what if we cannibalize our long-term viability for a short-term gain says every dipshit in charge of tech hardware manufacturing.
you know when the bubble pops and they no longer have AI companies buying RAM they will switch back to consumers and keep the high prices.
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if they’re still around when the financial shell game they’re playing finally comes to a stop. who am i kidding the government will bail them out.
Using your money.
if the US government were actually funded by taxes, then everything the government does would be with “my money”
Well, if you’re a citizen, the country is yours, and the government is there to manage it, but some assholes in power managed to convince people that it’s the other way around
Even if the government is funded by money printed by the central bank, it would still be funded with “your money”. Every dollar printed dilutes your money by that same amount, ie it’s like a much more subtle tax that doesn’t follow any of the principles of proportionality, everyone pays the same (except those with little to no liquidity and everything invested, so it’s really a tax on the poor through inflation)
Of course, not all the companies survive and now there’s decreased competition, so we can shove prices up a little bit further
Keeping prices above what people are willing to buy for, while the majority of their business goes bust, is not a recipe to stay in business.
But consumers are stupid. when they start selling ram again at a high price we should all boycot buying computers. instead a lot of people will just accept the new price. we saw it after the pandemic, people just accepting prices instead of holding fast and forcing prices down.
You’re saying this as a comment on an article about how drastically sales have already dropped due to the price increases… people are already doing that.
I am talking about when the price is no longer based supply. When we see their market bottom out on AI one would expect to see the price drop. But looking at recent history these massive companies keep the price high because consumers see it as the new normal.
Consumers will find a way to eventually afford this price bump when its not food, shelter or medical care. It just takes a little longer when it is not a necessity.
Also your reputation. I had a Crucial SSD and was days from getting an identical one as a backup but then they said they were stopping consumer RAM sales so they’re now on my blacklist.
Question is, though, who now isn’t on your blacklist?
Samsung and SK Hynix never sold to consumers directly, yet seem to be avoiding flak. Micron is now joining them in that.
Who do you get that isn’t that three? Almost all RAM on the market is Samsung, SK Hynix, or Micron.
On top of that, Samsung and SK Hynix were the ones that signed the OpenAI deal (OpenAI bought 40% of the world’s DRAM supply and kicked off panic buying), so tbh Micron is the least responsible for the current DRAM market issues.
Every business is doing this for everything. To different degrees but they are all chasing their “get our fortune now and get the fuck out because the sky is falling” mentality. Have been since Trump 1.0 and now it’s accelerating rapidly.
You have to remember that “get that bag” is practically inherit to business. We spend a lot of time and effort making it illegal to fuck people over and do bad business stuff, but kinda-sorta since Regan the businesses have slowly been winning that battle.
That’s every company, most upper management don’t stay in one position for more than 2 years. So the system is setup for short term gains because investors aren’t interested in long term investments and the blowback is the next guys problem. Who then is looking for the next big win to cover up the last guy issues without fixing anything. Then they bring in someone to clean up the mess and the cycle starts again.
Plus most consumers have short memories or don’t have an alternative so their stuck. There are small groups holding on but for 75% of the world’s population right now it’s Android or iOS, AMD or Intel, AMD or NVIDIA, Samsung or WD or Seagate or SanDisk, Att or Verizon, Apple or Microsoft, and so on.
That’s every company
Not every company, just most. Privately owned corporations aren’t legally obligated to kill long-term viability for short-term gaing like publicly traded companies are.
Many owners of privately owned corps are that dumb, but not all of them
On the plus side, indie games that don’t require a rocket ship for a PC have never been better. So, can still play some good stuff on my old clunker. Thanks to Steam/Proton, they run even better on my old computer.
Would be nice to see the gaming industry pivot back to making innovative games within the constraints of hardware, instead of just expecting customers to throw ever more powerful (and power consuming) hardware at it.
As much (well deserved) hate that Nintendo gets, they are fantastic at this. They seem to be able to make games look good on low powered systems with stylistic decisions and smart optimization/coding. They learned some pretty important things in the NES/SNES era about using tricks to squeeze performance out of the few KB/MB they had to work with.
Yeah that crossed my mind, but if I’m not mistaken Pokemon was developed by Game Freak, only licensed by Nintendo.
DLSS has made devs lazy. Why bother optimizing when you can have some whiz bang AI algorithm turn a low res input into a greasy looking high res output.
I don’t understand what their long-term plan is here. Even if AI isn’t a bubble eventually all of the AI companies are going to get to a point where they don’t need more compute because they’re working on algorithmic optimisations because they decide that that’s cheaper.
Then they’re going to have to pivot back to the consumer market. Except by that point it won’t even be a consumer market because China will have eaten their lunch.
The plan is to continue making bank until the companies are done with them, then sell to consumers again without missing a beat.
Source: the GPU shortage we just went through.
Future source: the CPU shortage scheduled for 2026.
That’s my point though they can’t do that.
The market isn’t just going to wait around for them to get around to selling to consumers again. China is going to see an opening and they’re going to manufacture their own chips and make bank. Then when the traditional manufacturer is getting their head out of their arses then realise there market share has vanished. All 100% their fault.
They have decided to shoot themselves in the foot because someone’s convinced them they won’t ever need legs ever again.
Cloud computing. Stallman was right.
We would need a better general network for that. Remember stadia? Nothing has changed since then, hell some areas have even lost some capacity.
I’d you’re talking about cloud computing for gaming specifically (as you can of course use cloud computing for, well, everything), then maybe it’s not good enough in the US, I don’t know enough about that area to say, but networking is definitively more than sufficient in Europe.
