RAM prices soar, but popular Windows 11 apps are using more RAM due to Electron, Web components
- Windows Latest discovered Discord and other Chromium and Electron-based applications with high RAM usage
- RAM usage spikes from 1GB to 4GB on Discord both in and out of voice chat
https://www.windowslatest.com/2025/12/07/ram-prices-soar-but-popular-windows-11-apps-are-using-more-ram-due-to-electron-web-components/Open linkView original on lemmy.nz761
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If there's any silver lining to this, perhaps we can get a renewed interest in efficient open-source software designed to work well on older hardware, and less e-waste.
Morgan Freeman: ”They couldn’t”
I wish we could, but it’s tough to maintain optimism in the face of these sociopathic corporations’ seemingly ever-growing power
Open source developers are just like you and me. They'll get fed up with the bullshit and start developing things they need with the resources they have, just like they've always done.
It's always been there, why is there so many great Open Source Software out there ? Even Linus started the linux kernel because he could not afford Unix.
If there’s any silver lining to this, fuck JavaScript, fuck JavaScript wrappers and fuck all people picked JavaScript for the programming language of anything cross-platform.
It’s unbelievable I would need 6 gbs of RAM to say a simple “hello” to my friends. It used to take 300kb with IRC.
that has very little to do with JavaScript though 🤷♂️
Maybe not Javascript as a language, but the framework it requires to get applications written with it running, which is a lot. And in a roundabout way, it kinda has a little to do with the language itself, as the reason electron got so popular in the first place is because it catered to web developers who either couldn't be bothered or couldn't figure out proper desktop app devlopment, so they went with the easy short-term path. And Javascript kinda is an easy language to pick up and write simple.projects in - now, maintaining more complex applications with it is another story.,.
It has less to do with JavaScript as most people tend to think IMO. JavaScript does not require Electron to exist, it's rather the other way around. The fact that Electron ships a whole browser is the culprit and you could even argue that V8 is bloated as well, though I'm not sure how efficient it is built and how much size it takes. Browsers historically need to support so much legacy stuff which is another main factor for its size. I really hope for stuff like Tauri or Servo to gain traction.
Not really, no. It's very compact compared to Python, Java or most anything in the same league. A compiled program would be smaller, of course, and Lua is minuscule next to anything — but otherwise V8 is small and fast. Iirc Node.js takes something like 30 MB out of the box, including its modules and libraries.
Even Electron apps aren't necessarily ram hoarders: Stretchly, which is a break reminder and thus needs to always run in the background, takes something like 20 or 40 MB of memory.
I’d love to see games do this because they are clearly not being optimized. Can’t wait to see that not happen.
Good thing, I’m happy with retro games and the occasional indie.
3/5 of the way through 100% Final Fantasy II. Figure by the time I catch up to modern final fantasy either hardware will be better again or people will optimize again. Either way I got time
US 2 or JP 2?
US 2 is so good, but the late game seeed to have a difficulty spike so I never finished it.
I'm doing the pixel remasters which I think are based more on original JP. I know some purists look down on them but I think overall they're a solid version.
I haven’t played them myself, but I think they look cool.
If someone wants to be a purist, let them get an original system and a crt. Otherwise, they can just shut up about.
Why would you do that when you can pull 50 JavaScript libraries and wrap it in Electron?
That'll be 800€ and all change you own.
"It sounds like you want low-end devices to be turned into thin clients for cloud-based operating systems. Do I have that right?"
Why spend time making better software when the end user can just buy better hardware!
That's been the thinking for the last couple of decades at least. But it can't continue if people can't afford new hardware.
Hardware doesnt need to get more powerful either. If we actually harnessed it, we have what we need already.
That just opens the market for subscription hardware. You will own nothing and you will be happy.
there are a shit ton alternatives. Too bad there are more average developers
Yes, it runs a separate browser instance for each electron program. Many of the programs that use it could just be a PWA instead.
