The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences • Hacker News Board

Re: The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences

#601

Post by Mavvie » Mon, May 10, 2021, 2:54 AM UTC

throwawayboise wrote: post #341

Mavvie wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like each year cars get way safer. It started with blind spot detectors/cameras, and modern cars will even brake automatically and keep you in your lane (or at least warn you if you leave it). Maybe new features like self-driving aren't as interesting, but I would buy a new car instead of a used one just for the perceived improved safety. I don't know if there's any research showing that these features actuall…

Many of these features add minimal benefit if you do some common-sense stuff such as, don't drive when you're really tired (or drunk, or on drugs, etc.); don't play with your phone while you're driving; don't read, do your makeup, shave, etc. while you're driving. IOW put your focus on the task at hand and you don't really need blind spot detectors. Of course the reality is that people are pretty bad at these things.

Yeah, as you say, reality is far from the ideal. But I believe that even without those obvious problems, people still make mistakes and the extra couple layers of protection could save your life.

I was in a near crash without doing any of those things (night driving on a very fast road in an area I was unfamiliar with, and misread the shape of the road). I panicked and swerved without checking my blind spot (it was an empty road, or so I thought) and almost caused the other person to crash. More advanced blind spot monitoring systems could have largely removed the danger of the situation I was in, although obviously there is a lot that I could/should have done better myself. I think the next year's model had a HUD which showed blind spot status.

Re: The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences

#602

Post by marcosdumay » Mon, May 10, 2021, 3:02 AM UTC

salawat wrote: post #464

marcosdumay wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> especially for people with less interest in tech Hum... I can program in something around a dozen languages, can find my way around the Linux kernel code as well as enterprise software, can administer OSes... Yet, I am completely unable to set my fridge's clock (why does it have one?) since I lost its manual. I have spent some time trying. IoT and smart things are a great equalizer. Nobody can handle them. Some tim…

The great VCR clock boss. Ah... Those were the days. Those were how I learned to finagle things that the manual was gone for. Still not sure whether I should consider the result brain damage though. I can set a VCR clock, but I can't grok people. Longer I live the more I wonder if I learned patience for the wrong thing.

Oh, I've never met a VCR that the clock I could not set.

But they usually had a panel with lots of instructions and well named buttons. That's nothing like today's devices.

For the notice, my fridge has a single button, and 2 independent displays (temperature and clock). Both short and long presses change the temperature.

Re: The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences

#603

Post by ecpottinger » Mon, May 10, 2021, 3:09 AM UTC

neltnerb wrote: post #193

smiley1437 wrote: post #58

Interestingly, there is an embedded video in that article that explains the issue specific to the automotive shortage - it's because the automotive industry cancelled a lot of chip orders in anticipation of low vehicle demand and that caused chip makers to reduce their production for the kinds of chips that go into cars, and now it takes time to ramp back up: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2021/03/02/how-the-global-compu…

I get that this is a potential big problem, but I had to stop reading when the dog washing company blamed needing to respin a new board on a chip being out of stock due to this. I'm sorry, but if you aren't buying enough chips to build all the boards you want to build of a revision, this is just what happens, chip shortage or no. Stuff gets obsoleted all the time, it doesn't take a chip shortage. Blaming a black swan…

I had a customer years ago using a Vic-20 as the controller for his greenhouse. The Vic-20 at that time had already been discontinued.

He bought in two units to fix to have in stock since he already had a unit running his greenhouse.

I asked him why use Vic-20s when there were a number of controllers already on the market. He said the problem he never knew when the present unit may fail and the Vic-20 did the job of an $10,000 controller which he did not know how long it would take to get the present controller to work on his system and the present one works fine.

It has been decades since I did the work and I would not be surprised if the system is still working today because he was prepared.

Re: The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences

#604

Post by neilv » Mon, May 10, 2021, 3:11 AM UTC

baybal2 wrote: post #536

exmadscientist wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

STM32 isn't the only Cortex-M microcontroller series in the world, you know. They're popular because they're pretty decent, low cost, have good dev boards and offer a wide variety of parts. However, their software sucks (okay, so do all of the other options...), their peripherals are not as good as some of the other options (in particular I'm thinking of peripheral clock trees when I say this, among other things), an…

> They're popular because they're pretty decent, low cost, have good dev boards and offer a wide variety of parts. Now find a single person who can program bare hardware on a short notice on above Arduino level. The current chip shortage has claimed 6 of our firmware devs, all hired by companies ready to spend just any money for anybody "who can replace that ____ing STM|NXP|Renesas thing" People downstream in the ind…

> The current chip shortage has claimed 6 of our firmware devs, all hired by companies ready to spend just any money for anybody "who can replace that ____ing STM|NXP|Renesas thing"

Condolences on the loss of coworkers.

