The price of the three-piece set for the start of school has increased. Those who wait and see have miscalculated: major manufacturers have raised product prices one after another.

Kuai Technology reported on August 5 that summer vacation was originally a hot-selling period for the "three-piece back-to-school set" of mobile phones, notebooks, and tablets. However, as global memory chip prices continue to rise, major manufacturers have raised product prices one after another. Consumers who originally planned to "wait and see" failed to wait for price reduction promotions. Instead, they waited for a wave of price increases that exceeded expectations. A consumer said in an interview that he bought a Lenovo Xiaoxin laptop for his sister, a prospective college student, and saved more than 2,000 yuan by buying it a month earlier. Another consumer said that he spent 8,199 yuan to buy HP Shadow Elf Max in February this year. Now the price of the same product on the same platform has exceeded 10,000 yuan, an increase of several thousand yuan. It’s not just notebooks that are increasing in price, mobile phone prices are also increasing to varying degrees. Taking Xiaomi as an example, REDMI Turbo 5 has increased from 2,299 yuan to 2,599 yuan, and Xiaomi 17 Pro Max has increased from 5,999 yuan to 6,499 yuan, both with increases of several hundred yuan. Public reports show that memory prices have been rising since this year and have continued to rise month-on-month for three consecutive quarters. The root cause of this round of gains is not the traditional cyclical fluctuations in consumer electronics, but the explosive growth in demand for AI computing power. Global AI data centers have had an almost "hungry" effect on high-bandwidth memory and high-end flash memory. The three major storage giants, Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix, have shifted their production focus to the more profitable AI server field. As a result, the supply space of consumer-grade DRAM and NAND flash memory has been severely squeezed. This price increase is being transmitted downstream along the industrial chain. The proportion of memory chips in the total cost of smartphones has risen sharply, from about 13% in the first quarter of last year to 43% in the third quarter of this year. Faced with a surge in costs, mobile phone manufacturers have had to stop all promotional offers. Even old models that have been on the market for more than a year have returned to their original prices, and the threshold for consumers to purchase new phones has significantly increased. In the short term, the imbalance between supply and demand of memory chips will be difficult to alleviate. TrendForce predicts that DRAM and NAND prices will still maintain double-digit month-on-month increases in the third quarter, and the era of low-price storage is likely to be gone forever. This round of price increases has not only changed the mobile phone market