Unless you can actually afford the ram prices, just play older games. There’s a ton of AAA games that I’ve never played.
Then there’s tons of remastered games too. I haven’t touched those. Older games are affordable and run on max settings with any modern computer.
We already have a life time of quality games and computer parts in circulation.
I think when we look back at this time we will see how new games are optimized and intended to run on lower end hardware rather than the “look how real it is” formula.
A good example is borderlands. Cell shading was created because it was aesthetically pleasing while also consuming the least amount of resources. When optimization and performance were no longer a problem, games like border lands used cell shading but still required all lot of resources.
How about we throw all the republicans in prison and use their brains for processing power
That amount of processing power wouldn’t play Doom.
If we link them all together we might be able to manage pong
I’d be in favor of putting Trump and his ilk in prison, but explicitly still letting him campaign and run his grifts. Here’s the deal though… He doesn’t get any real money for it, he just gets “prison bucks” that get him nicer treatment/amenities. We take all the actual money he generates from grifting, and use it to fund education in the areas that lost the most money in the con.
It’s a double whammy to find hotspots of the stupidest, most gullible people on the planet, and also getting their children properly educated and able to recognize and avoid the same scams their parents fell for.
“RAM to see ‘meaningful price increases’ before 2026 is out, as the memory crisis is predicted to last ‘at least’ another 3 years of people not buying any.”
Also it has no meaning.
I’m having difficulty understanding what you’re trying to say here. This words in bold are not anywhere in the article.
If you’re suggesting that demand for RAM is low, you simply do not understand the situation. Demand for RAM is higher than it has ever been, it’s just not consumer demand.
Demand never slows after a bubble pops. never.
Bubbles never take longer than 3 years to pop. Never.
We should organize raiding parties on data centers to get PC parts, pirate style yarrrr, and disrupt AI while doing it. Burn it down to leave no trace.
Pull in close and fire grapeshot broadside!
Please don’t shoot frag into the booty you want to loot.
Jokes on you we will soon be raiding data centers for fresh water
Two birds…two birds
Because what are we going to do with PC parts when we don’t have any electricity anymore. Sadface
STOP BUYING TECH. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, STOP. THE ONLY REASON PRICES KEEP GOING UP LIKE THIS IS BECAUSE PEOPLE AREN’T WILLING TO SACRIFICE COMFORT TO MAKE A POINT.
Buy used. Use hand me downs. Learn a new operating system to get new life out of stuff you already HAVE.
If people can’t give up access to shitty software to save tech, there’s no hope for the species. Period.
The prices are going up because big tech is buying it all up. Consumer sales quantities are way down due to the prices.
Prices are high because demand is driven by AI companies with mountains of investor cash. A consumer RAM boycott doesn’t move the needle.
I’m not building a PC or buying a computer because I can make due with what I have a few years longer. But I do desperately need a new laptop at the office, so work is paying an outrageous sum of money for a new computer.
I’m also getting a few new employees - each of which is gonna need a computer
It businesses, not hobbyists paying these increased prices.
Linux plus junk PCs. I’ve got a bunch of old computers my workplace tossed out because they wouldn’t take Windows 11 and I’ve never been happier with my tech setup in my life.
It’s probably some sort of mental condition, but I freaking love going trash-panda on our recycle PC pile and refurbing old hardware.
listen buddy, I’ve been getting computer junk every month for 20+ years. It’s all I think about and I still haven’t gotten addicted. If life has taught me anything is that the only thing you can’t get addicted to is free computer junk . how can I be addicted if it makes me happy? Computer junk is therapy, junking computers is LITERALLY my therapy. Life is free computer junk, everyday I wake up and I think about free computer junk. Every morning I grab my laptop and start looking on craigslist while I make my morning coffee. It’s literally all I think about, I can’t be at peace if I don’t junk at least 20$ a day. BUYING NEW IS JUST A PHASE. but I know a big junk pile is always right around the corner that’s why I’ll keep junking IT equipment until my wife leaves me.
I’m still perfectly fine in my 6+ years old Gaming PC with 16GB.
