r/technologytranslated

>If you priced a laptop or tablet this summer, you noticed. In June, Apple raised the price of nearly every Mac and iPad it sells. The cheapest iPad went from $349 to $449 overnight. The MacBook Air went from $1,099 to $1,299. The hardware stayed the same, but the prices didn't.

>It isn't just Apple. The PlayStation 5 costs $100 more than it did in March. Xbox prices went up $100 to $150 this past Saturday. Nintendo is raising the Switch 2 to $499.99 on September 1. Dell, HP, and other laptop makers have raised prices too. Every major device maker is moving in the same direction. Most of them name the same cause.

>You've probably read that AI data centers use a massive amount of electricity and water. They also use an enormous amount of memory. That is the bill that just reached the store shelves.

>Three companies make nearly all of the world's memory chips: Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron. The AI data centers going up across the country (including here in Oregon) need enormous amounts of memory, and they pay top dollar for it. So those three companies pointed their factories at AI. Memory sits inside every device you own: your phone, your laptop, your tablet, your game console. When the factories serve AI first, the chips for everything else get scarce. Scarce means expensive.

>The companies buying those chips are not being subtle about it. On July 30, on his final earnings call as Apple's CEO, Tim Cook called it "a hundred-year flood on the memory pricing." Microsoft was blunter in its Xbox announcement: "console storage and memory prices have increased by more than 2.5x and we expect another doubling by the fall of 2027."

>The hard-drive half of this story already played out this spring.

You may have visited a doctor's or therapist's office recently and been asked if you consent to an AI note taker. Many are not sure if they should allow AI to listen in on their personal conversations with a provider. Despite the hesitation, this technology is in place today.

That tool being used is an ambient AI scribe. It listens to the whole conversation, turns it into a transcript, and drafts your visit note into your chart for the doctor to review and sign. This allows the doctor to focus on you instead of a screen. Abridge, Microsoft's DAX Copilot, and Nabla are the ones you are most likely to be sitting in front of, and they are already common. At UC San Francisco, 70% of physicians were using an AI scribe in daily practice as of 2026.

Anyone who has attended a workplace meeting featuring an automated notetaker has already encountered this kind of technology. Most of us have seen those tiny bots popping into our online meetings. However, the doctor's exam room is a completely different environment, and the reality might surprise you.