This is what bothers me so much... Browsers should be improving their PWA implementation (looking at you, Firefox) and electron apps should be PWAs more often. Another decent middle ground Is Tauri. SilverBullet and Yaak are both so much lighter and better than anything else on my system.
Yeah but companies want full control and no ad blockers. That’s why they’re pushing shoddy Electron apps over their web experiences and PWAs.
I wonder how much exact duplication each process has?
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/mm/ksm.html
One imagines that one could maybe make a library interposer to induce use of that.
I guess the key is it has to be the same version of electron in the back end. If they change too much of it then how much memory can be shared?
I tried the PWA route with Discord. It wouldn't stay logged in, and acted generally janky. That said, I do PWA with any app that's Electron, at least to try and avoid the RAM bloat.
Or, even better, let’s start developing for separate platforms again, and optimise software for the platform that’s going to be running it. Rather than just developing everything for Chrome.
maybe a toggle to choose between "take some extra RAM, I'm feeling generous" and "fuck you, I'm computing shit over here" could be used to let the app know your current mood / needs ...
Memory hogging browsers usually do release memory when pressured. You can take it further by getting extensions that unload unused tabs.
The problem is electron apps that load the whole browser core over and over.
Miss times when 4 gigs of ram was more than enough for browsing and playing game at the sane time
It still is if you're willing to jump through enough hoops
cries in 8gb RAM
The proliferation of electron programs is what happens when you have a decade of annoying idiots saying "unused memory is wasted memory," hand-in-hand with lazy developers or unscrupulous managers who are externalizing their development costs onto everybody else by writing inefficient programs that waste more and more of our compute and RAM, which necessitates the rest of us having to buy even better hardware to keep up.
The original intent of this saying was different, but ya it's been co-opted into something else
So what was the original saying? As I see it, this phrase is wrong no matter how you look at it. Because all ram is used at all times, for example if you have 32GB of free ram, the kernel will use all of it as a page cache to speed up the file system. The more free ram you have the more files can be cached, avoiding access to the disk when you read them.
Seems like you understand the original meaning already.
I normally reply with a tux penguin but, is it really a Windows problem if the it's the apps that aren't optimized for shit?
Indeed, and Electron is not specific to Windows
Yep. My 64 gigs of RAM died in my old setup a few weeks ago, and instead of paying out the ass for replacement DDR4 RAM, I decided to pay out the ass for DDR5 RAM and upgrade while I was at it. Only did 32 gigs, because I really wasn't using most of my 64 gigs (I thought). A few days ago, I ended up having to set up a swap file because a Rust project I was working on kept crashing VSCode while it was running the analyzer. What are we doing here.
Windows itself is inherently unoptimized these days with its AI search powered start menu and settings pages that are actually electron web apps. Linux uses 3+ less gb of RAM on just desktop after I switched. So really it's a both problem. Both windows and the programs need a rethink
I wouldn't mind them all using HTML for UI if they'd learn to share the same one, and only load it when they need to show me something.
No, Razer, your "mouse driver" does not need to load Chrome at all times, when I'll only ever look at it once.
It's funny; on Linux such devices work perfectly but many users complain that they "aren't supported" because there's no UI (that sits uselessly in your notification area and eats memory).
I guess the prices give us a new kind of issue ticket template; "new RAM is too expensive for me, please consider optimizing"
Less abstract, more concrete than "take less of a share please"
Electron should be a system dependency entirely so that every single app doesn't have to be individually updated whenever there's a chromium CVE which seems to be weekly.
We kinda have that already
Some frameworks/standard libs do support that, making use of OS webrendering capabilities.
For example MAUI WebView
I remember how the combination of Internet mass distribution of file data and the blossoming gray market for file-share applications really super-charged the technology of file compression.
I wonder if we'll see skyrocketing RAM prices put economic pressure on the system bloat rampant through modern OSes.
Isn't the bloat basically being coded by the same ai that's eating up the ram to begin with?
