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.
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)
Profits for me, losses for thee
ha. they are renting the datacenters back to us.
its gonna be forced cloud computing for us and total control for them.
Of course, not all the companies survive and now there’s decreased competition, so we can shove prices up a little bit further
Absolutely
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
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.
how are they in control? market demand is an outside force
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.
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.
Somebody pop the zit that is AI.
At least people aren’t buying at these high prices, wouldn’t want them to stay there after all.
This is a good point, we don’t need PCs to be this expensive.
I just hope we don’t fuck up the whole thing and end up with cloud computers or end up not making new PCs…
5 years ago I would’ve called you insane, but with everything happening right now… it’s a distinct possibility.
RAM’s unaffordable, GPU’s will likely be harder to come by and more expensive. Microsoft is actively driving people away from Windows, Steam is launching their Steam Machine…
Here’s hoping many gamers will jump to Linux and grow that platform instead. But even then, too expensive hardware will be an issue.
We’re living in interesting times.
I would have called myself insane five years ago too!
Yeah, jumping to Linux could help a bit. I did that a couple of years ago, but that was more because I couldn’t upgrade to Win 11 on my almost a decade old PC. Now I’m glad I couldn’t upgrade to Win 11 haha.
I had a laptop with Win 11 tho but I never got used to it and don’t want AI and shit in any of my computers so I jumped over to Linux on that to.
Maybe Steam will save the day with the Steam Cube? Isn’t that pretty much a normal gaming PC?
That is an increasingly high risk I can see, PCs just no longer exist.
I went from thinking about a full rig upgrade, to just buying the best used processor and GPU my am4 board could handle with my current PSU and ddr4 ram.
Went from a ryzen 1600x and a Nvidia 1060 to a ryzen 5 5600x and a Radeon rx 6600 xt. I’ll be able to ride that out for a few years no problem.
I went from thinking of upgrades to enjoying my backlog of old games. My wallet and library are both happy and I’m enjoying the games I’m playing.
Likewise. I haven’t bought a game that wasn’t at least a year old in a decade. Heck, right now I’m playing Psychonauts.
Same here, the Steam Deck changed my life 😆. Less AAA, more AA and indie games, especially at work.
funny i bought exactly the same CPU and GPU half a year ago. Someone in my city sold these for 200€.
I was going to go for an AM5 board and everything, but couldn’t afford it. My older parts were from 2016 and not even terrible. Its funny how little the hardware requirements have changed in the games and OS area. I am still using the same 16g RAM and PSU from 2016.
AM4 unite! Have had 3600X and 2070 super since 2019 and still works well. Although some USB-ports on the mobo are starting to degrade.
That’s alright. USB rails for a PCI slot are dirt cheap.
Nnnoooo, you won’t get enough fps to enjoy your games!!!
/s in case some of you don’t get it
My eyes aren’t good enough for 4k. Lol
I also decided to do a mild upgrade in my AM4 board rather than shell out for marginal upgrades. I’m rocking the 5700x3d 5700xt build.
Ryzen 5600x here, was rocking a 6700 XT but found a good deal on a RX 9070 for $540 right around when the RAM prices increased. Already have 32 GB RAM, so I’m set for a while.
Yeah, I had the ram, but the 6600xt was the most I could buy without having to also upgrade my PSU.
Nice, had a nitro 6650xt, can’t recommend enough if it makes sense financially
Paid under $200 for it and it punches well above the 1060 I’ve been using. Wanted a Radeon because they play nicer with Linux and this card is the beefiest AMD I could go without having to also buy a new PSU. Also couldn’t go much nicer anyhow or I’d be creeping up on games cpu limited, so it pairs nicely with the r 5 5600x. So for me and my particular set up it made for a nicely balanced hardware and cost choice. After this it will just be time for all new hardware in a few more years.
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.
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.
Next up: MSI, ASUS, … are pulling out of the consumer market due to falling revenue causing major price hikes.
Do MSI and ASUS have enough corporate/enterprise sales to offset the loss of consumer demand? With the RAM companies the consumer crunch is caused by AI companies bidding up the price of raw memory silicon well beyond what makes financial sense to package and solder onto DIMMs (or even directly solder the packages onto boards for ultra thin laptops).
Asus is a significant ODM, supplying boards for brands like HP. I’m not sure what lines/models they make today, but they are a lot bigger than just their consumer lines.
Here’s to hoping that it increases pressure to break the cartels and start getting the ball rolling on more independent foundries.
Problem I see with new foundries is that the profit is still going to be selling to data centers. It would take a philanthrope like Marc Cuban selling meds at cost, selling at a loss to enthusiasts.
Calling Marc Cuban a philanthrope feels icky, but he is doing a thing that I think is genuine.
It doesn’t matter as long a the supply continues to grow. It also helps make the rest of the world less dependent on a US hegemony that’s now going sour. When investment firms are buying up so much inventory for data centers that aren’t even operational, a big part of that exists as an excuse for market manipulation by the really big hitters that have their presence in those cartels anyway. Once they start feeding their own demise and market competition, they will back off pretty quickly and will likely saturate the market from the surplus inventory they are clearly hoarding under bullshit excuses to try to eliminate and buy up the nascent competition.
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.
I’m on ryzen 9 5900x, rtx 3080, 32 GB DDR4, with mobo and psu that’s ~€850 today and it will play most modern games on high settings 1080p at +100 fps. Computer hardware these days is a lot more like car hardware than it used to be. Generational improvements aren’t as big and the price for a used 5 year old unit is a ⅓ of a new one. Unless you absolutely need the latest and greatest go with a used last gen.
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/XpFtXR
That setup would currently run for around $1730? Without investing into a monitor, or any peripherals like keyboard, mouse, etc and picking a relatively cheap psu/case/cooler combo.
Maybe I misunderstood but seems a far cry from €850.
Your prices are msrp for unused components.
On my local equivalent of ebay/amazon I can get a used 3080 10 GB for $390, ryzen 9 5900x $265, 32 GB DDR4 3200 mHz $170, new b550 mobo $80, 750w psu 80+ gold $70. $975 total. I didn’t count anything else coz a lot of people already have those things from their old PCs and they’re super cheep. For a full ~$1000 build add a $60 512 GB sata ssd. Cooler will set you back $15, same as a 1080p screen, case and m+k combo and a lot of the time you can get those things for free and they will last you a lifetime.
This is my first ever keyboard that I got for free from an office that was closing down and I use it to this day. Eventually I had to buy a PS/2 to USB dongle but that’s like $5. I have a 2nd spare one in case the 1st one breaks. I plan on using it till I die.
I see the misunderstanding, didn’t consciously see the ‘used’ hardware in your post above. That makes a lot more sense!
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.
I haven’t made any purchases since tariffs drove up prices.
I was prepping to build a new NAS in 2026.
Not anymore sellouts.
Wow, I can’t believe my plan for a cheap motherboard worked.
If sales are going down, prices of the motherboards are going up.
Going to gouge all the midstream businesses in the long run. Hardware retailers, PC assemblers, all those little companies selling custom cases and overclock kits and fancy cooling appliances.
The lack of cheap but crucial components will have some ugly coat tails for the rest of the industry.
Does China not have any companies that can make RAM? Seems like an opportunity to grab some market share. But maybe they don’t, or maybe they’d prefer to sell it to AI companies too.
CXMT has ddr5 manufacturing capabilities but it will be years before they scale it, and they’re embargoed by the US, so nobody on good terms with the US can get it.
And yes, they would also sell to the enterprise customers, but it would lower prices overall.
