memory prices have become entirely divorced from reality
No, because that is the reality we live in.
It is probably not just Ai companies to blame for, but also the cartel of RAM manufacturers.
Good time to be someone who uses hardware for a decade and not need an upgrade.
Unless that decade happens go end now. Then you have to be someone who uses hardware for 2 decades.
So this weekend I went looking for DDR 4 and even those were 2-3X times the cost from two years ago. Honestly fuck AI.
It won’t matter the AI or not at this point. This has baked and changed production so much that even if AI fell out tomorrow, it’d take years to retool and undo the amount of tooling chip makers have done to commit HBM DRAM.
Like a lot of the tooling that was done was done on the back of speculation. Now that it’s done, undoing it would cost a fortune and that price is going to be amortized by the customer. And since we’ve baked this new higher price for so long, it’s going to take forever to cool it back off.
AI or not, these prices are the new normal price. Things like ARM desktops, those are going to be the average consumer computer. Things with discrete GPUs and RAM that is user serviceable, that’s becoming niche. There’s already been way too much investment in that direction to go back at this point. I mean you even look at DDR6 desktops, CAMM2 is the compromise normal there too. You don’t buy 4x8GB, you buy a 32GB block, that’s it. You have the one slot, that’s it.
The AI thing, it’s just pushed a lot of other things past the point of return. While there might be some reduction after the fall of AI, even if chip makers swapped back to desktop product as fast as they can, they’ve invested so deeply into AI, that fast as they can is years before consumers will ever see relief, if ever.
At this point, I see PCs adopting the Apple way of putting it all in a single chip approach. Just because, that’s where a lot of investment has already gone and if RAM tanks, they’ll want to hold onto whatever investments they’ve already made rather try and blaze a new path.
It was done on purpose, to keep us from building and tinkering with our own technology.
walled garden baby
e: same reason they’re fucking with 3d printing
I think prices will have to come down a fair bit once the demand from AI disappears. Yes the manufacturers are going to need to pay for the new capacity they built, but they’re also going to need demand to be high enough for the new capacity to not look like a terrible investment, and that will probably mean lower prices when they don’t have data centers filling up the next few years of their production.
Making consumer hardware again will mean retooling and I’d be willing to bet that data centers will be able to swapl their software to cloud based desktops/gaming a lot faster than hardware manufactures.
Keep artificially raising those prices and you’ll soon find that the “demand” has shifted to something else entirely. The whole world, it seems, is pricing customers out of the market. How does that make sense (unless you are going for dependence and reliance upon the government)? My new mantra is “bring back filing cabinets and stationery”, it’s cheaper and uses less electricity and paper.
That’s not likely. What is likely is that computers that can still work with very small memory footprints become more popular. Microsoft is going to scramble. Apple is going to raise prices, and has already started selling cell phones on payment plans. Linux can often be better at running with low-memory setups, and those are going to be more and more popular.
It’s not just computers. Everything that has some memory or RAM will be more expensive. TVs, phones, /tablets, home appliances. Of course some people will get a latest of everything, but a lot of people will realize that they actually don’t need a new model every other year. It will not be just buying because why not, but only out of necessity and most likely second hand.