But this seems interesting to software people who haven't been doing embedded, but who can wrangle C well enough to adapt (quickly?) to embedded constraints and interfaces.

Re: The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences

#605

Post by pfranz » Mon, May 10, 2021, 3:14 AM UTC

ineedasername wrote: post #378

pfranz wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never heard of Carvana, but test drives aren't something we should need dealerships for. Having 1 or 2 cars of each is all you need. Technically a low-end model would be fine, but I can see them only offering the highest end model to upsell features. Then you do what brick-and-mortars have complained about for years and order exactly what you want online. Personally, I think renting a car for a medium term is wa…

I'm not saying things couldn't work differently, only that the incentives don't align to make that very easy to accomplish. Tesla did it because they had the advantage of looking at the current status quo and saying "Yeah, no thanks, we'll retain control of whole process." I get what you mean about certain aspects, but I would not describe the process of buying a car in that way. I don't know what you mean. I don't t…

> you can avoid the 4-hour dealership visit pretty easily these days

I'm not a frequent new car buyer. The last two times I bought a car (over the past 5 years) we had agreed on a specific car, had cash in hand, and did not have a trade-in to negotiate. The wait wasn't over "coming to a deal" or anything. It just seemed like bureaucratic paperwork process that would normally be built into the haggling; waiting on tags, title, insurance or some other seemingly made up step. Late in the paperwork process there were upsells already added on to the car.

I have zero idea what the average new car buyer is, but I feel like most will drive a bit to find the specific car they want but they want servicing to be nearby. I get that coupling financing, trade-in, test driving and purchasing is good for the customer. I also don't see things changing in the next 20 years, but black swan events do happen. Every decade or two someone, like Tesla, tries to shake things up and other events like auto bailouts or cash-for-clunkers has potential to disrupt things. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if EV adoption erodes dealership service center margins. I know cars.com was trying before Carvana to side-step the dealer process and Carmax seems to have found success--like you said, all eventually settled on used cars.

Re: The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences

#606

Post by CamperBob2 » Mon, May 10, 2021, 3:14 AM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #542

baybal2 wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually a "feature." Automakers like to have easily sun-settable, hard to replace parts to quickly remove old cars off the market. Now, they want to do it even quicker. DRMed autoparts are a new craze. A tsunami of them is coming in 2021+ cars. They all now want to do the the John Deere trick. They gave the industry a very bad example to follow.

As an employee of John Deere I can assure you that is false. We are proud that machines made in the 1950s are still in regular use, and we make a ton of money providing replacement parts for machines that old. We have also spent large amount of dollars over the last decade replacing electronics that have gone obsolete, not to mention buying and storing spare parts so we can continue to replace those old electronics f…

Our bottom line would look a lot better if we didn't have to redesign perfectly good electronics all the time.

Well, I can think of at least one easy way to avoid that problem. If you document your hardware and put a leash on your lawyers, you'll find that your customers and their independent service organizations will be glad to take on this responsibility for you.

Re: The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences

#607

Post by sgtnoodle » Mon, May 10, 2021, 3:18 AM UTC

syshum wrote: post #576

sgtnoodle wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I treated myself to a medium frozen yogurt yesterday, no toppings, after carrying a sheet of peg board about a mile. It was $8 after tip. Maybe that's small tourist town price rather than inflation, but all the restaurants in the area definitely jacked prices up 50% over the last two years. I had to carry the peg board from the in-town hardware store because it wouldn't fit in my Mustang. A Ford Mustang has the same…

>>A Ford Mustang has the same sticker price as it did when I bought mine 10 years ago. So, if there's inflation, Mustangs have comparatively gotten cheaper. I am not sure where you are getting your prices, in 2011 Base Mustang v6 coupe sticker was $22,145. Adjusted for CPI to official 2021 dollars that would be $26,076. Base model 2021 Mustang v6 Coupe starts at 27,155, which is about 4% more than CPI indicated would…

I think you're possibly reading more into my statements than there was. No need to be so confrontational.

