Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business

investors.micron.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 407 posts

Re: Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business

#351

Post by Retric »

jack_tripper wrote: post #344
barrkel wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel this vibe. It's part of the reason I invested in a monster home workstation - threadripper 9995wx, 768gb ecc ram, 96gb Blackwell pro. I expect it may easily be the last proper home PC I buy that is scaled in line with the scaling that I grew up with in the 80s and 90s. Increasingly, what we have are mobile terminals - possibly with a dock for monitor connections - for remote big iron. And the continuous push f…

The Terry Davis tinfoil-hat version of me has a theory that this wider industry trend of pushing away consumers from general purpose home computers towards only using remote datacenters from locked down mobile/thin edge devices, is supported by both industries and governments because: Number one, you become a recurring subscription instead of a one and done deal, making it incredibly profitable for industry And numbe…

My suspicion is it’s mostly a result of the slowing pace of computing growth.

When computers go obsolete in 2 years nobody wants them on their balance sheets, when they last 6 sales go down and you get more years of profit from owning them. This hasn’t been an instantaneous transition, but a low shift in how the industry operates.

Re: Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business

#352

Post by squigz »

prmoustache wrote: post #288
squigz wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Actually, his experience is the standard PC enthusiast experience for the vast majority of DIY'ers in many nations. I have to genuinely question this. I haven't heard of anyone I know buying PC components at a physical store in like 20 years, and I know people from various nations.

There are still physical stores in most cities so I guess they are still selling if they aren't out of business. They cater for a more enthusiast/gaming oriented population than in the past but still. You have to take into account that same day delivery from amazon and the likes is only a real thing in the USA. Most other markets do not have the same service, even with accounts such as Amazon Prime. There is only one…

Not having same day delivery isn't really a dealbreaker for most people. Most people aren't like, "I need to upgrade my computer RIGHT NOW"

And it is available in other countries.

Re: Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business

#353

Post by squigz »

dan-bailey wrote: post #341
squigz wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Actually, his experience is the standard PC enthusiast experience for the vast majority of DIY'ers in many nations. I have to genuinely question this. I haven't heard of anyone I know buying PC components at a physical store in like 20 years, and I know people from various nations.

Anecdata != data. That MicroCenter continues to exist tells me that there's at least enough people shopping for parts in meatspace that there's net revenue to be had.

I guess I really wasn't clear enough.

At no point was I entirely denying that some people go to physical stores to buy components. I was just countering the idea that a majority of people do so, as opposed to ordering online.

Re: Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business

#354

Post by matheusmoreira »

linguae wrote: post #139

I'm sad. I'm a software guy, not much of a hardware expert, so please bear with me if I"m too pessimistic. However, I feel that if trends like this continue, it might be the end of enthusiast-level personal computing as we know it. No more being able to head down to the electronics store and purchase RAM, motherboards, processors, GPUs, storage, and other components. We're going to be limited to locked-down terminals…

It's not just market forces. Computers are actually too subversive for the powers that be to allow mere citizens to have them.

Give citizens computers and they have encryption. This alone gives them a fighting chance against police, judges, three letter agencies, militaries.

Give citizens computers and they can wipe out entire sectors of the economy via the sheer power of unrestricted copying.

The future is bleak. Computer freedom is dying. Everything then word "hacker" ever stood for is dying. Soon we will no longer have our own systems, we will have no control, we will be mere users of corporation and government systems. Hacking will go extinct, like phreaking.

This fact brings me a profound sadness, like something beautiful is about to perish from this earth. We used to be free...

Re: Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business

#355

Post by adolph »

hammock wrote: post #161
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.

Exiting the market. Not abandoning the factories. They will be retooled for AI market, which is more profitable. This is like developers shifting from building homes targeted at homeowners to building build-to-rent neighborhoods for Blackrock and company xD

  Have you ever confused BlackRock with Blackstone? Despite their similar 
  sounding names, these two financial powerhouses represent distinct approaches 
  to investment management.
https://www.investing.com/academy/trading/blackrock-vs-black...

  Major news organizations and sector researchers describe the claim as 
  unfounded and often rooted in confusion between BlackRock Inc. and the 
  private-equity firm Blackstone Inc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackRock_house-buying_conspir...

Re: Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business

#357

Post by dominicrose »

freedomben wrote: post #340
dominicrose wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We will still ba able to buy Raspberry Pis, install Linux and self-hosted solutions. We don't have to do what everyone else is doing.