I mean, ymmv. The historical flood of cheap memory has changed developer practices. We used to code around keeping the bulk of our data on the hard drive and only use RAM for active calculations. We even used to lean on "virtual memory" on the disk, caching calculations and scrubbing them over and over again, in order to simulate more memory than we had on stick. SSDs changed that math considerably. We got a bunch of very high efficiency disk space at a significant mark up. But we used the same technology in our RAM. So there was a point at which one might have nearly as much RAM as ROM (had a friend with 1 GB of RAM on the same device that only had a 2 GB hard drive). The incentives were totally flipped.
I would argue that the low-cost, high-efficiency RAM induced the system bloat, as applications could run very quickly even on a fraction of available system memory. Meanwhile, applications that were RAM hogs appeared to run very quickly compared to applications that needed to constantly read off the disk.
Internet applications added to the incentive to bloat RAM, as you could cram an entire application onto a website and just let it live in memory until the user closed the browser. Cloud storage played the same trick. Developers were increasingly inclined to ignore the disk entirely. Why bother? Everything was hosted on a remote server, lots of the data was pre-processed on the business side, and then you were just serving the results to an HTML/Javascript GUI on the browser.
Now it seems like tech companies are trying to get the entire computer interface to be a dumb terminal to the remote data center. Our migration to phones and pads and away from laptops and desktops illustrates as much. I wouldn't be surprised if someone finally makes consumer facing dumb-terminals a thing again - something we haven't really experienced since the dawn of personal computers in the 1980s.
But TL; DR; I'd be more inclined to blame "bloat" on internet web browsers and low cost memory post '00s than on AI written-code.
I would argue that the low-cost, high-efficiency RAM induced the system bloat, as applications could run very quickly even on a fraction of available system memory. Meanwhile, applications that were RAM hogs appeared to run very quickly compared to applications that needed to constantly read off the disk.
Internet applications added to the incentive to bloat RAM, as you could cram an entire application onto a website and just let it live in memory until the user closed the browser. Cloud storage played the same trick. Developers were increasingly inclined to ignore the disk entirely. Why bother? Everything was hosted on a remote server, lots of the data was pre-processed on the business side, and then you were just serving the results to an HTML/Javascript GUI on the browser.
Now it seems like tech companies are trying to get the entire computer interface to be a dumb terminal to the remote data center. Our migration to phones and pads and away from laptops and desktops illustrates as much. I wouldn't be surprised if someone finally makes consumer facing dumb-terminals a thing again - something we haven't really experienced since the dawn of personal computers in the 1980s.
It is definitely coming and fast. This was always Microsoft’s plan for an internet only windows/office platform. Onedrive and 365 is basically that implementation now that we have widespread high speed internet.
And with the amount of SaaS apps the only thing you need on a local machine is some configuration files and maybe a downloads folder.
Look at the new Nintendo Switch cartridges as an example. They don’t contain the game, just a license key. The install is all done over the internet.
Tauri is the way to go ; so that every app doesn't each embed another web browser that makes for 90% of the file size.
Is the Rust backend mandatory?
In Tauri, the rust backend is the glue between web/js and OS functions. Yet you don't need to do any rust code, it's delivered ready.
If your app interfaces with the OS, like most apps would (reading a file, managing the window, etc), then you would be writing rust, no?
Let's say you are a webdeveloper trying to package your js app into a executable.
Tauri makes it so that it embeds your js into a rust base, and if you need to interact with the os, you have a Tauri JS API which calls predefined rust functions embedded in the executable.
You can literally never write rust code while using tauri.
But they givr you the choice, since rust is faster than compiled js, you also can create rust functions which you then call from your js code.
Cool, thank you for the knowledge!
Of course all must rust, return to the oxide!
Tauri doesn't automatically make apps perform good. Easy and common pitfalls still can make it go to a crawl just like electron.