Retail price for the V6 premium trim Mustang I bought was about $26000 retail. The modern equivalent I would say is a V4 with basic trim, because the 2021 base model comes with considerably more technology than the 2011 premium. The only practical difference is leather vs. cloth seats. The retail price for that car is about 27000. So yeah, I think you can get the roughly the same amount of Mustang today for the same price 10 years ago.

If you look at the V4 premium, then yeah it's about 20% more expensive than the base model which tracks estimated inflation. You're getting considerably more technology than the premium model a decade ago, though. It's a better car. Maybe not 20% better though.

I'm laughing about the peg board prices. You're calling me out with numbers, but it seems like you're ignoring the dimensions, and I explicitly claimed that my estimate was unsubstantiated. I just looked it up as well, and the equivalent quality sheet is $19 per 4'x8' sheet at the closest Lowes. I bought a 4'x4' sheet locally for $19. So, I only paid 2x. Seems like a high premium still. I wonder what home improvement stores pay wholesale?

Re: The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences

#608

Post by valuearb » Mon, May 10, 2021, 3:26 AM UTC

smiley1437 wrote: post #58

Interestingly, there is an embedded video in that article that explains the issue specific to the automotive shortage - it's because the automotive industry cancelled a lot of chip orders in anticipation of low vehicle demand and that caused chip makers to reduce their production for the kinds of chips that go into cars, and now it takes time to ramp back up: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2021/03/02/how-the-global-compu…

And auto makers are estimating they won’t be able to ship 1M cars this quarter because of chip shortages, but that’s less than 4% of demand. That’s no crisis.

Let’s face it, automakers not only made their own bed here, but as soon as they canceled their orders PC makers swooped in and claimed the released production because PC sales were through the roof.

Next year Pc sales aren’t likely to continue at this pace. We are less than 2 years from a semiconductor glut.

Re: The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences

#609

Post by ecpottinger » Mon, May 10, 2021, 3:32 AM UTC

robomartin wrote: post #285

neltnerb wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that this is a potential big problem, but I had to stop reading when the dog washing company blamed needing to respin a new board on a chip being out of stock due to this. I'm sorry, but if you aren't buying enough chips to build all the boards you want to build of a revision, this is just what happens, chip shortage or no. Stuff gets obsoleted all the time, it doesn't take a chip shortage. Blaming a black swan…

> I had to stop reading when the dog washing company blamed needing to respin a new board on a chip being out of stock due to this ... > if you aren't buying enough chips to build all the boards you want to build of a revision Friendly advice: If you are going to be a consultant to industry, don't post comments like this. As someone who has been manufacturing tech products for over thirty years, my first reaction to…

I wrote a simple inventory program for a yachting company, after entering the inventory data into the computer it turns out a lot of expensive parts had been double ordered and even triple ordered.

But the Ontario added a luxury tax and sales tanked. It looks like they had over three million dollars in excess inventory. And soon the company went bankrupt, to this day I think the company would had pulled thru if it did not have the extra money in the bank instead of inventory they could not use.

Re: The global chip shortage is starting to have consequences

#610

Post by sgtnoodle » Mon, May 10, 2021, 3:34 AM UTC

syshum wrote: post #576

sgtnoodle wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I treated myself to a medium frozen yogurt yesterday, no toppings, after carrying a sheet of peg board about a mile. It was $8 after tip. Maybe that's small tourist town price rather than inflation, but all the restaurants in the area definitely jacked prices up 50% over the last two years. I had to carry the peg board from the in-town hardware store because it wouldn't fit in my Mustang. A Ford Mustang has the same…

>>A Ford Mustang has the same sticker price as it did when I bought mine 10 years ago. So, if there's inflation, Mustangs have comparatively gotten cheaper. I am not sure where you are getting your prices, in 2011 Base Mustang v6 coupe sticker was $22,145. Adjusted for CPI to official 2021 dollars that would be $26,076. Base model 2021 Mustang v6 Coupe starts at 27,155, which is about 4% more than CPI indicated would…

For fun I looked up a 2011 vs. 2021 Honda Civic. That's likely a much more apples-to-apples comparison. About $16k to $21k, or 31%. That's about 2.7% per year, which seems to be slightly more than claimed inflation as well.

That's interesting, I think. I suspect cars are becoming more expensive to manufacture over time due to more stringent regulations. Lower emissions, more active safety features, etc. Maybe certain raw materials have become more expensive as well? Or maybe NRE costs have gone up across the board now that electric cars are becoming mainstream?