessory profits.
Utter nonsense. Nothing about the sky high ram prices is sustainable. Not the ai driven data center bubble, nor the expected amount of disposable income for the consumer to fork over just to keep up with the tech they already have. Next to no one's wages are increasing at the same rate.
Gaming especially is ill suited to survive this if only because most gamers are aging AND have a massive backlog of nostalgic AND new experiences
This is effectively a factor that can cause a crash for gaming as its impact on pricing will cause a severe contraction in sales in the very long run.
The Switch Lite prices are wrong. It's $200 and $230.
There was a price hike in August last year in NA, no?
This doesn't make sense. The components haven't gotten more expensive to produce, it's just a demand shock. So with higher profit margins there should be a massive expansion of production to meet the new demand.
Is there something that stops a rapid expansion of production? Surely new entrants can produce these products within a few years and current producers can expand production even faster.
What is the constraint here?
Much of Chinese industry is sanctioned one way or another by US (and 2nd rate Epstein Class memberes in EU), but nonetheless they are aiming to scale up production immensely in next years, led by Chang Xin and Yangtze Memory.
Classic self-interested positioning. Only the Sith deal in absolutes.
Lenovo isn't a chip manufacturer, they BUY chips and high chip prices destroy their own business.
You are correct! And it seems that even their Parent company has no pieces whatsoever in the chip game. Tough times ahead for them, it seems.
Then prehaps they should stop investing in AI?
Well just the sacrifice we must make to support a technology that only benefits a small sliver of the population and fucks over everyone else.
Playstation and Xbox choose a bad time to go back to exclusives. At these prices even if your exclusives are good you're not selling systems at $600+. You have a lot of people saying they want to play Wolverine or Gear E Day, but they don't want to buy these consoles. A lot of gamers want these companies to keep exclusives but I don't think they realize the price they have to pay to play them.
If we just keep using current gen specs for like 10 years, it will be cheap eventually.
I'll tell you what... I'm shopping for a new laptop for business use. I generally can get a long life out of my laptops because I'll add RAM down the line, and I don't use them for significant gaming, so the software typically won't outgrow the tech for at least several years. My current laptop is a decade old, and still mostly suitable for my use, after having made two ram upgrades (started with 6 GB, went to 12 GB, then to 16 GB).
The problem is that most new laptops that are reasonably portable do not have removable/ replaceable ram. So I'll need to buy something with an amount of ram that seems like overkill right now, if I want to get several years out of the device. That basically means 64 GB. And that pushes me into machines well over $2,000. And these aren't machines with a dedicated graphics card. We're talking about middle of the road business laptops, just with a little more than average ram.
The silver lining here is that now for just a couple hundred extra dollars, I can move into a pretty capable gaming machine. So I may do that. The only downside there is that I'll have to forgo some of the portability and battery life. So we'll see.
Anyway, this is a really long way of saying that RAM now accounts for a huge portion of the price of computers and related tech. It has really changed the equation, and is causing me, and likely others, to shop differently.