I don't think any SBCs will be a replacement for quite some time. At what point will there be a raspberry pi with 128 GB of RAM and a 16/32 core? That's what I'm running right now, and I really hope I don't have to downgrade in the future.

Yes I guess we've reached a point where it's harder for individuals to grow their hardware or even maintain it. I'm not sure the huge investment in servers for AI is going to be good for companies either. We're honestly in a science-fiction novel right now, I have no idea what's going to happen politicaly with AI.

I don't really believe in AGI if that's what they're going for, but hey they'll get something close to that.

Re: Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business

#358

Post by vladvasiliu »

jack_tripper wrote: post #344
barrkel wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel this vibe. It's part of the reason I invested in a monster home workstation - threadripper 9995wx, 768gb ecc ram, 96gb Blackwell pro. I expect it may easily be the last proper home PC I buy that is scaled in line with the scaling that I grew up with in the 80s and 90s. Increasingly, what we have are mobile terminals - possibly with a dock for monitor connections - for remote big iron. And the continuous push f…

The Terry Davis tinfoil-hat version of me has a theory that this wider industry trend of pushing away consumers from general purpose home computers towards only using remote datacenters from locked down mobile/thin edge devices, is supported by both industries and governments because: Number one, you become a recurring subscription instead of a one and done deal, making it incredibly profitable for industry And numbe…

I'm cynical enough to not argue against your number two theory.

But the first one? I'm less convinced. I think the underlying assumption is that companies look to make the most money off consumers. I can get behind that.

But just the other day I was looking at a new GPU and considered running a local LLM. I was looking at spending no more than 1000 €. That would get a me 5070 TI 16 GB. Not enough to reasonably run anything interesting. I'm not looking to "tinker with things", I want to actually use them, mostly for coding. A JetBrains subscription would run less than 10 € per month [0], and keep me up to date with the evolution of things. My 5070 would be stuck at its mostly useless level forever, since I don't see requirements going down any time soon. If prices didn't change, I'd need more than 100 months, or 8 years, to break even. And during these 8 years, I'd never have a decent LLM experience by buying it outright.

Sure, this would be a capable GPU for other uses. But in my case, it would just sit around under my desk heating up my room.

---

[0] You'd get a 20 € discount if paying for a whole year upfront (10/month, 100/year). I'm also excluding VAT, since I'd buy this for work and have a VAT registered company.

Re: Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business

#359

Post by vladvasiliu »

homarp wrote: post #312
mh- wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious where you live. Anecdotally, this is the opposite to the experience of everyone I know.

rue montgallet still exists in Paris. Yes, very less than it used to be, but still there. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xjj6uIIUT_0 gives a good idea of how it is now

Unfortunately, the aggregator website is basically no longer updated. So now you have to go door-to-door to check their prices. Also, with all the talk of counterfeits flooding Amazon and whatnot, I'm no longer that comfortable buying expensive stuff from random stores.

But, I guess, if you need a mouse right now and don't insist on the absolute best price, they're still there, yeah.

In practice, I live two streets away from there and yet I do all my shopping online (not that I buy that many parts anymore).

Re: Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business

#360

Post by babypuncher »

snuxoll wrote: post #99
babypuncher wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The push for ray tracing comes from the fact that they've reached the practical limits of scaling more conventional rendering. RT performance is where we are seeing the most gen-on-gen performance improvement, across GPU vendors. Poor RT performance is more a developer skill issue than a problem with the tech. We've had games like Doom The Dark Ages that flat out require RT, but the RT lighting pass only accounts for…

The literal multi-million dollar question that executives have never bothered asking: When is it enough? Do I, as a player, appreciate the extra visual detail in new games? Sure, most of the time. But, if you asked me what I enjoy playing more 80% of the time? I'd pull out a list of 10+ year old titles that I keep coming back to, and more that I would rather play than what's on the market today if they only had an ac…

Well in the case of Doom: The Dark ages, it's not just about about fidelity but about scale and production. To make TDA's levels with the baked GI used in the previous game would have taken their artists considerably more time and resulted in a 2-3x growth in install size, all while providing lighting that is less dynamic. The only benefit would have been the ability to support a handful of GPUs slightly older than the listed minimum spec.

Ray tracing has real implications not just for the production pipeline, but the kind of environments designers can make for their games. You really only notice the benefits in games that are built from the ground up for it though. So far, most games with ray tracing have just tacked it on top of a game built for raster lighting, which means they are still built around those limitations.

Post reply on HN