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Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage

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Re: Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage

#151

Post by ajross »

meerita wrote: post #22

If the memory shortage is real and sustained, I wonder whether we’ll see a secondary effect in the resale market.

We already are. Check eBay at the component level, which is showing it quite clearly. Look for secondary/reclaimed/refurbished components to backfill the gaps too.

Also be aware that this stuff whipsaws, if OpenAI actually takes posession of that memory and decides they can't use it and dumps, we're going to see a crash. Likewise if they back out of the deals with the memory fabs (or fail and default). There's some scary volatility on the horizon.

Re: Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage

#152

Post by galangalalgol »

varispeed wrote: post #132
h4kunamata wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is an Apple problem and keep in mind that iPhone doesn't do multi-task, the fact that you are having problems with 12GB is not surprised to me. I have to use a Macbook M4 at work with 24GB, I have an AMD Lenovo Ryzen7 with 32GB running Linux Mint Cinnamon. It is infuriating how slow this Macbook is, even to shut it down is slow asf. macOS is not different than Windows, I cannot wait for COB to get back to my Lin…

24GB is not enough, it will keep swapping, compressing etc. I had such device at work. 32GB is a night and day difference. That said my workflows are such that I need at least 128GB now...

How did we get here? Quake ran well with 16MB of ram.

Re: Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage

#153

Post by mschuster91 »

goalieca wrote: post #40
biophysboy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I too much of an idealist to hope that AI leads to less buggy software? On the one hand, it should reduce the time of development; on the other hand, I'm worried devs will just let the agents run free w/o proper design specs.

The message with AI from execs is that you have to go fast (rush!). Quality of work drops when you rush. You forget things, don’t dwell on decisions and consequences, just go-fast-and-break-things.

> The message with AI from execs is that you have to go fast (rush!). Quality of work drops when you rush.

Sure, but otherwise, the competition will be first to market, and the exec may lose their bonus. So, the exec keeps their bonus, and when the tech debt collapses, the exec will either have departed long ago or will be let go with a golden parachute, and in the worst case an entire product line goes down the drain, if not the entire company.

The financialization and stonkmarketization of everything is killing our society.

Re: Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage

#154

Post by rescbr »

al_borland wrote: post #140
londons_explore wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we aren't far from AI being able to solve this sort of problem too. Imagine you are Apple and can just set an LLM loose on the codebase for a weekend with the task to reduce RAM usage of every component by 50%...

From everything I’ve seen, LLMs aren’t exactly known for writing extremely optimized code. Also, what happens to the stability and security of my phone after they let an LLM loose on the entire code base for a weekend? There are 1.5 billion iPhones out there. It’s not a place to play fast and loose with bleeding edge tech known for hallucinations and poor architecture.

If you ask an LLM to code whatever, it definitely won’t produce optimized code.

If you direct it to do a specific task to find memory and cpu optimization points, based on perf metrics, then it’s a completely different world.

Re: Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage

#155

Post by nickjj »

torben-friis wrote: post #138
nickjj wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The latest phone reviews have been eyebrow raising. It's eyebrow raising for me in other ways. I have a Pixel 9a and it's been quite good with really solid battery life. It's barely 6 months old and I got it new straight from Google. A few days ago I noticed the battery started to drain much faster than usual. I also noticed at the same time Google is pushing the 10a. Nothing changed on my end. I barely use the pho…

Yup, I’ve heard of that “bug” from personal friends so you’re not imagining things.

Did it happen to them in the last few days? Did it self fix itself?

I wish there were better options for phones. It's absolutely crazy to me that a phone can be perfectly working one day and then it starts getting issues like this out of the blue.

It makes it completely undependable. All I want is a phone I can trust traveling with where I'm not going to wake up the next day and then the phone starts draining 3-4x faster than it normally does.

There hasn't even been a system update for almost 3 weeks, so it wasn't an update that busted things.

Re: Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage

#156

Post by xenadu02 »

Animats wrote: post #5

The DRAM shortage and lack of fab capacity have also caused the Playstation 6 to slip to 2029 or so.[1] Game consoles are vulnerable. They need a lot of RAM and have to sell at a moderate price. The IDC article says that DRAM prices are not expected to come down again. "While memory prices are projected to stabilize by mid-2027, they are unlikely to return to previous level — making the sub-$100 segment (171 million…

> The IDC article says that DRAM prices are not expected to come down again

Sure thing. I'd take a look at IDC & similar firms' forecasting history before worrying too much about what they say.

