South Africans have a fairly predictable response whenever technology gets more expensive. Just blame the Rand.
Most of the time that argument is not an unreasonable one. We import most of our consumer electronics, so when the rand gets hammered against the dollar, the price of everything from smartphones to laptops naturally follows.
Except this time, the rand is not the problem. Well not entirely at least.
According to figures compiled by MyBroadband, the dollar averaged around R16.47 in 2020. During the first half of 2026, it averaged roughly R16.42.
Basically unchanged.
A PlayStation 5 Digital Edition, meanwhile, has gone from R9,999 at launch to R14,499, a whopping 45% increase.
Now, before we declare the rand completely innocent, there’s an important bit of economic housekeeping to do. R9,999 in 2020 isn’t the same as R9,999 today.
South Africa has experienced significant inflation over the past six years, so part of that 45% increase simply reflects the fact that money itself buys less than it did when the PS5 launched. Adjust that original R9,999 price for cumulative inflation and you’re looking at something closer to R13,000 in today’s money.
That means the PS5 Digital isn’t really 45% more expensive in purchasing-power terms. Adjusted for inflation, the increase is closer to 10% to 12%.
That’s a way smaller number, but it’s still not normal.
Consumer technology isn’t supposed to behave like groceries or electricity.
A six-year-old console should not merely keep pace with inflation. Historically, it should get cheaper over its lifecycle especially now well into its 6th year.
That is how the console business has traditionally worked.
Instead, we have a six-year-old PlayStation costing more in real terms than it did at launch, despite the rand sitting at roughly the same level against the dollar.
So if the currency isn’t responsible, and inflation doesn’t explain everything away, what exactly is going on?
Well the culprit here is AI. The enormous amount of memory being swallowed by the infrastructure required to build and run artificial intelligence.
The AI boom might feel like something happening inside ChatGPT, data centres and Silicon Valley boardrooms. But its consequences are being felt very quickly and painfully in South African stores.
The scary thing is, this is just the beginning.
AI has developed a massive appetite for memory
To understand why your next laptop could cost more, we need to talk about the supply chain.
Most of the world’s DRAM comes from just three companies: Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron.
For years, these companies supplied memory for PCs, smartphones, consoles, servers and practically every other computing device we use.
Then AI arrived on the scene with an insatiable appetite for chips and seemingly unlimited amounts of money to spend.
Modern AI accelerators require huge quantities of high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, to train and run increasingly complex models. What’s even more important for manufacturers, HBM is considerably more profitable than the ordinary memory sitting inside your laptop or gaming PC. So If you are running a chip factory, the maths is not that complicated. Money talks.
You will make more of the thing your customers desperately want and are willing to pay more for.
Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron have consequently been shifting production capacity towards higher-margin AI-related memory.
Estimates suggest AI projects now account for roughly 70% of memory demand, leaving consumer electronics manufacturers fighting over whatever’s left.
RAM prices have more than doubled since October 2025, creating a serious problem for hardware manufacturers.
Memory traditionally represented around 15% to 20% of the cost of building a PC. At current prices, that figure can move closer to 30% or even 40% and at that point, there are only a few options.
Raise prices, reduce specifications or take a significant hit on margins and you don’t need to guess which two consumers are already starting to notice.
South Africa has a much bigger problem than expensive PlayStations
While R15,000 for a Playstation is a hard pill to swallow, gaming consoles are discretionary purchases.
What is more worrying, is happening at the bottom of the laptop market.
Daily Maverick reported in March that roughly 52% of South African consumer laptop demand sits in the entry-level R3,999 to R4,999 segment.
These are not necessarily secondary machines sitting next to someone’s MacBook Pro.
They are often the first laptop for a university student. The computer a matric learner uses for assignments and research and perhaps the only machine inside a small business.
Push that R4,999 laptop towards R9,000 and you are pricing these customers out of the market entirely.
Gartner expects PC prices to rise by around 17% globally this year, with smartphones increasing by roughly 13%.
