Amazon's Prime Day computer-component deals look like discounts until you check last year's prices.
A Samsung 9100 PRO 2TB SSD is marked down to $335 from $680, but that same drive sold for $165 during last year's Prime Day. A Crucial 64GB DDR5 kit is 7% off at £690 in the UK, versus £170 a year ago. A 32GB Crucial kit has fallen from £108 to £400 despite a 22% "discount" tag. GPUs fare a bit better: Asus's Radeon RX 9070 XT is $829, up from $690 last year, though a Radeon RX 9070 GRE OC dropped 33% to $529.99, undercutting its MSRP, and an RTX 5080 in the UK is down to £1,199.99 - a genuinely rare good price for a high-end card.
The pattern says more about the ongoing memory shortage than about Amazon's generosity. RAM and NAND prices have climbed for over a year, and that scarcity is now baked into every "sale" price shoppers see. A 22%-off sticker on RAM that still costs roughly four times what it did in 2025 isn't a bargain - it's inflation wearing a bargain's clothes.
Prime Day used to be the moment to assemble a budget PC. This year it's mostly a reminder of how much that budget has grown, with a couple of GPU exceptions worth grabbing before memory costs push card prices up again too.