There is an AI boom right now. There will be a consolidation cycle at some point. When that happens half the players, if not more, will disappear. The huge hardware budgets will go with them.

We also can't be certain that the DRAM makers aren't capitalizing on this opportunity because they can. Remember: all of them are convicted monopolists. As in actual prison time convicted. And fined. And lost civil lawsuits. Multiple times.

I just can't see AI paying enough of a premium on HBM to justify the DRAM spikes. Frankly I can't see the volume either. Wafer starts on DRAM are dramatically bigger than you are probably imagining. DRAM is in practically everything these days. AI servers is but a drop in the bucket. 10% of the market? Yeah right, if its 4% I'd be shocked. And you are telling me a shift of 4% of wafers to HBM is driving these prices and shortages?

I humbly suggest if you look at the numbers something smells funny.

Disclaimer: none of us has access to the actual data, a lot of it is inferred by industry players. Some are well connected and usually accurate but that is not evidence. Therefore it is possible this is a genuine market action and nothing nefarious is going on.

Re: Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage

#157

Post by FartyMcFarter »

torben-friis wrote: post #138
nickjj wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The latest phone reviews have been eyebrow raising. It's eyebrow raising for me in other ways. I have a Pixel 9a and it's been quite good with really solid battery life. It's barely 6 months old and I got it new straight from Google. A few days ago I noticed the battery started to drain much faster than usual. I also noticed at the same time Google is pushing the 10a. Nothing changed on my end. I barely use the pho…

Yup, I’ve heard of that “bug” from personal friends so you’re not imagining things.

Couldn't this just be confirmation bias?

Re: Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage

#158

Post by mschuster91 »

ajross wrote: post #148
darthoctopus wrote: post #4

Lest we forget, this memory shortage was deliberately engineered [1]. Thanks, OpenAI. [1]: https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram...

These are Bonkers times we live in. Be honest, who had "Sam Altman kills Apple Computer" on their 2025/6 Bingo card?

> Be honest, who had "Sam Altman kills Apple Computer" on their 2025/6 Bingo card?

Not the person Sam Altman specifically, but AI in general. It was obvious even in 2024 that braindead beancounters were jumping on the hype train, so much so that coal power plants were kept alive to satiate the power hunger [1]. The last time that shit happened, it was the coin craze [2], but unlike cryptocurrencies there was and is an actual product being made...

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/14/ai_datacenters_coal/

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m...

Re: Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage

#159

Post by nntwozz »

canthonytucci wrote: post #45
ProfessorLayton wrote: post #8

Somehow, with 12GB of RAM, I can't get my iPhone 17 Pro to keep more than a few safari tabs open without having them refresh when I come back from an app or two, and it makes me want to throw my phone across the train (Where the internet often cuts out!). A lot of software has been squandering the massive hardware gains that have been made. I hope this changes when it becomes a lot harder to throw hardware at the pro…

I feel like my 3GS was way better about resuming where I left off than any fancy new iPhone I’ve had in the past few years. Big name apps like Facebook, YouTube, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts seem totally disinterred in preserving my place. YouTube being the worst where I often stack a bunch of videos in queue, pause to do something else for a while and when I return to the app the queue has been purged.

On a tangent how about those sweet app updates with patch notes reading bug fixes every week or so from the likes of Xiaomi and Anker weighing in at 600-700mb.

It's all gone to $hit, efficiency is gone it's just slop on top of more slop.

Re: Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage

#160

Post by shafiemoji »

ProfessorLayton wrote: post #8

Somehow, with 12GB of RAM, I can't get my iPhone 17 Pro to keep more than a few safari tabs open without having them refresh when I come back from an app or two, and it makes me want to throw my phone across the train (Where the internet often cuts out!). A lot of software has been squandering the massive hardware gains that have been made. I hope this changes when it becomes a lot harder to throw hardware at the pro…

I am on my $110 android device from 2022 (4GB RAM), and I have never faced the browsing related issues that you mentioned. My phone came with stock android 11 ROM with no bloats, so that might've helped too I guess.
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