More concerning is its expectation that the sub-$500 laptop category could effectively disappear by 2028. Counterpoint Research is also forecasting shrinking global smartphone shipments.
Now for wealthier markets, rising technology prices are irritating at best.
But in South Africa, where millions of people access education, employment opportunities, financial services and government platforms through relatively inexpensive devices, this becomes an accessibility problem.
If the technology industry stops making affordable devices because AI companies are willing to pay more for the components inside them, our already massive digital divide becomes even wider.
PC builders are already feeling it
You do not need to wait for laptop manufacturers to update their price lists to see what is happening.
RAM prices have been skyrocketing.
A 32GB DDR5-6000 kit listed by Evetech at around R1,950 in mid-2024 had climbed towards R2,400 by mid-2025.
By mid-2026, comparable kits were sitting at roughly R3,500, with Corsair and Kingston options generally ranging between R3,200 and R3,750.
For someone building a high-end gaming PC, another R1,000 or R1,500 may not matter much but at the budget end, it’s a different story.
Suddenly you have no choice but to go 16GB instead of 32GB and opt for a smaller SSD or cheaper GPU. Maybe even postpone the upgrade entirely.
And that leads us to another sneaky trick consumers need to start watching carefully.
Your next phone might cost the same but give you less
Manufacturers know consumers hate price increases and a R9,999 smartphone suddenly becoming R11,999 is too obvious.
They use another way to protect margins that is much harder to notice.
Keep the price the same and reduce the specification.
TrendForce expects mid-range smartphones to remain around 6GB to 8GB of RAM rather than moving towards 12GB as many otherwise might have.
Budget devices could increasingly settle around 4GB. Xiaomi and Redmi have already warned customers to expect price increases of around 20% to 30%.
Apple has also raised MacBook and iPad pricing, while describing the memory shortage as an unprecedented challenge.
For consumers, this means model names and price tags are becoming less useful indicators of value.
Imagine last year’s phone came with 8GB of RAM for R7,999 and this year’s replacement arrives at R7,999 again.
That sounds great right? Until you realize now it has 6GB RAM instead. That is effectively shrinkflation for technology.
Same brand, same naming convention and same price but less specs.
It means buyers are going to have to pay much closer attention to specifications instead of assuming that a newer generation automatically means better hardware.
Don’t expect this problem to disappear next year
The sad reality is that there is no quick fix.
Semiconductor factories are not fast food restaurants. You cannot simply open another one next month because demand suddenly increased.
New memory fabrication capacity takes years and billions of dollars to bring online.
Micron’s additional capacity is not expected to contribute meaningfully until the third quarter of 2028. Intel has also pointed towards 2028, while Gartner expects pressure on storage markets to continue through at least 2027.
We have experienced memory shortages before with the DRAM shortage of 2017 and 2018 lasting roughly eighteen months before supply caught up.
But that demand was largely being driven by smartphones and conventional cloud infrastructure.
AI is a different beast.
The world’s biggest technology companies are spending absurd amounts of money building data centres, training larger models and deploying AI across practically every product they can find with little evidence that this appetite is about to disappear.
So, should you buy now or wait?
Unfortunately, there is no particularly satisfying answer.
If you genuinely need a new laptop, PC, smartphone or console, waiting for prices to return to “normal” could mean waiting several years.
In some categories, prices could actually get worse before they get better. That makes buying enough memory and storage upfront increasingly sensible.
If you are choosing between a laptop with 8GB and 16GB of RAM, for example, stretching to 16GB may make more sense if your budget allows. The same applies to storage as waiting, could become considerably more expensive.
On the other hand, if your current device still works perfectly well, there has rarely been a better argument for keeping it.
You probably don’t need a new laptop because Intel released another processor and also don’t need a new phone because of a trendy orange colour or a dedicated AI button.
And you most certainly don’t need to upgrade simply because the technology industry’s annual marketing calendar says you should.
What you should be doing is keeping your devices longer. Replace batteries if you can and buy based on what you actually need rather than what is newest.