But then again I switched from Windows to Linux about 2 years ago.
Since the time I started using PCs (over 3 decades ago), I went down the route of squeezing as much as I could from my desktop PCs by upgrading the hardware piece by piece rather than periodically buying a new one - to the point that I think I’ve done maybe just 3 full replacements in those 3 decades - the upgrades most of the time being memory, graphics cards and storage upgrades as those tend to be the best bang for the buck, though a few times all the way to replacing the motherboard (which sometimes forces things like memory upgrades and once even a computer box and power source upgrade, in the transition to ATX physical format).
All this to say that in the last few years since Windows has become so bloated and inneficient, Linux’s capabilities to run Windows software have become so good and the prices of the usually best value hardware upgrades (memory, graphics cards) have become so high that, in my (I believe informed) view, the best performance upgrade for one’s PC right now for most people is literally to replace Windows with Linux.
This isn’t fanboyism speaking - I’ve been using Linux for fun since the early 90s when I would install Slackware from floppy disks, professionally for a large part of my career (which was developing software for the server side, were Linux became dominant in the 00s) and only switched my Gaming PC to it 2 years ago because I before I didn’t feel it wasn’t at all hassle free to game in Linux and I didn’t want to come how to unwind from spending all day programming and doing bug-fixing just to be stuck at diagnosing problems running some game or other in Linux - this is genuinelly my analysis based on my experience of improving my PC almost always by targetted upgrading piece by piece to improve performance rather than regularly buying new machines.
In fact, I’ve done this upgrade not just for myself but also for a family member whose Windows 8 (!) PC had become incompatible with pretty much everything the used - put Linux in, put up the desktop shortcuts for them to get to what they use (browser, e-mail), configure the thing to auto-update and it’s problem solved.
Many people have been delaying their upgrades for a long time already. I bought my old RAM 2015 and tried to convince myself for so long that it’s still fine until I finally upgraded this year.
Buying RAM used often isnt really a good idea unless you have a friend who makes you a good deal. For example I could find the RAM type I wanted for 180€ used or pay 220€ for new parts. That’s not worth it for me and also doesn’t make a dent into the market.
Also remember that most new hardware is sold to either computing providers or businesses. ~70% of memory produced is consumed by AI data centers, leaving only 30% for mobile devices and personal computing.
Don’t get me wrong, consuming less and buying used are still good ambitions, but it realistically has no impact on how prices are formed.
CEX in the UK do 5 year warranties on used hardware. Realistically you would probably just get a voucher rather than cash if it failed but you could then buy another replacement at least.
Buying used is per se not a bad idea, but the high RAM prices also mean more scammers, as it is now very profitable to scam people with fake RAM. And people need tech, so not a really an option to stop buying completely.
And I doubt prices would go down if consumers would stop buying or buying less RAM. The prices are high because the tech corporations are willing to buy RAM at basically any cost. Consumers are just a drop in the ocean at this point.
If tech is going to be usurped entirely, then reject it. I’ve started doing everything I can by mail and physical presence. Don’t buy the hype that you NEED tech. If your friends won’t let you change how you get in touch with them, then they’re not that good of friends and you don’t really need them.
If all of my stacked 15 year old computers here stop being able to access Lemmy? Oh well. It’s been fun.
This is a war. They are winning because we are willing to have a point where we say, “Well, this is the limit… I have to capitulate now.” They rub their hands together gleefully waiting for you to cave.
Don’t. Be stubborn. Because if we don’t it’s already over. Legislators and underfunded foundations are not going to save us.
Yeah I’d rather no computer or no internet at all than to accept the cloud. I’ll find other hobbies and entertainment.
They don’t care about hobbyists. They don’t need the tech.
But business users do.
I’ll still have tech but my spec requirements will decrease based on price. If that means I am compiling CDDA on a 2008 pentium laptop then so be it!
I would rather somewhat more modern and more energy efficient hardware, but when costs of hardware are so high then the energy costs of old hardware matter less.
Yeah, but guys… Be reasonable.
At best AI will be amazing and steal our jobs, enrich the wealthy further, and destroy the environment.
