Hardware Memes

Remember when building a cross-platform desktop app seemed like a good idea? Just wrap an entire Chromium browser around your glorified calculator app, they said. It'll be fine, they said. Now every todo list app on your machine is basically running its own copy of Chrome, each one hogging more RAM than your entire OS did in 2010. Your 32GB of RAM? Gone. Your fans spinning up for a chat app? Normal. Your CPU crying because you opened Slack, VS Code, Discord, and Spotify at the same time? Just another Tuesday. The real kicker? RAM prices are skyrocketing because everyone's buying GPUs for AI training, so now you get to pay premium prices to run five instances of Chromium just to check your messages. What a time to be alive.

Electron apps: where your simple to-do list needs 800MB of RAM because why optimize when you can just ship an entire Chromium browser with it? The developer confidently explains their revolutionary idea while someone from a timeline where RAM actually costs money arrives to stop this madness. But modern devs don't care—memory is cheap and abundant, so let's just bundle V8, Node.js, and the kitchen sink for that calculator app. Meanwhile, embedded systems engineers are weeping in a corner with their 64KB constraints.

When you realize that selling one 16GB stick to buy two 16GB sticks still leaves you with... one 16GB stick. Galaxy brain financial planning right here. It's like robbing Peter to pay Paul, except Peter and Paul are both you, and you're still broke with half the RAM you started with. Mickey's got that look of someone who just discovered that dual-channel memory exists and now his single stick is running in peasant mode. The Kingston Fury Beast deserves better than this economic anxiety. At least Chrome will have 16GB less RAM to consume.

So you spent three weeks learning trigonometry, diving into DDA algorithms, and debugging why your walls look like a Salvador Dalí painting, only to realize John Carmack did this in 1992 on hardware that had less computing power than your smart toaster. And he did it while probably eating pizza and writing assembly like it was a casual Tuesday. The "box of triangles" bit hits different when you realize modern game engines abstract all this pain away with their fancy rendering pipelines, but back then? Carmack was literally casting rays and doing trigonometric calculations per pixel to fake 3D in Wolfenstein 3D. No GPU acceleration, no Unity, no "just import Three.js"—just raw math and the will to make demons shootable. Meanwhile, you're here in 2024 with Stack Overflow, ChatGPT, and 64GB of RAM, still struggling to get your raycaster to not crash when you look at a corner. Humbling stuff.

That moment when you're upgrading your RAM and spot that little blue sticker on your Crucial memory stick that says "Removal will void warranty" already attached to your motherboard. You stand there contemplating your life choices like you're witnessing the end of the world. Do you proceed with the removal and lose the warranty forever? Do you just... leave it there and buy another stick? The existential dread is real. It's like the hardware gods are testing your commitment to that extra 16GB. The apocalyptic vibes are spot-on because once you peel that sticker, there's no going back. Your warranty is now as dead as that kernel you accidentally nuked last week.

PC gamers getting absolutely demolished from every possible angle. Bitcoin miners drove GPU prices to the moon, AI training suddenly needs every RTX card ever manufactured, and Micron casually dipped out of the consumer market. Meanwhile NVIDIA's just standing there watching the chaos unfold, probably calculating profit margins. And then there's "Poor Optimization" - the real villain nobody wants to talk about. Your dream PC getting absolutely kicked in the teeth because some AAA studio decided 8GB VRAM should be the minimum for their unoptimized mess. You can't even upgrade your way out of bad code. The GPU shortage era was wild. People were camping Newegg like it was a Supreme drop, paying scalper prices that would make a loan shark blush, all while game devs kept pushing "recommended specs" higher. Fun times.

Black Friday "deals" on RAM prices are basically just retailers putting on clown makeup. You watch the same DDR5 kit climb from $134k to $156k over the weeks leading up to Black Friday, then they slap a "MEGA SALE" sticker on it at $629k and expect you to be grateful. It's like they're not even trying anymore—just straight up insulting your intelligence while you're standing there with your wallet out like William Wallace ready to charge into financial ruin for some memory sticks. The pricing strategy is so transparent it hurts. They're literally training us to wait for "sales" that cost 4x more than the regular price. Peak capitalism meets peak absurdity.

So AI already brutally murdered RAM and is currently swinging at RAM's poor cousin (Crucial brand, nice touch). But wait—there's still one more door to kick down: the GPU. And honestly? GPU manufacturers are probably sweating right now because AI's appetite for VRAM is absolutely insatiable . First, AI workloads ate all your RAM for breakfast with massive language models and training datasets. Then they came for your storage with multi-terabyte model checkpoints. Now they're eyeing your GPU like it's the final boss in a horror game, except the boss always wins. Your RTX 4090? Cute. AI needs a server farm with 8x H100s just to load the model weights. The real kicker? While gamers are out here celebrating their 24GB VRAM cards, AI researchers are like "yeah that'll hold my model's attention layer... for one token." The GPU shortage wasn't a crypto thing—it was a preview of coming attractions.

Nothing says "tech industry" quite like watching the same economic disasters play out on repeat. RAM prices spiking 80% in 2021? Check. RAM prices spiking again in 2025? Check. It's like the hardware manufacturers have a playbook and they're not even trying to hide it anymore. The guy flipping through his calendar to find the last time this happened is all of us trying to figure out if we're living in a time loop or if the industry just has zero originality. Spoiler: it's both. Supply chain issues, factory fires, "market conditions"—the excuses change but the price gouging stays the same. Pro tip: if you ever need to predict the future of hardware prices, just look at what happened 4 years ago. It's basically astrology but with more DDR5.

Ah yes, the classic "I bought hardware at literally the worst possible time" experience. Crucial (the RAM manufacturer) getting absolutely obliterated while the guy who bought RAM in September 2025 watches in horror. Because nothing says "excellent timing" like purchasing components right before they either drop in price by 60%, get discontinued, or the entire market implodes. The real kicker? You know this person was probably thinking "finally, RAM prices are reasonable" before clicking that buy button. Spoiler alert: they weren't. They never are when you need them.

So Micron just ditched the consumer RAM market to chase AI money, and somewhere in Valve HQ, Gabe Newell is nervously sweating because they just announced the Steam Machine reboot for 2026. You know, that living room PC console thing that flopped harder than a null pointer exception back in 2015? The timing couldn't be worse. RAM prices are about to skyrocket because everyone and their grandma is building AI datacenters, and Valve just committed to shipping hardware that needs... you guessed it... memory. It's like announcing a new car model right as the world runs out of tires. The dog sitting in the burning room perfectly captures Valve's situation - they're watching the memory market implode while pretending everything's fine with their Steam Machine 2.0 plans. Someone's getting fired, or at least they would if Valve had a traditional management structure.

Your ancient GTX 1080 Ti looking at you like a war veteran who's been asked to do one more tour of duty. GPU prices went nuclear and suddenly that 7-year-old card you were planning to retire is now your most valuable asset. The correction from "GPU" to "RAM" is chef's kiss—because yeah, you're not upgrading anything else either. That graphics card has rendered more frames than it ever signed up for, and now it's being held together by thermal paste and prayers. It's seen things. Terrible things. Like your Blender projects.