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RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

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161–170 of 427 posts

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#161
post #6
post #5

To be fair, Samsung's divisions having guns pointed at each other is nothing new. This is the same conglomerate that makes their own chip division fight for placement in their own phones, constantly flip-flopping between using Samsung or Qualcomm chips at the high end, Samsung or Mediatek chips at the low end, or even a combination of first-party and third-party chips in different variants of ostensibly the same devi…

> two versions of the same phone with different processors That's hilarious, which phone is this?

I might be out of date, but last I knew, it was "most of them."

International models tended to use Samsung's Exynos processors, while the ones for the North American market used Snapdragons or whatever.

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#162
post #73
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's an absolutely deranged opinion. Most tech jobs can be done on a $500 laptop. You realise some people don't even make your computer budget in net income every year, right?

Most tech jobs could be done on a $25 ten year old smartphone with a cracked screen and bulging battery. That’s exactly my point. Underspending on your tools is a misallocation of resources.

That's a bizarrely extreme position. For almost everyone ~$2000-3000 PC from several years ago is indistinguishable from one they can buy now from a productivity standpoint. Nobody is talking about $25 ten year old smartphones. Of course claiming that a $500 laptop is sufficient is also a severe exaggeration, a used desktop, perhaps...

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#163

Earlier 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.

That's kinda like saying the mid-20s were pretty scary too, minimum wage was AMOUNT and a MacBook M4 Max was $3000. . In the mid-90s me and my brother were around 14 and 10, earning nothing but a small amount of monthly pocket money. We were fighting so much over our family PC, that we decided to save and put together a machine from second-hands parts we could get our hands on. We built him a 386 DX 40 or 486SX2 50 o…

> That's kinda like saying the mid-20s were pretty scary too, minimum wage was AMOUNT and a MacBook M4 Max was $3000..

A powerbook 5300 was $6500 in 1995, which is $13,853 today.

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#164
post #18

I'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 got a used M1 MacBook Air a year ago.

By far the fastest computer I’ve ever used. It felt like the SSD leap of years earlier.

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#165
post #138
post #125

"The price of eggs has nothing on the price of computer memory right now.". A dozen eggs went to ~$5. They are eggs and most people use what, max 12 eggs a month? Get out of here with that trite garbage. Everyone knew that the egg shortage was due to the extreme step the US does of culling herds infected with avian flu and that they were transitory.

Surprisingly, apparently Americans average 279 eggs per year per person or 24 per month. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/02/28/why-ameri... (This is not a comment making any judgements about cost or the state of the economy, I was just surprised to find it that high)

Maybe if you include all the eggs in processed food like cookies or cakes and in restaurants or other catering operations you reach that number? And eggs consumed at home could still be around 12 per person?

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me that reads 3x, not "almost 10x". The main differrence here is probably power. A desktop/server is happy to send 15W to the SSD and hundreds of watts to the CPU, while a laptop wants the SSD running in the ~1 watt range and the CPU in the 10s of watts range.

There's over twice as much content in the first test. It's around 3.8gb/s vs 30gb/s if you divide both folder size and both du durations. That makes it 7.9 times faster and I'm comfortable calling this "almost 10 times".

The total size isn't what matters in this case but rather the total number of files/directories that need to be traversed (and their file sizes summed).

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#167
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

8GB or 16GB of RAM is absolutely a usable machine for many software development and IT tasks, especially if you set up compressed swap to stretch it further. Of course you need to run something other than Windows or macOS. It's only very niche use cases such as media production or running local LLM's that will absolutely require more RAM.

> something other than Windows or macOS > 8GB

No modern IDE either. Nor a modern Linux desktop environment either (they are not that much more memory efficient than Macos or windows). Yes you can work with not much more than a text editor. But why?

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Except nobody earns the minimum wage today, it's less than 1/2 of 1% of US labor. The median full-time wage is now $62,000. You can start at $13 at almost any national retailer, and $15 or above at CVS / Walgreens / Costco. The cashier positions require zero work background, zero skill, zero education. You can make $11-$13 at what are considered bad jobs, like flipping pizzas at Little Caesars.

>You can make $11-$13 at what are considered bad jobs, like flipping pizzas at Little Caesars.

Holy moly! 11 whole dollars an hour!?

Okay, so we went from $4.25 to $11.00. That's a 159% change. Awesome!

Now, lets look at... School, perhaps? So I can maybe skill-up out of Little Caesars and start building a slightly more comfortable life.

Median in-state tuition in 1995: $2,681. Median in-state tuation in 2025: $11,610. Wait a second! That's a 333% change. Uh oh.

Should we do the same calculation with housing...? Sure, I love making myself more depressed. 1995: $114,600. 2025: $522,200. 356% change. Fuck.

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#169

Earlier 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.

1990-1997 averaged >4% yearly compounded minimum wage hikes, which is probably about where it should have been. The late 90s to today has been <1.25%.

Re: RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

#170

I really wanted to build a new PC this year, which is obviously not happening anymore. But I do have 2x16GB DDR5 SODIMMs from my laptop that I'm not using, after I upgraded to 64GB a while back. Now I wonder if I can build a tiny PC around those? Does anyone make motherboards that support DDR5 laptop memory?

A bunch of the NUC models use laptop RAM, and often have barebones kits. Looks like ASUS has a decent range of kits and prebuilt, but you may be able to find boards. If you want something expandable, look for the "Pro" and "Extreme" range. I had one of the first gaming-oriented NUC's a while back, Hades Canyon, highly capable.
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