memory why?

computerwoman

ok you guys,
maybe someone can help with this,
why has memory got so cheap,
why is DDR2 cheaper than DDR memory,
what have I missed,
I seem to remember some 2-3 years ago when I was building my first computer that memory DDR was quite expensive, I paid about £115 for 1 gb of DDR ram from ebuyer,
yet I find to my amazement that this is now more expensive than DDR2 ram,
I can get 1gb of DDR2 ram (kingston) which is a good make for as little as £37 yet 1 gb of DDR ram is £60 why is this,
whay have I missed in the techi world,
any advice would be great,
cw

superscaper

RAM memory is so prolific that in world trade terms it is a commodity and with all commodities prices can fluctuate a lot and frequently. It will end up being dependant on manufacturing costs, supply and demand. A typical product will be purely cost to manufacture + profit margin but commodities are much more difficult to predict with all the extra variables, if you could predict it with any kind of accuracy then I'm sure you could become a billionaire on the stock market. There won't be a single reason DDR is more expensive at the moment than DDR2 but a combination of reasons from manufacturing changeover to DDR2 and costing more to manufacture a more legacy technology in combination with a larger demand from individuals for DDR compared to system builders demand for DDR2 creating a sellers market for DDR rather than a buyers.

superscaper

Obviously in these cases better doesn't necessarily mean more expensive.

superscaper

I wrote the earlier posts from my memory and my own observations but looks like wiki has good article on commodities (and it lists RAM as a modern commodity, phew luckily I was right after all and I learned something from my business lectures ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity

Little_John

Another thing that makes the older stuff more expensive is that they stop makinging it in the quantities they used to as people now want to buy the newer better stuff. The old stuff is likley to be old stock and they are selling it at the price they paid for it back when it was current/new.

You are lucky when I built my first PC memory cost £30 per mb