And at worst it will reach a wall it can’t overcome and continue to fuck up humanity.
It’s a win-win!!1!
microsoft’s own evaluation chills me, because it’s spot on, and THEY STILL WENT FULL FUCKIN HOG deepthroating this garbage:
“Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” an internal Microsoft document admitted.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-is-creating-doom-loops-all-over-the-economy
The massive financial crash that will wipeout those assholes might the only real “win” the rest of us get.
Of course, judging by the last one in 2008 (which, IMHO, I suspect will turn out to be smaller than the AI one), governments the world over will try to save the assholes and make the rest of us pay for it with Austerity - if there’s one thing I’ve learned from living through a couple of major crashes (in the very industries most hardly hit) and several minor ones is that when those in power see that they can rescue the wealthy whilst making the rest pay with no consequences for themselves, they’ll do it again and again in ever more extreme ways, until things at a societal level rather than just crack, actually blow up.
We shall see - there is really no way the rest of us can stop the desperate feeding frenzy amongst the increasingly panicked elites and their politician minions before the whole thing crashes from the systemic accumulation of inbalances, so no matter what we (the common folk) do, we’re going to get a massive AI crash - probably as big as the Net Crash and the 2008 Crash together - the more the feeding freenzy lasts (and governments as usual are activelly trying to delay the day of reckoning, hence making the feeding frenzy last longer and hit deeper) and the more of the broader Economy the sharks can reach, the worse it will be.
3 more years of diarrhea, because people think the slop generating machines are finally making “AI gems”…
It’s not a crisis when it’s artificial… Just stop allowing companies to hoard shit…
That should be long enough to make sure consumer electronics, especially PCs, are dying.
and the industry inflicted it upon itself with the shit eating grin
Nope. As long as demand exists. And you can’t just make it disappear like that.
A ‘memory crisis’ they created artificially and deliberately in order to price gouge as hard as possible.
This is ON SALE, from MicroCenter today- they’re known for having amazing deals.
THIS IS NOT OKAY
that’s server ram (registered ecc), which costs a lot more than ‘normal’ modules
It is yes, but it was 1/4 the price 1 year ago.
Huh, I wonder what’s been happening the last year that would make RAM chips that are almost exclusively used by businesses to go up in price like that?
Still WAY to much, let’s be real. It doesn’t even cook breakfast.
I love the Linux community, because this memory shortage has prompted two quite significant developments. Firstly, quite a substantial speedup of the Zram/Zswap (whichever one it is) systems (and a little improvement on compression), secondly, a potentially whole new memory compression stack referred to as CRAM that could allow reading compressed memory directly at near-DRAM speeds.
While making current memory management more efficient won’t in any case effectively solve the memory shortage, as none of these savings are comparable to effectively giving you a free extra stick, it is awesome that people have spent significant effort on this front.
CRAM is an excellent name
It really is.
Make RAM Doubler Real 👏
The prices keep going up because the willingness to pay isn’t slowing down. As long as people are willing to over pay, the prices will keep going up! Of course the suppliers are predicting price increases, they know there’s a crowd that HAS to have the latest and greatest even when previous gen hardware still hangs, and they have deep pockets and no patience. Then u have people paying for cloud services and shit, increasing demand. This isn’t even getting into the AI craze or cloud computing. I have a friend that won’t build a gaming PC because “it’s cheaper to pay to stream a PC from my laptop” while complaining about ram shortages, which he is actively funding. I am perfectly happy with my ryzen 5 running ddr4 and a rx6600, it plays everything on my 1080p 75hz monitor just fine. I won’t dare think about upgrading till the madness stops, and if it doesnt then fine I’ve been priced out of gaming. My sub 800$ PC is already more expensive than half the cars and motorcycles I have owned 😭 no I’m not spending 2k to build a rig jeeezum
Can we just observe what a bizarre fucking moment we are living in?
Everyone knows the collapse of the AI bubble is imminent and most of those people know it’s going to be the proximal trigger for a global financial collapse and at the very least a long recession.
Everyone knows except the people who are investing billions of dollars into it and their press.