Yaak is an example of a tauri app that performs horribly, and that can't reach a satisfactory 30fps on modern hardware. The issue is within how tauri interacts with the js world and syncs state.
It's because people want cross-platform apps and web is the easiest way to do it. Yes, you have Flutter, KML or Qt but those are often hard to work with (looking at you, Flutter) or it's difficult to find devs that can work with them. You choose web (JS/wasm) and you have plenty of devs familiar with the tools and you can support all the platform easily. I'm using Tauri for my personal projects because it's fun and easy. I could use Qt but I don't want to work with C++ or Python, at least not in my spare time. If anyone can recommend me a nice framework supporting Linux and Android and using modern language I might switch. I haven't found one.
Just use the website then? There already is a suitable browser installed on every system. But no, must have apps. Makes it easier to stop people from having opinions about data collection and such. And the full browser stack needs to be fully reproduced each time. It gets really ridiculous when these apps sit idly in the notification area. Not to speak of security implications because electron apps and such usually don't get timely updates.
It is a good solution for some apps but if you need to store data locally, use push notifications, run something in the background or access any native APIs you have to go with a native app.
All major browsers can do this - with the exception of running something in the background I guess. But that is exactly the sort of usage scenario where an Electron app is the worst choice. Coding a separate utility with no GUI would be the sane thing to do here, not put whole browser stacks into memory.
Pretty sure PWAs can run in the background.
You're actually right, by now browsers have APIs to do most of the things apps do. Technically you could convert most apps to websites. I guess as a user I just don't want all my apps to open a tab in my browser. I want to move apps between virtual desktops and monitors independently and I don't want my app's window to be clattered by all the menus from my browser. On mobile I also prefer switching between apps than between different tabs. For me the best compromise is:
All this is already possible with most browsers.
Do you know any websites that integrate into Linux desktop and Android like native apps? I mean I can run it from cmd/icon, and it opens as new window without any decorations? I never saw it but if it's works fine it's an interesting option.
Those are called Progressive Web Apps (PWA). You can use firefox to add the website to your desktop like this: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web_apps/Guides/Installing
Once you do, when you open the app it should have just the website without the tabs and everything else firefox does.
WebBluetooth, WebUSB, WebSerial and the File System Access API aren't universally available in Browsers for example.
Tauri would be a lesser evil compared to electron, but that then involves libwebkitgtk.
It's because there is no such thing as optimisation anymore. Websites are bloated to the gills with terrible animations and tracking scripts.
Programs. They are called programs . We are talking about desktop machines, not mobile devices
I have been really enjoying working with Avalonia, it is a .NET library that works across windows, Linux, and Mac and allows you to use C# for desktop app development on those environments. Its what MAUI should have been.
Yeah I just can't stop getting ragebaited by the Electron hate. All Electron haters are free to develop their own efficient, pleasant looking, cross-platform native app instead since it's so easy
Limitation breeds innovation
Just another AI agent bro, that will fix th
Like a rust based alternative to VSCode
https://zed.dev/
VSCode history is so messed up. Microsoft buys github and stops production of github team's IDE, then uses the framework developed for that IDE to make VSCode.
Fucking 1600s colonizer behavior.
No thanks. Any software that has AI integration as one of its main selling points is shitware imo.
Entirely optional, it's marketing, hate the game not the player
Lol, this is news? Where have they been the last 15 years?
In other news, the sky is blue.
Yeah, the RAM shortage is definitely to blame on Electron. Won't someone please think of the poor AI companies who have to give an arm and a leg to get a single stick of RAM!
I wouldn't mind so much if they were giving their own arms and legs, but they seem to be giving ours.
If you have a better way of generating videos of absurdly obese Olympic divers doing the bomb from a crane, I'd love to hear it.
Tbf isn't AI mainly used to code electron apps by shitty companies?
And here I am resurrecting Dell laptops from 2010 with 1.5gb DDR RAM and Debian
I remember when they changed the backronym for Emacs from "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping" to Eighty. Megabytes. Or when a Netscape developer was proud to overtake that memory use.
