The year 2000 will be remembered for the noticeable rise in price of almost all technological components. If hardware accounted for most of the price increase, now Microsoft is also starting to raise its prices. According to the Taiwanese economic publication Economic Daily News, Microsoft will increase licensing fees for the Windows 11 operating system by ten percent. This increase will not affect ordinary users who assemble computers on their own and buy license keys. The main impact will be felt by OEM manufacturers selling ready-made assembled systems to end users. The increase in licensing fees will not be exactly the same for all equipment manufacturers. Microsoft usually scales the cost of a license in direct dependence on the installed processor. A laptop with a powerful Intel Core i7 processor will cost the manufacturer significantly more in terms of deductions than a device with a basic Core i3 chip.

A Windows 11 license is usually not the biggest expense item when manufacturing a laptop, and it seems that the increase in fees is already partially embedded in current market prices. However, according to the Taiwanese edition of EDN, Asus and Acer plan to raise prices for their products by about five percent later this year. In the overall market picture, Microsoft's licensing fees will affect the situation much less than the skyrocketing prices for RAM and solid-state drives. But this is becoming another additional factor that makes buying a personal computer more expensive than before. The Windows 11 weather app consumes a significant amount of RAM to display the usual weather forecast. Microsoft has also removed the recommendations for thirty-two gigabytes of RAM for Windows 11 and now sells Surface devices with eight gigabytes.

All these changes take place in the same year when the Steam Machine consoles had to enter the market at a significantly higher price than originally planned by the manufacturer. The reason was the ongoing global RAM crisis affecting the entire industry. Even Microsoft itself had to raise the prices of Xbox Series X and S game consoles to compensate for the serious rise in price of electronic components. The second half of the current decade promises to be quite difficult for ordinary consumers of electronics. Manufacturers are forced to shift the increased costs to the end customers of ready-made devices. The technology industry is experiencing a period of marked growth in production costs across the board. Users are faced with a consistent rise in the cost of both software and hardware components.