We all know that an industry that spends more than it earns should collapse but I’m not so certain it is imminent.
“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” feels like a quote that holds very true in today’s market.
There is going to be a LOT of used hardware on the market if it does.
Oh they know
Oh they definitely know, it’s a deliberate and methodical way to pump the money around between corporations, move it from consumers to corporations and from corporations to the C-suite. They know the bubble will burst. They only care about how much money they have extracted from it to still come out on top after it all comes crashing down.
It’s a pyramid scheme, we’re the ones at the bottom and we can’t get out.
The investors know too. They just need to hype it up so the next is bigger than them and bail them out.
It’s a pyramid scheme for billionaires. They just hope they’re not at the bottom of the pyramid.
Same as NFTs and every other bubble where it was clear that it was a bubble
Everyone knows the collapse of the AI bubble is imminent
Paul Krugman was predicting the Housing Crash as early as 2004 in his NYT column.
Everyone knows except the people who are investing billions of dollars into AI and their press.
The theory of the modern tech industry is that you can simply outrun your problems. Meta/Facebook has done this repeatedly, leaping over multi-billion-dollar failure after failure based entirely on the inertia of their core product growth combined with low interest rates and a bullish long term economic outlook.
Even in the worst-case scenario, we have such an enormous array of tools to manipulate markets - as demonstrated in 2008 and 2014 and 2020 - that investors are reluctant to sell with a massive federal bailout always on the horizon. And we’re far from the worst-case scenario. '26 Q2 was a historic earnings season. We are in the middle of the biggest bull market in history.
Well, sure, as far as government policy is concerned, the stock market is the economy, no wonder it’s going to be goosed until it collapses.
Put it together aligning with the housing collapse and we gonna be living great.
That is why you sell shovels rather than mine the gold yourself. These memory companies know what they are doing…
Here’s the thing about bubbles - when people believe that collapse is imminent, they hold back and don’t dive in. It is only when the overwhelming majority believe that this new thing can’t lose, is going to change the world, and that we are in a “new paradigm” where the old rules don’t matter, that the bubble has peaked and collapse is imminent. We’ve probably got another year or so before collapse. Too many people are still skeptical.
Timing a bubble pop is notoriously difficult.
I think one thing that’s helping people hang on to delusion is the scarcity of real information. For instance, it’s prefectly possible that 2/3rds of NVIDIA GPUS purchased for data centers are just sitting in a warehouse somewhere, uninstalled. But that’s just a guess based on available data, but we can’t know for sure.
I think with Anthropic and OpenAI’s upcoming IPOs, we’re going to get a lot of information that will eventually filter through the slavish business press and into public consciousness as facts instead of opinions.
I think this bubble is a bit different and not really reliant on the general public’s view or support. They will attempt to ram this down our throats, with violence where necessary, because the more buy-in the better, but the clock is already ticking because they made promises of profit they cannot keep and when the debt comes due they will not be able to pay
Bond market already knows. But this time it’s an ugly double whammy as it’s both the AI companies and the US government that won’t be able to pay their debt, and they are interlinked.
They know their promises cannot be kept. They are building a surveillance state for the government. When the bubble bursts, the government will swoop in and bail them out because they are too big to fail and hand over most of these AI resources to the US government.
I wondering if there is any benefit for me in having all the RAM my motherboard allows for when this bubble burst, and Ram prices fall like a rock to rock bottom.
Honestly, probably not.
I think we’ve reached the top of the S-Curve for personal computing hardware. People are staying with their old hardware longer and software is no longer targeting high end and future devices.
So unless there’s a reason you think you might need that RAM, I’d put the money somewhere else.
People are staying with their old hardware longer
Absolutely 100% my experience too, my computer is a mix of 2-5 year old hardware, and I’m still on the AM4 socket which is 9 years old now! It is a newer motherboard but I started on that socket way back in 2017! The upgrade path for AM4 has been insane. 😋
In the 90’s I wouldn’t have a single component that was 2 years old.
