That has become no longer true since last year.

20 years is too long in the past, so indeed computers were more expensive then.

But if we go only 15 years in the past, to 2011, we find the same price per GB of DRAM as today, so that affordable computers had only 16 GB of DRAM.

2011 was actually the last year when I bought a computer with only 16 GB of DRAM, but today I hope to not need a computer any time soon, because I would not be able to buy as much memory as I want and as much memory as I have in my old computers, bought at a time when they were much cheaper than today.

Not only DRAM, SSDs and HDDs have exploded in price, but also the mini-PCs with Intel or AMD CPUs have a double price than last year, when bought as barebones, without memory.

For now, it is not obvious how much the prices have increased, because there are on the market a lot of obsolete computers that have remained unsold from the previous years, and which are cheap, but if you would want an up-to-date model that would be a true upgrade over whatever old computer you have, then the price is steep. (That means that for example in the case of barebone mini-PCs you can find cheap models with Intel Arrow Lake H or AMD Zen 4 CPUs, e.g. around $500, but the corresponding models with Panther Lake or Zen 5 are double in price, e.g. around $1000.)

I don't think this is a good argument. To be sure there has been a big jump in prices lately; we are familiar with the reasons so I'm not going to restate them here.

It happens that i just upgraded my main computer and phone, from >10 years old to >3 years old. And certainly I'm conscious of the fact that if I'd done this a year or even 6 months ago I'd have saved maybe 15% over what I paid. On the other hand, I'm also very conscious of that fact that the new gear is far more performant; the RAM is faster, the memory bus is wider, the system architecture is massively more efficient, there's specialized logic that just doesn't exist on my older machines. So I think it's a big mistake to say 'xGB of RAM costs the same now as 15 years ago' when it's performing ~10x beter.

> But if we go only 15 years in the past, to 2011, we find the same price per GB of DRAM as today, so that affordable computers had only 16 GB of DRAM.

Some of the individual components may still be relatively expensive, but overall I don't think this is true at all. Compare a 2026 macbook pro with a 2011 macbook pro at a similar price and the 2026 model is gonna blow the 2011 model out of the water on any benchmark you care to use.

> But if we go only 15 years in the past, to 2011, we find the same price per GB of DRAM as today, so that affordable computers had only 16 GB of DRAM.

Uhm, in 2011 4 GB RAM was the standard for PCs (some were still sold with only 2 GB), 8 GB was already enthusiast territory. 16 GB was a professional workstation.

The price of DRAM and SSDs might be back to a similar price as 20 years ago with the recent price spikes, but if they're the same price I'll probably take a high end computer from today than a high end computer from 15 years ago.