I was going through some paper work when I saw this old receipt:
IF you can’t read it clearly, it shows I bought two sticks of 8 Meg 60 ns RAM for $87.09 each in 1996.
An 8 Meg stick of RAM for 87.09. That’s $10.89 per Meg of RAM in 1996.
Today, according to www.pricewatch.com, a stick of 256 Meg of PC133 RAM costs $42. That’s $0.16 per Meg of RAM in 2001.
The cost of RAM in 2001 is 1.5% of the cost in 1996.
If we do the math and extrapolate the RAM cost per Meg out 5 more years, we see that RAM will cost $0.0025 per Meg.
That means that a Gigabyte of RAM should cost $2.50 in 2006.
I figure that people are willing to spend about $50 on RAM for their computer. R33t hardware dewds (like me) willspend much more, but the average person will spend $50.
In 2006, $50 should buy you 20 Gigs of RAM. It boggles the mind…
your mathematics are exquisite, though there’s a flaw in your thought process. A gigabyte of ram won’t cost $2.50 anytime soon simply because the raw materials and labor required to make such a module would exceed $2.50. You’ll never see factory fresh ram priced that low. You might buy it secondhand or refurbished, for what the seller things it’s worth. But the MSRP will never be that low. And by the time people are selling it for that much, it will have been obsolete and completely worthless anyway.