#budget-pc-hardware

#budget-pc-hardware

"We're making this change because the cost of building high-performance VR hardware has risen significantly. The global surge in the price of critical components - specifically memory chips - is impacting almost every category of consumer electronics, including VR."

As of 11 April 2026, Mac mini configurations with 32GB and 64GB of RAM and Mac Studio configurations with 128GB and 256GB of RAM are listed as 'currently unavailable' on Apple's US online store, with no estimated delivery date and no path to ordering.

Both work with Linux's existing swapping mechanism. Swapping (called paging in Windows) is a way for the kernel to handle running low on available RAM. It chooses pages of memory that aren't in use right now and copies them to disk, then those blocks can be marked as free and reused for something else.

RAM prices are skyrocketing, driving up the cost of products that rely heavily on memory. The price of Raspberry Pi boards has now soared to the point where two 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 boards will cost you as much as a new laptop.

After Google released its TurboQuant compression algorithm, which can purportedly drastically reduce the amount of memory required for certain AI workflows, stock prices for memory manufacturers dropped significantly.

Intel hasn't made it easy to buy a flagship desktop chip. The company's 2022 and 2023 Raptor Lake chips ran hot, power-hungry, and had those infamous crashes, while 2024's Arrow Lake-based Core Ultra 9 285K had lackluster gaming performance that the company has tried to address with updates.

If you're weighing your options, consider some Presidents Day offers on iBuyPower's pre-built desktops, including the $1,899 RDY Element 9 Pro R07 and the $2,099.99 Slate - both of which are stocked with high-end AMD processors and GPUs that can tear through most games at 1440p with fast frame rates. They also come with 32GB of DDR5 RAM and 2TB of storage, along with a mouse and keyboard.

AI-driven memory and storage price hikes have been the defining feature of the PC industry in 2026, and hobbyists have been hit the hardest-companies like Apple with lots of buying power have been able to limit the price increases for their PCs, phones, and other gadgets so far, but smaller outfits like Valve and Raspberry Pi haven't been so lucky.

Modern Linux is powerful, flexible, stable, and secure. With the exception of some of the more lightweight Linux distributions, it's also far more resource-dependent (just like all modern operating systems). Also: 5 things to consider before leaping from one Linux distribution to another Consider this: The minimum system requirements for Ubuntu Desktop today include just 4GB of RAM. I've run Ubuntu on a virtual machine with only 3GB of RAM.