[compumike]

Lots of people are speculating that the price spike is AI related. But it might be more mundane:

I'd bet that a good chunk of the apparently sudden demand spike could be last month's Microsoft Windows 10 end-of-support finally happening, pushing companies and individuals to replace many years worth of older laptops and desktops all at once.

[ProllyInfamous]

I worked in enterprise laptop repair two decades ago — I like your theory (and there's definitely meat there) but my experience was that if a system's OEM configuration wasn't enough to run modern software, we'd replace the entire system (to avoid bottlenecks elsewhere in the architecture).

[RachelF]

Perhaps the memory manufacturers have seen how much Apple gets away with charging for the memory on their laptops and have decided to copy them ;-)

[ErneX]

It’s not speculation, but it could also be both.

[Marsymars]

I have no idea about the number of people this has actually affected, but this is exactly my situation. Need a new workstation with a bunch of RAM to replace my Win10 machine, so I don't really have viable options than paying the going rate.