When something get’s sufficiently commoditized… it almost reaches a point where you start thinking about that one “thing” as a single, cohesive object rather than the sum of its parts. For many, a car is a thing you sit inside of, press a button or two, and you’re suddenly being propelled down the highway to your eventual destination. For the petrolhead, though, that same car is a symphony of engineering… disparate parts sourced all over the globe coming together to turn fuel, electricity, or both into the sweet sensation of speed.

Much the same can be said for the gadgets, electronics, and (frankly) modern marvels that permeate our daily lives. Most don’t think about their dishwasher as a small computer managing cycles of water, soap, and heat to make one of the more mundane daily chores… disappear. Heck, the average person things about their iPhone as, well, an iPhone.. that is until they send it clattering along the driveway only to find the screen shattered and the literally thousands of internal components… well… exposed.

Those components, then, often become the unsung heroes. An iPod without a hard drive is just a paperweight. A TV without a backlight is a very hard to use eReader. And… well… pretty much anything in our modern world without RAM is, honestly, useless.

RAM, or Random Access Memory, is one of the most ubiquitous pieces of the tech puzzle… microwaves to spacecraft rely on it. So, when the world’s ready supply of this technological lifeblood is suddenly… “spoken for”… what does that do to your next laptop? I hate to say that’s when good old fashioned Economics kicks in and… you may not like the inevitable answer.

This story goes much deeper than the price tag of your next Nintendo Switch, mind you. So grab another cup of tea, this one gets interesting…