What's the point of more RAM and faster processors if we just make applications that much less efficient?
"unused ram is wasted ram"
yeah yeah yeah, great. but all you motherfuckers did that and i'm fucking out of ram.
I want to run more than 1 process thanks. So fuck off with you trying to eat 3GB to render a bit of text.
This phrase is just plain wrong. Unused ram is used for the page cache by the kernel. You must always have some ram free or else the whole system will not operate without a page cache. Larger page cache allows to cache more files from the file system.
Native apps are so much better, on every platform.
The JavaScript must flow….
Traditions… Simple: download more ram
They only have DDR4 :/
Just for reference: My Current cpu (5700x3d) has more cache than my windows 98 computer had ram. And win98 wasn’t that bad.
It is amazing how bloated software has gotten. Used to be, your computer's OS fit on a floppy diskette.
cough Windows START MENU cough cough
And the Apollo was launched with 4KB of ram.
4kb of RAM and an office packed with hundreds of engineers using slide rules, sure.
They used Cloud Computation and AI ("Actually Interns") way before it was cool.
Meanwhile, on my Linux system I use about 20% of my ram idling around and it doesn't really budge. I've only got 16gb
I left windows just 2 months ago to use a MacBook for work.
In both computers I had 16gb of ram.
Windows usage was significantly higher in regard to ram usage.
I use today Linux is way more efficient, but after seeing similar efficiency with Mac, I’m changing my language to say Windows is extremely inefficient.
I brought a laptop from 2003 back from the stone ages. It runs surprisingly well, is up to date, and only really struggles with web stuff because of the state of things.
Antix linux running on 2GB ram, Pentium m 1.4GHz, and an SSD in an IDE enclosure. Uses about 200mb of ram. As far as being functional, the screen is small and low res, and it doesn't do these newfangled video formats. But if you consider 90% of my work life is in spreadsheets and documents and low resource applications, it really could be just fine. I'm not saying I would enjoy it if it was all I had to use, but I could if I needed to.
Join Linux, ditches windows
I'm using Linux on all my pc. The ram problems exist here too. Firefox is taking the most, the slack app is taking a big chunk too. Linux is not exempt from badly written code, it's everywhere and nobody seems to care about optimizing their code's memory usage anymore.
Sometimes it is even worse, as some apps get native clients on mac/windows but for linux, the webapp packaged as electron is “good enough”
Hardware keeps getting kore powerful but programs aren’t really doing anything more for us. Games look pretty much the same at anything but the highest settings and a browser does the same shit it did ten years ago, but with all this hardware the devopers stopped giving a shit. “Who cares if it’s good for a 2070, a handful of 5090s exist!”
I would be interested in seeing how you have it set up that firefox or linux are using any substantial amount of ram. That wouldn't have anything to do with 'badly written code'.
Well I mean linux has electron apps too
Correct! The difference is the OS.
Windows is a ram hog. Using 4GB or more just to exist. Linux uses 1-2GB, sometimes less.
Microsoft FORCES electron web components.
Linux has choice.
So yes, linux has electron as well, but Linux is a lot lighter and nowhere near a hog like windows.
I will once Nvidia gets off their asses and properly implements support for the Nvidia App in Linux. I've tried the alternative control panels for Nvidia GPUs. They suck.
Don't remind me, I am high on copium right now. I can't even play any of my steam games, but I have my Miyoo Mini+, so I'm surviving haha
This is a trade off. Many of these apps work on osx and Linux because they are browser-based. If they go back to native apps you lose that portability.
There are plenty of cross platform frameworks and libraries that don't involve web tech
There are, but few of them also work on the web as an alternative to the desktop. Writing one shitty web app and offering Electron wrapped versions of it gets you a webapp, a Windows app, a Linux app and a MacOS app. And you already have web devs on the team because everyone does.