Not american, But most of the world does not have the network. And Europe might have a good enough network, but not everywhere, and who knows if the current network will handle the sort of extra load that moving everything off local hardware would create.
Our economy increasingly is consumed to serve the rich. They are eating the world. Grocery stores increasingly cater to the wealthy. So do the automakers. Billionaires are buying up whole city blocks for themselves. And now we won’t be able to buy electronics because they’ve taken the resources for their speculative investments, and if they crash the economy our tax dollars will be appropriated to bail them out. It’s almost like we’re barreling towards a violent confrontation between the classes…
We won’t. Them sowing discontent among ourselves works to well and has worked longer then most realize.
I for one am in favor of throwing the rich into wood chippers.
The rich and their bought and paid for politicians.
Feet first.
We need global laws against gouging
This isn’t typical price gouging. It’s an industry moving away from consumers because our buying power is nothing compared to large corporations running on AI circlejerk VCs.
I mean, it is also that OpenAI cornered the RAM market, which is a typical price gouging scenario; it’s just weird that OpenAI wasn’t trying to make money directly through the maneuver. It does seem like they wanted prices to rise, though, to increase the barrier to competition.
It’s almost like unregulated capitalism is a certain highway to oligarchy and authoritarianism.
It’s also desirable for them because it decreases people building their own computers and pushing more people to buying premade ones they sell.
No, the endgame is for all the compute power to be in the cloud, and you rent time on their servers.
Everyone will just be running thin clients at home, with subscriptions if they need to do anything more than send an email
Makes sense. CPU/Mobo/RAM typically go together in a rebuild. Storage, case, PSU, perepherals, GPU can often carry over between builds as they’re all pretty backwards compatible.
Yeah. This makes pretty good sense. Make some ram and SSDs - lowee the price - and I’m sure Motherboard sales will go up.
It’s funny how people don’t want to buy motherboards without anything else
I only change motherboards when moving up to the next RAM format or CPU chipset. I stick with AMD due to cost and low thermals, and while their CPU generations shared the same interface I had one mobo for DDR3, one for DDR4, etc.
Can’t wrap my head around constantly upgrading the mobo to be honest. Sure, they have lots of features but I haven’t seen a situation where a mobo would be an upgrade worth doing without also upgrading everything else.
Just use Intel CPUs and you’ll understand, as they seem to invent a new incompatible socket every five minutes requiring a new mobo.
It’s such a shame to see high-performance computing and gaming more broadly become largely unaffordable. Hell, prior to the DRAM shortage, the current-generation game consoles were already MORE EXPENSIVE than they were at launch. And it’s just going to get worse.
None of this is “high performance computing”. Are you simulating nuclear explosions? Airflow around supersonic aircraft? Sequencing DNA?
This is all entertainment, it’s useless, it turns people into potatoes. Digital garbage to make AI fat people fart videos.
Good riddance I say.
Go use a type writer.
Lil bro thinks this is only about gaming
Probably never used his pc for anything other than
You posting on the Internet is also useless digital garbage, so put your money where your mouth is and go do something productive.
This is hilarious. Intel after many years finally fixed their manufacturing process, but won’t be able to sell chips because of memory crunch
If only they had a solid state technology that expanded system memory… Shutting down optane comes to bite them, again.
I’m sure it doesn’t help that motherboard manufacturers have increasingly been targeting “whale” consumers over the last 10-15 years. I remember when a top of the line motherboard would cost you $300; and an average board was around $100-150.
Somebody pop the zit that is AI.
AI isnt a zit, its a giant infected boil and blister now.
And after 26+ years of friendship, my buddy chose this month to be the month where he finally hunkered down and built his first PC. Of all the times to build a budget parts list for a friend…
Burst the fucking bubble already. I’m edging so hard right now.
It’s a play to make at home compute unachievable, forcing people to pay for subscription cloud services and cloud compute in walled gardens.
I don’t agree. The prices will rise across the board no matter where you site the memory or if it’s in a gaming computer or otherwise. Renting will always be more expensive than owning because competitors must recoup the capital cost of buying and make margin at the same time.
Or gpu prices or hdd/ssd prices that never recovered from the tsunami. Consumers just keep getting fucked.
A rising tide drowns those who can’t swim.
Prices don’t generally recover; any reason for a price rise is a reason to make it the new norm.
Used to be, competition would spring up and keep them in check, but now that the entire market is 6 companies in a trench coat, any new competitor would just be acquired or forced out of business with legal demands or supplier tampering.
These companies have been found guilty of collusion in other markets (lcd panels anyone?) so what you are saying while factually correct, is in fact because of the failure to address the post collusion market. A fine is paid and then business as usual. It’s like a chicken vs egg argument except instead of just recognizing it doesn’t matter and regulate a market properly we use it as perfect justification for doing nothing.
You’ll be happy with the government supplied computers whether you like it or not.
Alternately, perhaps we can look forward to
You’ll be happy to rent the megacorporation owned and configured computers whether you like it or not.
Still to optimistic.
You’ll be happy to rent the megacorporation owned and configured remote interface for the corporate remote computing server which you will also happily pay a subscription to access wether you like it or not.
Thanks. I hate it.
I fear they will pull a GPU and the storage prices will be permanently 50% higher after.
I mean, that’s capitalism, right? The manufacturers see that their product is still selling at a 300% markup, why would they bring the price back down when they can just make more profit if/when costs for them come back down? Sure they might drop it a little to make it “look” like a good deal. Just like GPUs. They went from being $600 for high end, to being $2000. Then when they announced that the next Gen was “only” going to be $1200 everybody was like “Wow! What a great deal!”
I hate this timeline. They just keep figuring out new ways to squeeze money out of me and ruining my hobbies.