IDK if that’s because I’m older, but definitely it seems the advantage of upgrading every year is diminishing, and the price is increasing. Sometimes I would even buy a new GPU 2 times in the same year. 😜My desktop is 10-year-old gaming PC. If you look at the Steam Survey, it’s about middle-of-the-road today.
It’s not just PC. It’s an open question whether anyone is going to be the next gen of game console, and that’s partially because gaming itselfhas been enshittified, but also for the same reason people aren’t running out to buy 8K TV’s–the minimal improvement in subjective experience is not worth the price.
People are more likely to replace phones because they break than because they are upgrading–partially why Apple and Samsung are doing their DARNEDEST to lock down repairs, so they can drive up the cost of repairs to force people to buy a new phone.
We’re approaching a world where we think of what was formerly “high technology” the same way we think of refrigerators–as basic devices that can generically and permanently do a necessary set of tasks.
I always hated consoles, as a waste of a good computer you couldn’t do anything with but game.
But I think consoles will be fine, consoles are mostly for children, and they will get exclusives to drive up sales.
But this is a bad time to make a new console, still AFAIK both Sony and Microsoft are planning new ones next year?The economics of consoles are in shambles.
It used to be you’d get highish-end hardware at cheaper price because of mass production and manufacturer incentives (made up for on games).
Now with people carrying massive game libraries, they’re less likely to buy new games, at the same time as console gaming becomes enshittified cash grabs, at the same time as tech has hit diminishing returns in an industry where generational hardware sales drive software purchases.
Playstation has a few exclusives, but XBox has literally none–it’s all cross compatible with Windows, and almost every single one of those titles is playable via Steam on Linux. You can build an equivalent PC for the same price or less than the equivalent console, and have improved upgrade and repair paths, plus mods, plus Steam sales… consoles make less and less financial sense every day.
The only console that is doing well is Nintendo, and that’s because they built around content not hardware.
And that said, most kids are growing up gaming on tablets and phones, and they haven’t gone through the evolutionary learning process that a 35-year-old life-long gamer. Chances are you hand an 8-year-old a complex two-stick game and they’ll do about as well as my father would.
I think likely we’ll have a profusion of quirky handheld consoles, but the big box consoles will be replaced with computers.
the big box consoles will be replaced with computers.
I think you are wrong, the PC is dying, and the consoles will have even bigger advantage from mass production in the future.
Most people don’t care to maintain a PC just to play games, and most people don’t really have any other use for a PC anymore.
Even without subsidies from Microsoft and Sony, the current gen consoles were cheaper than an equivalent performing PC when they arrived. But in the future that may not be true, it’s all down to profit maximization, because there is no doubt a console can be sold cheaper than an equivalent performing PC.
I never understood why my dad was always so cheap until now.
You “used” to pay this much for something and now it skyrocketed, so you can’t live with yourself paying that higher price when it has been much cheaper for so long. Maybe he thought prices were going to come down again.
I don’t think the prices of RAM are ever going to come down. At least as long as people keep paying, which they do.
Well, people aren’t really paying. Theoretically, large AI investment groups are paying. I say theoretically because as far as I understand it, they’ve mostly promised to buy the output but I don’t think have actually made good on buying it. The manufactured scarcity is being realized as increased memory costs, but the contracts are still landing even though the biggest contract may not actually be filled in the future (AI bubble). It’s why memory makers are trying to get Apple and co to commit to today’s prices for the next 3 years, because if they do and the big contract falls through, they still get their insane profit margin baked in for a bit and then can stockpile / price fix / sell through to market.
The big wrench here will be if Chinese memory fabs come online. If that big contract (AI) defaults, existing contracts are going to be very much worthless as folks would rather cancel them and fill orders at CXMT. So you may see a lot of consumer memory start filling from those fabs as they take market share while traditional players try to price fix. So the real question is, will cxmt try to capture market or play price fixing with the current cartel? My money is on market share.
My guess is price fixing, maybe slightly undercutting the current giants. Entering the market is only worth it because the prices are high.
Eh, I think they see more power and influence in gaining market share and being the provider of that technology, and then cornering the market. Prices are currently high, but they tend to do a better job of playing the long game.
