One place where shortages are already being felt is in the smartphone market, according to a TrendForce publication. Low-end models running on the Android ecosystem have included 6GB to 8GB of RAM for some time now. However, due to the sharply increasing prices, manufacturers are increasingly forced to fall back on 4GB, which means that new smartphone models are in some respects a step back compared to their immediate predecessors.
We also see a differentiation in the market for mid-range models. While 12GB became more and more common, it is now stuck at 8GB in most cases. This is the case with the high-end models, but the transition from 12GB to 16GB that was initiated has drastically slowed down.
There is also a clear impact in the field of storage. microSD ports were becoming a thing of the past, partly to save costs, but also because the internal memory was so large that this was no longer necessary. However, now they are returning en masse, so that the phones can be sold with less internal memory and can therefore remain in the cheapest segment.
However, manufacturers can only do so much. Google will need to streamline Android to not be as memory intensive, similar to what Apple has done, while app developers may need to make adjustments to support these new, weaker phones.
