Neither the car nor the house, the new indicator that someone is good pasta is the RAM memory that you have available. The RAM crisis is extremea price increase planned for 2026 that will hit the entire industry. Such is the seriousness of the matterthere are already those who predict that the manufacturers of telephones are considering returning to figures of the past: the 4 GB of unified RAM for smartphones of the next year.
Samsung has doubled the price of DDR5 RAM after running out of stock, a movement that completely threatens the entire smartphone industry. And no, RAM is not just an element to ensure the fluidity of the mobile phone and efficient multitasking: RAM is a pillar on which the advancement of technology itself depends.
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The rise in prices. In just six months, RAM prices have skyrocketed between 100% and 400%. Giants like Samsung and SK Hynix are allocating around 40% of its resources to supply RAM to Stargatethe OpenAI infrastructure. Consequence: the RAM market has entered a valley of scarcity.
The 4 GB of RAM. There are clear pillars for not recommending a phone even to my worst enemy:
- That it does not have good update support.
- That has a processor that can’t handle basic apps.
- That has less than 6 GB of RAM
There are already those who predict that 4 GB of RAM will return in 2026a significant leap back even for entry-level devices, where 6GB of RAM was starting to become the standard.
What they didn’t tell you about RAM. Advances in RAM go far beyond basic performance in multitasking and everyday apps. RAM memory is one of the vital organs of any smartphone, and the advances in it are what have allowed us, today, to have smartphones that are much more capable than those of years ago.
- Local AI processing– Without sufficient RAM, it is not possible to run local AI models. He iPhone 15 is the best example.
- Photographic quality: functions such as processing HDRcomputational zoom, and even the processing of the photograph itself (subsequently processed RAW data) depend largely on the mobile phone’s ability to move all that data in RAM. Exactly the same applies to video recording.
- Multi-window and multitasking: Multitasking is not just about not having a heavy game crash while you browse in Chrome. It’s that Google Maps can run in the background without slowing down your phone, that YouTube can run in mode PiP (window), that your keyboard is capable of managing translations and corrections in real time in any heavy app, etc.
- Gaming experience: We usually focus on CPU and GPU when thinking about a mobile phone capable of running a heavy game, but RAM is essential to avoid microcuts, speed up loading times despite having open apps, and ensure that the game will not close in the middle of a game.
The consequences. We have been complaining for the last few years that there is hardly any real progress in smartphones and that, perhaps, we are close to their peak. But there are nuances in this interpretation. We have never had humble mobile phones with AI implementation, the ability to move triple A games on budget devicesand such a positive experience in practically any product range.
The RAM crisis is a major brake on the advancement of upcoming proposals, and may make it more than likely that some 2026 phones will end up performing worse than their predecessors.
There is no solution in sight. DDR5 RAM, although it has been on the market since SK Hynix released it in 2020is not common in entry-level proposals. DDR4 RAM is still the standard here and, unfortunately, so is its price. has been increasing by close to 200% in recent months.
More expensive RAM, more expensive mobile phones or mobile phones with less RAM.
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