I hate that you are right. Giving up electron would likely mean less Linux and mac compatibility. It's a shame, but it's likely true.
For commercial software, definitely. It'd be web and MAYBE Windows unless there's a Qt nerd spearheading the project or something.
FOSS is actually better off here IMO, since it's done by people as passion projects, so there's no need to pinch pennies by eliminating target platforms. HOWEVER there'd also be more need for the devs to have different platforms to test on.
There is also the advantage of an army of web devs who can build somewhat functional software for the desktop day one.
We were laughing at Java back in the days. Now they use JS instead...
electron was a steaming pile of shit 8 years ago. still is. what's changed?
our acceptance of shitty corporate software.
Electron is fine for what it does. It's just that every problem was turned into a nail and Electron is the hammer.
https://releases.electronjs.org/release?channel=stable
Thank Google for those cool products.
Electron was originally developed by GitHub for a text editor called Atom.
And it always used Chromium under the hood.
what's google got to do with it? this is an article about a product develeped at GitHub (now a microsoft subsidiary) causing problems with Windows and the thumbnail is showing produts from the following companies:
like. look. i hate google. they partner with israel to conduct genocide (don't use waze, btw, or better yet, don't use any google products). but this seems like not looking at the whole of how evil all of big tech is just to focus on how evil one company in big tech is
CoMaps is a good alternative to Waze. If you think it isnt make an OSM account and help make it a good alternative :p
CoMaps is GOATed. i need to make some edits in my neighborhood
The article mentions Chrome/Chromium: 9 times
The article mentions Google: 0 times
Google made Chrome. Chrome had that multi-process architecture at its core which allowed to consume as much memory as needed even on 32-bit OS. Chromium was always inside it and open source. Then they created CEF, which allowed webdevs to build "real" apps, and that opened the floodgates. Electron was first built on it but they wanted to include Node and couldn't because it required too much experience in actual coding. So they switched to Chromium. It didn't change much in the structure, just basically invited more webdevs to build more "real" apps (at 1.0 release Electron advertised hundreds of apps built with it on its website).
Google could do something about how the web engine works in frameworks (that don't need that much actual web functionality), but didn't. They invited webdevs to do anything they want. Webdevs didn't care about security because mighty Google would just publish new Chromium update eventually. They never realized they don't need more security in their local "real" apps gui that connect to their websites because there is not much room for security danger in such scenarios. They just always updated the underlying engine because why not. Chromium dll is now at 300 mb or something? All of that code is much needed by everyone, is it not?
So, for me the sequence was always seen as this:
Google (caring about webdevs, not OS) ->
Webdevs (not caring about native code and wanting to sell their startup websites by building apps) ->
Reckless web development becoming a norm for desktop apps ->
Corporations not seeing problems with the above (e.g. Microsoft embedding more stuff with WebView2 aka Chromium)
So yes, Google has everything to do with it because it provided all the bad instruments to all the wrong people.
Personally, I don't care much about hating Microsoft anymore because its products are dead to me and I can only see my future PCs using Linux.
I mostly use terminal-based software on Linux.
I think that the only programs I use much that embed a web browser are:
Firefox
Steam
Some games that are Web-based and which I only run one of at once (Neo Scavenger, some RPGMaker-based games, probably some others).
Not sure how meaningful it is to say that Firefox "embeds a web browser", considering that it IS a web browser :P
I mean don't you know that firefox loads a FULL web browser with an engine and all every time it boots up?
TUIs FTW!
I have couple of old 8 gb sticks from my old 960 GPU pc. Is there any way for me to stick it onto my new pc and have only certain app use it and nothing else?
Only for multi CPU mobos (and that would be pinning a thread to a CPU/core with NUMA enabled where a task accessed local ram instead of all system ram). Even then, I think all ram would run at the lowest frequency.
I've never mixed CPUs and RAM speeds. I've only ever worked on systems with matching CPUs and ram modules.
