TECH NEWS – Right now, the reality is that weaker entry-level smartphones may be forced to rely on newer, and therefore more expensive, memory.
Older-generation LPDDR4 and LPDDR4X memory modules have been in production for roughly 8 to 10 years, but reports now suggest that Samsung is halting that production, most likely because it wants to maximize profits by focusing instead on supplying LPDDR5 and LPDDR5X RAM modules. That means customers who wanted to place orders based on the older standard may have no choice but to migrate to the newer technology, no matter how expensive that becomes. The DRAM crunch, then, seems to be doing more than just driving up component prices. It is also shrinking customer choice.
While The Elec does not clearly state whether Samsung is being forced to stop all LPDDR4 production, the most logical explanation is that the company simply sees more profit in ramping up LPDDR5 and LPDDR5X output. Samsung will continue serving customers whose older orders have not yet been delivered, but future shipments will reportedly be rejected unless buyers shift to the newer standard. That means both smartphone makers and chipset vendors, such as Qualcomm and MediaTek, will have to come up with new solutions. Even Samsung’s own Mobile Experience division may have little option other than moving toward LPDDR5 procurement, as the Korean giant will likely transition its less powerful Exynos chips, which currently use the older LPDDR4 standard, to the newer alternative as well.
Devices such as the Samsung Galaxy A17, which previously came with LPDDR4X memory, may now end up shipping with LPDDR5 RAM instead, bringing faster memory bandwidth but also very likely a higher price. With this decision, Samsung is not only heavily influencing what its customers are allowed to buy, but is also setting up a situation where consumers will understandably feel burned. Existing Galaxy A17 owners may be annoyed to learn that they are using the slower variant, while buyers of the same model later on could get faster memory, only to pay more money for roughly the same overall feature set.
This is clearly not an ideal scenario, and it appears to be another side effect of the AI boom, which has consumed what remained of available memory inventory and left everyone else scrambling for the leftovers.
