Of everything on your media console, the streaming stick was always going to be the first device to see its price go up, simply because it’s the most straightforward. These sticks are just a small pile of memory with an HDMI plug attached, and there’s not much else on the materials bill to absorb a cost increase.

But we all know this part of the story by now: Roku, Apple, and Walmart all raised prices over the summer, and Amazon recently followed with price increases for every current Fire TV Stick, but it won’t be long before we’re having a very similar conversation about everything from TVs to soundbars, which also contain memory despite not yet moving the way streamers have.

But that doesn’t mean we’ve escaped it – they’re just slower-moving products with longer supply agreements and more places to hide a cost increase. But time is running out, and it’s important to know the details before spending anything on tech in 2026.

The cheapest TVs get the worst of it

Though it has nothing to do with picture quality

Analyst firm Omdia has been tracking what each component costs as a share of a television’s bill of materials, and its second-quarter update for 2026 showed clear as day what memory is doing to the sector. For a 32-inch HD smart TV, the audio and video processing board (essentially the computer inside the set) accounted for 37% of the total build cost, up from 13% a year earlier. On a 55-inch UHD Google Smart TV, the mainboard went from 12% to 31%, and on a 75-inch UHD Google Smart TV, from 8% to 20%.

It’s easy to see that memory doesn’t scale with the panel, and Omdia’s model keeps the configuration consistent across screen sizes with 2GB of DDR and 16GB of eMMC flash. A 32-inch set and an 85-inch set can run the same chips, so when those chips triple in price, the increase has the same monetary value but differs widely depending on the share of the TV’s build cost. The analysts’ own conclusion is that manufacturers need to shift toward larger, more premium products to manage memory share, meaning that a $79 32-inch model immediately stops making sense first.

It’s a pressure that’s already reached the negotiating table, with US retailers agreeing in March 2026 to TV makers’ requests for price increases, with vendors required to give 60 to 90 days’ notice before any rise takes effect. By April, the manufacturers were asking retailers to split the memory increase down the middle, and Omdia puts the rise in the cost of building a set at 30% to 50% – possibly more.

On paper, none of this seems to have reached the shelves yet. Walmart’s May Rollbacks sale featured an 85-inch TCL Roku set priced at $498 (matching its lowest Black Friday price in 2025) and a 98-inch TCL Google model at $998. But those are last year’s models, and the promotions driving retail traffic through 2026 appear to be old stock. This year’s sets carry higher list prices, and they’ll be what’s left once the clearance runs out.

Soundbars and receivers have even less protection

But so far, the damage is at the enthusiast end

Memory has now become about allocation rather than a commodity, an important distinction in the home audio world. Samsung, LG, and TCL all ship TVs in the tens of millions and negotiate accordingly, so a company making AV receivers or hi-fi streamers (shipping a fraction of that) takes whatever’s left at whatever price it happens to be that quarter.

Early evidence supports that, though not quite in the way you’d expect. FiiO raised US prices on four of its portable players from April, citing memory costs it could no longer absorb, and Shanling followed in August with increases across new and existing products, warning that some lower-margin models would simply be discontinued. Apple also raised HomePod prices alongside the Apple TV 4K.

Meanwhile, the more mainstream brands have held strong, with Marantz launching its Cinema Series 2 range in August, Denon launching new mid-range models for 2026, and Yamaha launching the RX300A and RX500A lines starting at $399. That hardly looks like an industry stretching out product cycles to avoid re-engineering, so it appears that the discretionary end of audio has been forced to reprice first, because it had no scale to fall back on. Meanwhile, the bigger AV brands are still absorbing, but I’d be surprised if that held through another two quarters of contract increases.

The price isn’t the only thing that’s changing

But the other option is much harder to spot

A manufacturer facing an inevitable cost increase has two choices: charge more, which is visible to customers and unpopular, or hold the price and reduce what’s inside. We already know what that looks like, because Amazon did it. Its Vega OS sticks now ship with half the RAM of the Fire OS models they replace, and the compromises also land on Dolby Vision, sideloading, and Wi-Fi generation. As expected, the same play is running elsewhere, with Omdia’s smartphone research showing vendors freezing or cutting back on memory in lower-end handsets while continuing to upgrade the premium tier. Samsung, meanwhile, had its own increases land on its high-storage variants alone, and Microsoft, for its part, discontinued the 2TB Xbox outright rather than price up.

No one has caught a TV or soundbar shipping with less memory than a predecessor yet, but I’d certainly watch for things like a set dropping from 16GB of storage to 8GB, or a bar losing onboard Atmos decoding in favor of passthrough. None of these things tend to make headlines on their own, but their accumulation, leading to an overall lower customer experience, is bound to.

Waiting for it all to blow over isn’t the smart move

But consumers need to be even more savvy shoppers

When things are unpredictable like this, the instinct for most is to sit tight, but those companies creating the memory are telling us the opposite. On Samsung’s first-quarter earnings call, for example, Kim Jaejune (who runs its memory business) said that its supply falls far short of demand, and the gap for 2027 is set to widen further than in 2026. Chey Tae-won, chairman of the group that controls SK Hynix, puts meaningful relief at around 2030.

Which is to say, if you’re holding out for next year to be cheaper, you shouldn’t be. I would also resist the opposite reflex, which is to replace everything before September, as this structural shortage doesn’t produce a single hard deadline to beat, and there’s no cliff edge coming either.

If I were replacing something this year, I’d let the failure decide the order. A TV that still works is the last thing I’d touch, precisely because last year’s model is both widely available and heavily discounted during the 2026 clearance cycle, and the window closes when the 2025 stock does, rather than on a specific date. A receiver or soundbar that is already dropping HDMI handshakes, though, is something to deal with right away, as the 2027 crop will have been built on a tighter budget.

And the upgrade that involves no memory at all is still sitting there, largely ignored. Repositioning the bar off the shelf it has been rattling against, re-running the room calibration you skipped, plugging the console into the receiver’s 4K/120 input rather than the one nearest your hand. None of that has a DRAM contract behind it.