61–70 of 264 posts
I'm trying to work out if I should buy a 48GB M4 Pro Mac Mini now, or wait for M5 Pro ones later this year. For AI/ML purposes, mostly. As far as I can tell, the new M5 MacBooks didn't go up much or any for the same amount of RAM?
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Maybe if I can find an unused one, still not sure tbh... Or I might go for an alternative SBC from AliExpress and compromise on CPU
I cant personally comment on them since I havent grabbed them yet but these are two Pi clones I was considering: Radxa Rock 5C and Orange Pi 5 I would do research on them because they are a similar form factor and usually cheaper for more memory… the software will be different.
It's not a shortage, it's a cartel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVzeHTlWIDY
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The video is 1 and half hour long. It's a whole documentary. Very detailed and well thought out, but too long for me at the moment. I'll see if its possible to get a summary somehow.
aside: YT has a AI/summary option (unless creator opts out). Look for the sparkle button. Personally, it gets me 80% there most days.
I was just looking to buy a Raspberry Pi 5: the 8GB one is now 58% more expensive than last year; that's more than what I'm willing to pay.
Have fun reading 40 answers about how discarded Lenovos from 2017 are cheaper and stay idle at 5W. It springs to 3x the power usage of a pi if they do anything with it but who cares about performance per Watt?
It's not a shortage, it's a cartel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVzeHTlWIDY
The video is 1 and half hour long. It's a whole documentary. Very detailed and well thought out, but too long for me at the moment. I'll see if its possible to get a summary somehow.
I am not sure what the video suggests. This is my own understanding of the things after I got way too invested in why does OpenAI need all of this ram all of a sudden. (On a random tuesday)
My understanding is TLDR: The stargate project had OpenAI,Oracle,Softbank etc.
Softbank got the money from Japanese bank loan[0] at low interests rates and actually scrambled to find the 20 Billion $ (they commited combined with oracle to around 500 billion $)
(Btw The datacenter thing is being done in a similar fashion by Oracle)
Almost all of that money when given to OpenAI was used/(will be used?) to commit 20% of the Ram supply of the whole world at a more expensive package because these companies just package ram in different order to get "AI ram" and then Micron shuts down the consumer brand (Crucial)
This has now caused Ram prices to spike 5 times the cost in a couple of months back. Also, the inflation is happening in hard drive and just Nand in general.
The largest impacts I can see that is that even companies like google were scrambling to find Ram. I find this to be one of the larger reasons why they might need so much ram all of a sudden. I mean Google and Anthropic were needing Ram but not 20% of it and not committed in such a way and I am not sure if datacenters are even being built for ram to be stored[1]
OpenAI datacenters in Argentina for example is operated by such a shady company that came like 1-2 years ago IIRC. So a 500 Billion $ Project is just picking any random companies ... Yea no, I have the belief that they don't trust it themselves especially when a company is scrambling for money.
All of this does feel very cartel/monopoly-ish to me to push the competitors out of the market or the people running open source models out of the market and another benefit of it for OpenAI all was that we normal everyday people get impacted too and I am sure that when they made such a large decision, they must have internally thought about it but we all know the morality of OpenAI now after the DoD deal.
But I don't think that google and other companies are that impacted by it all it seems as well. Only the average consumer and Hosting providers (Thus seeing OVH,Hetzner raise prices for example). The average AWS/GCP/Azure makes enough money that they might not even raise money for sometime and they'll be fine having another additional benefit that more people worried about increasing prices would go to Microsoft Azure/GCP/AWS even more so.
Edit: Gamers are being pushed out of consoles and everything too and some are saying seeing the cloud connection and AWS coming out and saying that we want Gamers on cloud (paraphrasing) as meaning that its all done to move everything to cloud.
I do believe that this might be only half the story as OpenAI does benefit from everything moving to the cloud (somewhat) but its done even more to prevent competition in the whole genre as well.
I believe that they thought about it and treated it as a plus point but before all and everything, it helped them thought that it can help them maintain their flimsy lead in AI models as more and more catch up by having a more monopolistic lead by stifling competition by rising prices 5 times. Gamers and normal people were just the largest casuality in this crossfire.
I was thinking in the past month when I found all this that damn, OpenAI's morality sucks and they did all of it on purpose
And then they had the department of defence* deal and the whole controversy surrounding it so yeah, that too.
OpenAI doesn't want your benefit. It wants its profit and when these are conflict, OpenAI doesn't care a cent about you, not anymore than the cent that you give it.
[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-06/softbank-...
[1]: https://www.shacknews.com/article/148208/oracle-openai-texas...
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The video is 1 and half hour long. It's a whole documentary. Very detailed and well thought out, but too long for me at the moment. I'll see if its possible to get a summary somehow.
aside: YT has a AI/summary option (unless creator opts out). Look for the sparkle button. Personally, it gets me 80% there most days.
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Weren't 512GB models selling like hot cakes to the complete surprise of Apple? Wait time was up to 3 months last time I checked. Glad I got mine last October.
“Like hot cakes” is relative. > The 512GB Mac Studio was not a mass-market machine—adding that much RAM also required springing for the most expensive M3 Ultra model, which brought the system’s price to a whopping $9,499. Number of people willing the number of people willing to spend $10,000 on a computer is pretty tiny. Maybe they are common enough in HN circles, but I doubt any one at Apple is losing sleep over the…
Just a guess, but I think it’s entirely possible that Apple sold through the full production run that they intended for this generation of the machine and they don’t want to order a new batch before the next generation of processors come out.
I have to think that Apple is close to replacing the M3 Ultra with an M5 Ultra or something of the sort.
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Even if so, everyone lives in the same market. If Apple has a contract for those chips at an artificially low price, it's to their advantage to sell them to someone else at market value instead of putting it in a Mac where they'd have to increase price (and take the PR hit) significantly to make the same profit.
it's Apple and they don't like to adjust prices to the market other companies would have just hiked the price of the 512GB model to reflect the lack of supply and to allow people who really need that model to pay for it dearly but that comes with some PR damage that Apple would rather not deal with