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submitted 3 days ago by alessandro@lemmy.ca to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca
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[-] FauxLiving@lemmy.world -1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Ok, so who is arguing against that? Certainly not me.

Yes, every company on Earth would charge you $182737854 billion dollars for their product if they could and ever seller on earth would like to buy the product for $0. The market price is the price that both of these two opposing positions agree is fair.

You said:

Memory is high because there is nothing preventing them from charging anything they want above and beyond the cost of manufacture.

It is a requirement of every successful manufacturing business that has ever existed has to charge a price that is above the cost of manufacture. The term for this in academia is profit. If a company does not charge a price above and beyond the cost of manufacture then they're selling the product for less than it costs to make it and, unless they're Tesla, then they will eventually go out of business.

I can admit that maybe I did misread you because I assumed that you were trying to make some deeper point, because what you said, if read literally, is that "Memory is high because companies seek profit" which is the most trivially true thing you can say about economics.

So, back to basic economics.

The thing that is preventing a company from charging 'anything they want' is the fact that there are other manufacturers (because there isn't a true monopoly in the RAM market) that are competing in the same market. Nothing is preventing Samnsung from charging $150,000 for a 1GB stick of RAM, but if Micron is selling their 1GB sticks of RAM for $150 then nobody will buy from Samsung.

This a phenomena known as competition prevents Samsung from being able to sell RAM for arbitrary prices. The market sets the price, not any individual company.

I assumed you knew something so basic.

The only way a manufacturer can arbitrarily change the market price is if they are the only manufacturer, aka a monopoly (in which case the $150,000 sticks of RAM are the only ones available on the market) or they are price fixing (and Micron has secretly agreed to sell RAM at $150,000 and no other manufacturers exist).

So if you're not alleging price fixing then your comment is basically 'Companies seek to maximize profit' which is like saying the sky is blue or the sun is hot.

this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2026
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