@BlastMode7 What do you think will happen with future prices?
Well, I think this is a very complex issue. The memory prices as well as production are merely one component. There's a lawsuit pending against Hynix, Micron and Samsung about price fixing. IF they are found guilty, that could help to alleviate some of the issue. It will at least bring memory prices down so the average person can afford to put more than 8GB of RAM in their builds. I'm honestly not looking forward to buying another kit of 32GB come the end of the year. For production, they need to build another facility or "smart" device production needs to drop off. Remember, it's not just phones and tablets. We're talking a plethora of app driven tech that needs memory.
The memory supply just isn't there for graphics card manufactures to keep up with the demand from crypto miners. Right now you're seeing a drop due to a severe drop in BTC and ETH, and a lot of people that were in mining without really knowing what they're doing, are now getting out. The influx of used mining cards, as a result, has also been a big driving force in this drop in GPU prices. The other is that mining with BTC isn't very profitable for people using GPUs due to ASIC miners. They recently released one for ETH, which is the other big crypto on the block. Only time will tell if they take out GPUs in the way ASICs did for BTC. You still have the issue of the fact there are a lot of cryptos that are very viable for mining with GPUs and there's also the fact that both BTC and ETH are back on the rise. You also have the issue of retailers not selling at MSRP as they know they can sell them for that price. Our only recourse there is to vote with our wallets. Sadly, miners will buy them and not bat an eye.
Lastly, Samsung had a power outage that killed a lot of NAND flash memory not too long ago affecting the price of SSDs, but to a much lesser degree.
So... what needs to happen in the short term is that ASICs work out well to mine ETH and memory manufactures need to be found guilty of price fixing, if they are. Those two things will make the most difference this year. In the long term, we would need to not have another crypto take off that can be mined with GPUs and memory production needs to increase. The latter is going to take a while, if another facility is built.
I imagine we're going to see a another temporary drop in prices like we did about a year ago. Since memory is rather expensive now, we may not see much more of a price drop in GPU prices. I could be wrong, and I hope I am, but I don't think we're seeing the end of this.