The price of DRAM looks fairly firm. There is a little further downwards possible but £75 for an 8Mb stick of 72-pin is what you should be looking for.
EDO RAM, however, continues to command a premium in spite of the fact that it costs the same to produce. This is likely to change quite quickly as non-EDO supplies dry up. In fact, I predict that EDO will be cheaper than standard within a few months as supplies of the old stuff dry up and users discover that they need it for compatibility (you can't mix EDO and non-EDO in the same bank).
Just when you thought it was safe to invest in 72-pin SIMMs, the DIMM turns up. This is a 64-bit wide SIMM with 168 pins. The advantage? You can add memory a DIMM at a time to 64-bit Pentium bus machines. With 32-bit (72-pin) SIMMs you had to add two SIMMs together.
Is this likely to catch on? Well there is a precedent. 30-pin SIMMs, which are eight-bits wide and require installation in fours for a 32-bit 486 bus got superseded. Personally I can't see the problem in adding two SIMMs at a time but I suspect DIMM will be standard in a couple of years.
If you're buying a new motherboard there are plenty with four SIMM sockets and a single DIMM. This lets you buy 32Mb of RAM in 8Mb 72-pin now (the cheapest), and when that isn't enough in a year or so buy the extra as a DIMM.
Not the drives. I still expect them to be around £300 by the end of the year. This is the problem - the blanks are going to be in short supply any time now.
It appears that CD-Rs in the States actually sell for more than they do in Europe, so producers are supplying the US market first now that demand is high. Okay, I know this sounds unlikely and its usually the other way around, but this is the best information I have.
Expect the price of blanks to go up the world over as more inexpensive CD-R drives go on sale. For example, Plasmon are due to launch one for under £550 next week. Considering they were three times this price last year you can see why disk supplies are going to be squeezed. Strangely, the drive manufacturers don't make their own disks and visa versa, so they may have been caught on the hop.
There is hope, however. There are several blank manufacturers so they'll all be ramping up production and forcing prices down to get their share of the market.
© 1996 Frank J Leonhardt