I think the hardware cost and software complexity to achieve this is beyond the cost of "more ram" or "faster storage (for faster swap)"
As to whether it's possible to get certain apps use specific physical RAM sticks, I am not sure, but that seems unlikely and would probably require some very low level modifications to your operating system. But even before you get to that point you'd have to physically connect them to your new motherboard, which will only work if there are both free RAM slots on it, and your new motherboard has slots for the same generation of RAM that your old PC uses.
Doubt it
sort of;; https://www.amazon.com/pci-ram-expansion-card/s?k=pci+ram+expansion+card
Way ahead of you Luddites
edit
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/ukwjwa/anyone_remember_this_scam/
first link died for some reason, probably not enough RAM
This isn't news lol
Electron is a f…ing cancer for Desktop
I'm tired of this! How can we start our own RAM foundry--is that the right term? Surely there's a YT tutorial somewhere.
The latest semiconductor manufacturer specializing in RAM is ChangXin Memory Technologies
So... whatever that costs. Although, I think this wiki is a bit behind the times, as they've got DDR5-8000 memory in flight according to TechInsights.
It must take so much R&D to achieve anything remotely comparable to what Samsung, Micron (/Crucial... RIP) and SK Hynix can produce.
Fingers crossed they can either undercut the 3(now 2) big producers, which is doubtful. But hopefully they can help reduce the maximum price that decent memory can inflate to. Because at some point a medium sized customer is gonna get fed up of the Samsung/micron/skHynix bullshit, and custom order the ram they need, and such a smaller producer will provide a much better service for a similar price
The miracle of the Chinese Economy (and, really, all the BRICS countries) has been their willingness to educate and industrialize their population.
Yeah, it takes a ton of R&D, but when you've got 1.4B people you're going to sift out a few who can get the job done. India's Tata is already building their own semiconductor facilities. Brazil's semiconductor sector has been struggling to break into the global market for... decades. Russia's so sanctioned that they've got no choice but to go in-house. South Africa is finally building industrial facilities to match their role in the raw materials supply chain.
I would suspect this crunch in the global market is going to incentivize a ton of international investment in manufacturing entirely to meet domestic demand. And heaven help us all if there's an actual flashpoint in the Pacific Rim, because that'll shut down the transit that companies like TSM and Broadcomm need to produce at current scales.
I just wouldn't hold my breath, especially under the current protectionist political environment. You're not going to be buying outside of the US sphere of influence any time soon.
It wasn't just their willingness to educate their own people but also Apple's willingness to offload all of their production there and basically revolutionize their Tech industry by developing all of their hardware there
https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-money/2025/06/17/g-s1-72993/how-apple-turbocharged-chinas-development
Taiwan's FoxConn building assembly plants in Shenzhen in 2005 does not explain why Huawei is releasing cutting edge phones in 2025.
Besides, if you want to get historical, Apple cribbed all their technology from Microsoft's trash bin back in the 90s. And Microsoft plundered IBM and the early tech companies of the 1980s before that.
Chinese firms didn't cheat by licensing the same technology every American firm was outright stealing through reverse engineering.
Pretty sure all ram manufacturers are Korean? I guess China puts chips on PCBs, maybe? But South Korea has the knowledge . And it had met domestic demand. RAM prices have been acceptable for many many years.
It's the AI sector that is inflating demand (maybe by circular investment and contracts).
So, I don't see anyone investing 10 years into the future to make ddr6 ram where their business plan relies on current trends.
Micron is American, headquartered in Boise, Idaho. Western Digital is based in San Jose, California. Kioxia (formerly a department of Toshiba) is Japanese.
Only Samsung and SK Hynix are Korean.
Even if you're not up to DDR6, there's money to be made in lower-tier memory for lower quality devices. Also, when the market is in a pinch, you'll have the ability to scale up with investment dollars faster if you're already in the business.
Big RAM hates this one little trick!
Very good explanation.