You make more money selling the good stuff. It's like this in just about every industry.
RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung
61–70 of 427 posts
Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung
#62I'm running a box I put together in 2014 with an i5-4460 (3.2ghz), 16 GB of RAM, GeForce 750ti, first gen SSD, ASRock H97M Pro4 motherboard with a reasonable PSU, case and a number of fans. All of that parted out at the time was $700. I've never been more fearful of components breaking than current day. With GPU and now memory prices being crazy, I hope I never have to upgrade. I don't know how but the box is still g…
I agree with you on SSDs, that was the last upgrade that felt like flipping the “modern computer” switch overnight. Everything since has been incremental unless you’re doing ML or high-end gaming.
I know it's not the same. But I think a lot of people had a similar feeling going from Intel-Macbooks to Apple Silicon. An insane upgrade that I still can't believe.
Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung
#63I'm running a box I put together in 2014 with an i5-4460 (3.2ghz), 16 GB of RAM, GeForce 750ti, first gen SSD, ASRock H97M Pro4 motherboard with a reasonable PSU, case and a number of fans. All of that parted out at the time was $700. I've never been more fearful of components breaking than current day. With GPU and now memory prices being crazy, I hope I never have to upgrade. I don't know how but the box is still g…
A few years later but similarly - I am still running a machine built spur-of-the-moment in a single trip to Micro Center for about $500 in late 2019 (little did we know what was coming in a few months!). I made one small upgrade in probably ~2022 to a Ryzen 5800X w/ 64GB of RAM but otherwise untouched. It still flies through basically anything & does everything I need, but I'm dreading when any of the major parts go and I have to fork out double or triple the original cost for replacements...
Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
> two versions of the same phone with different processors That's hilarious, which phone is this?
Basically every Galaxy phone comes in two versions. One with Exynos and one with Snapdragon. It's regional though. US always gets the Snapdragon phones while Europe and mostly Asia gets the Exynos version. My understanding is that the Exynos is inferior in a lot of ways, but also cheaper.
In the past using Snapdragon CPUs for the U.S. made sense due to Qualcomm having much better support for the CDMA frequencies needed by Verizon. Probably no longer relevant since the 5G transition though.
Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Am I crazy for thinking that anyone using computers for doing their job and making their income should have a $5k/year computer hardware budget at a minimum ? I’m not saying to do what I do and buy a $7k laptop and a $15k desktop every year but compared to revenue it seems silly to be worrying about a few thousand dollars per year delta. I buy the best phones and desktops money can buy, and upgrade them often, becaus…
This is a crazy out of touch perspective. Depending on salary, 2 magnitudes at $5k is $500k. That amount of money for the vast majority of humans across the planet is unfathomable. No one is worried about if the top 5% can afford DRAM. Literally zero people.
The vast majority of humans across the planet aren’t making their money with their computer, which was the qualifier in the first line of my comment.
Furthermore, even if they did, the vast majority of them still won’t be using their computer to generate revenue - they’ll be using an employer-provided one and the things I’m talking about have nothing to do with them.
Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sears would like to have a word about how healthy intra-company competition is.
Sears had horizontal market where all of it did basically the same thing. Samsung is a huge conglomerate of several completely different vertical with lots of redundant components. It makes absolutely no sense to apply the lessons from one into the other.
I think what the GP was referring to was the "new" owner of Sears, who reorganized the company into dozens of independent business units in the early 2010s (IT, HR, apparel, electronics, etc). Not departments, either; full-on internal businesses intended as a microcosm of the free market.
Each of these units were then given access to an internal "market" and directed to compete with each other for funding.
The idea was likely to try and improve efficiency... But what ended up happening is siloing increased, BUs started infighting for a dwindling set of resources (beyond normal politics you'd expect at an organization that size; actively trying to fuck each other over), and cohesion decreased.
It's often pointed to as one of the reasons for their decline, and worked out so badly that it's commonly believed their owner (who also owns the company holding their debt and stands to immensely profit if they go bankrupt) desired this outcome... to the point that he got sued a few years ago by investors over the conflict of interest and, let's say "creative" organizational decisions.
Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung
#67In the 90s, Motorola Mobile used Cypress SRAMs and not Motorola SRAMs.
Pricing.
Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I've never been more fearful of components breaking than current day. The mid 90s was pretty scary too. Minimum wage was $4.25 and a new Pentium 133 was $935 in bulk.
If you were in minimum wage jn the 90s your lifelihood likely didn't rely on Pentium processors. Also, it is frightening how close that is to current day minimum wage.
I was an unemployed student then -- a generous family member gifted me my first Windows PC, and it cost about the same as a used car.
Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Am I crazy for thinking that anyone using computers for doing their job and making their income should have a $5k/year computer hardware budget at a minimum ? I’m not saying to do what I do and buy a $7k laptop and a $15k desktop every year but compared to revenue it seems silly to be worrying about a few thousand dollars per year delta. I buy the best phones and desktops money can buy, and upgrade them often, becaus…
I mean, as a frontline underpaid rural IT employee with no way to move outward from where I currently live, show me where I’m gonna put $5k a year into this budget out of my barren $55k/year salary. (And, mind you - this apparently is “more” than the local average by only around $10-15k.) I’m struggling to buy hardware already as it is, and all these prices have basically fucked me out of everything . I’m riding rigs…
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Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung
#70I'm running a box I put together in 2014 with an i5-4460 (3.2ghz), 16 GB of RAM, GeForce 750ti, first gen SSD, ASRock H97M Pro4 motherboard with a reasonable PSU, case and a number of fans. All of that parted out at the time was $700. I've never been more fearful of components breaking than current day. With GPU and now memory prices being crazy, I hope I never have to upgrade. I don't know how but the box is still g…
Am I crazy for thinking that anyone using computers for doing their job and making their income should have a $5k/year computer hardware budget at a minimum ? I’m not saying to do what I do and buy a $7k laptop and a $15k desktop every year but compared to revenue it seems silly to be worrying about a few thousand dollars per year delta. I buy the best phones and desktops money can buy, and upgrade them often, becaus…
> maybe $250/month (...) which you can then use to go and earn 100x that.
25k/month? Most people will never come close to earn that much. Most developers in the third world don't make that in a full year, but are affected by raises in PC parts' prices.
I agree with the general principle of having savings for emergencies. For a Software Engineer, that should probably include buying a good enough computer for them, in case they need a new one. But the figures themselves seem skewed towards the reality of very well-paid SV engineers.