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Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business

investors.micron.com

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Re: Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business

#121

Post by michaelt »

theelous3 wrote: post #45
httpz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The brand aware "consumers" are really just DIY PC builders, which is relatively a small number. Enterprise DRAM business is doing so great that Micron just doesn't see the consumer market is worth chasing. This is bad for consumers though since DRAM prices are skyrocketing and now we have one less company making consumer DRAM.

The people who occupy the b2b ram buying kind of jobs are not aliens from another planet. Brand awareness in consumer markets, especially ones that are so closely tied to people's jobs (nerds gonna nerd) is going to have a knock on effect. It's not like a clothing brand or something.

Sometimes reputation and suchlike in the consumer market can directly boost your B2B business. Consumers and professionals alike will look at backblaze drive reliability figures.

Other times professionals will sneer at a consumer product, or a consumer product can diminish your brand. Nobody's wiring a data centre with Monster Cables, and nobody's buying Cisco because they were impressed by Linksys.

Re: Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business

#122

Post by Felger »

Very sad news. Crucial Micron is (soon "was") an great brand for computer assembly and upgrade. It is sad to see the brand rushing to the "easy money" stream. This won't be forgotten when the current bubble will evenually pop and they might meet the same fate as the now forgotten Elpida (who bought Qimonda wich also failed).

The MX500 1st gen (fw M3CR023) was the second best SATA SSD range with the kings the Samsung 860 Evo and Pro. P3 and P3+ were very good drives with great princing for some time, not comparable to the Samsung 970 Evo and Evo+ though.

Never had a failure on about 500 units of crucial MX300/500/P1/P3/P3+/P5. Always updated their firmwares, though.

Comparatively, had lot of sluggish controllers on Sandisk/WD green/blue SATA SSD, and some BX500. But a lot better than any entry level generic Phison S3111 based SSD.

Also very few failures with DDR3/4 DIMMs and SODIMMs. Less than with Kinston and Corsair modules. About the same as Samsung OEM modules from HP/Dell.

Now let's just hope Samsung will not follow in their tracks. I don't see WD-Sandisk going corporate only since they do not make DRAMs modules.

Re: Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business

#123

Post by inferiorhuman »

sheepscreek wrote: post #90
Animats wrote: post #10

Wow. They're not selling off the business, they're totally exiting it. This is a big loss. Crucial offered a supply chain direct from Micron. Most other consumer DRAM sources pass through middlemen, where fake parts and re-labeled rejects can be inserted.

They are rerouting RAMs for consumers to enterprise for server build up - for higher margins I’m sure. MAG7 will happily pay more but poor consumers like us can’t - this is more bad news for us.

  They are rerouting RAMs for consumers to enterprise for server build up
Enterprise? No. Micron is explicitly focusing on AI.

Re: Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business

#124

Post by linsomniac »

freetime2 wrote: post #7

Crucial was always a brand that I associated with quality, and I used their memory to upgrade several MacBooks back when it was still possible to upgrade the memory on MacBooks. That being said, the only SSD I’ve ever had fail on me was from Crucial. In recent builds I have been using less expensive memory from other companies with varying degrees of brand recognizability, and never had a problem. And the days of bei…

I've long (very, very long) been a storage snob. Originally via the IBM UltraStar drives, and continued with the Intel SSDs. Even with good backups, a drive failure is often a pain in the ass. Slightly less so with RAID.

IBM really locked me in on the Ultrastar back in the mid '90s. Sure, it has proven itself to be a great product. But some of the first ones I bought, one of the drives arrived failed. I called the vendor I bought it from and they said they wouldn't replace it, I'd have to get a refurb from IBM. So I called IBM, when I told them I had just bought it they said I needed to call the place I bought it from because otherwise I'd get a refurb. I explained I had already called them. "Oh, who did you buy it from?" I told them. "Can you hold on a minute?" ... "Hi, I've got [NAME] on the line from [VENDOR] and they'll be happy to send you a replacement."

Re: Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business

#126

Post by mschuster91 »

KapKap66 wrote: post #92
20after4 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the MBAs and private equity firms are about 80% of the way through ruining everything that was ever good in the world. They've been accelerating exponentially. Probably won't be long now. I like to think it can't get much worse but I thought that several times before and I've been proven wrong each time. Optimism is getting much harder to hold on it.

They didn't mess up Valve yet :)

Try buying GTA San Andreas on Steam - if you didn't buy it before some cutoff date a few years ago, all you can get is the shit AI textures "remaster".

Steam is a powerful force, and I applaud them for staying private and not IPO'ing - but their founders won't be around forever (hell Gabe, please transfer Steam into some sort of public-good trust or whatever, or have provisions in your will making it impossible for whomever inherits the company to enshittify), and sadly even they can't beat down on the studios too hard lest they end up like Netflix.

Re: Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business

#127

Post by kreco »

sgnelson wrote: post #93

I feel like the "democratization of technology" is on the back slide. For the longest time, we had more and more access to high end technology at very reasonable price points. Now it feels like if you're not Facebook, Google, OpenAI, etc. etc. computation isn't for you. I hope this is just a blip, but I think there is a trend over the past few years.

Interesting take.

In a naive way, when rich entities are interested in a limited resource it's basically over.

Somehow I can see a parallel with the housing crisis where the price go higher and higher.

I can't see both of them ending anytime soon unless there is a major paradigm shift in our life.

Re: Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business

#128

Post by Felger »

RedShift1 wrote: post #29

Their MX500 series SSDs were just king of price, performance and reliability. I even installed them in industrial PCs with intense vibrations and large temperature cycles, they're still chugging along like it's nothing.

Agreed, the first gen MX500 with M3CR023 fw proved IMHO to be the second most reliable SATA SSD 2.5" form factor with the Samsung 860 range SSDs (860 Evo / Pro).

Sadly, the MX500 is now difficult to find in western europe. Only lower grade BX500, still quite reliable but not as fast as the MX500 with cache + DRAM.

Had quite a lot of controller issues (become sluggish for periods of time) with the sandisk/WD ones like green/blue and SSD plus.

Re: Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business

#130

Post by fn-mote »

walterbell wrote: post #20
Animats wrote: post #10

Wow. They're not selling off the business, they're totally exiting it. This is a big loss. Crucial offered a supply chain direct from Micron. Most other consumer DRAM sources pass through middlemen, where fake parts and re-labeled rejects can be inserted.

Should countries have a upper limit on the ratio of server:client memory supply chain capacity? If no one can buy client hardware to access the cloud, how would cloud providers survive after driving their customers to extinction? It shouldn't be possible for one holding company (OpenAI) to silently buy all available memory wafer capacity from Samsung and SK Hynix, before the rest of civilization even has the opportun…

These suggestions seem to me part of an absurd struggle against basic market economics.

This isn’t antitrust because the companies aren’t reselling it to you at a much higher price after cornering the market (cough cough Ticketmaster & scalpers).

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