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Hold on to Your Hardware

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Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#21

Post by Shank »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #9

Articles entire thesis looks like it can be completely de-railed if one activity happened: ai infrastructure firms cease to be able to secure more capital. Is that likely? History says it's inevitable, but timeframe is an open question.

> ai infrastructure firms cease to be able to secure more capital

If this does occur, unfortunately it isn’t like any of the production capacity is going to immediately shift or be repurposed. A lot of the hardware isn’t usable outside of datacenter deployments. I would guess a more realistic recalibration is 2-3 years of immense pain followed by gradual availability of components again.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#22

Post by lmz »

Micron is killing its Crucial consumer brand, not supplies to consumer brands who use its chips. Hynix never had a consumer brand for RAM I don't think?

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#23

Post by dust42 »

Just to mention one thing, helium -which is a necessity for chip production- is a byproduct of LNG production. And 20% of that is just gone (Qatar) and the question is how long it will take to get that back. So not only a chip shortage because of AI buying chips in huge volumes but also because production will be hampered.

Tongue in cheek: we urgently need fusion power plants. For the AI and the helium.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#24

Post by picture »

barrkel wrote: post #15

I don't buy the central thesis of the article. We won't be in a supply crunch forever. However, I do believe that we're at an inflection point where DC hardware is diverging rapidly from consumer compute. Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node. Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute that you rent, or buy a time…

It seems like you largely agree with the article - people shall own nothing and be happy. Perhaps the artificially induced supply crunch could go on indefinitely.

Also, I wonder how many of us, even here on HN, have the ability to spend that amount of money on computer for personal use. Frankly I wouldn't even know what to do with all the RAM - should I just ramdisk every program I use and every digital thing I made in the last five years?

Anyhow, I suppose for the folks who can't afford hardware (perhaps by design), one ought to own nothing and be happy.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#25

Post by kingleopold »

Angostura wrote: post #10
jagged-chisel wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we’ll finally get some good tools to make real productive work possible on phones.

Like a large screen and a keyboard? Hello Mac Neo

I see they are offering to macos for iphone pro and ipad pro next years with subsc. ? or via upgrade with price I mean it's now possible more than ever

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#26

Post by jleyank »

Hold onto your hardware. Hold on to your existing software and the current version. Don’t upgrade without a specific need. None of the “progress” is actually helpful to hackers and I’m not sure it’s even helpful to typical users. There’s enough information being given to and slurped by others, don’t make it more effective.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#27

Post by 9wzYQbTYsAIc »

not_the_fda wrote: post #16
camgunz wrote: post #2

I feel like this is just the bubble talking. I'm pretty naive here, but at some point suppliers will adjust so they can take money from data center builders and consumers, just like pre-bubble.

Chip manufacturers are used to boom bust cycles and are always hesitant to bring on more capacity, since it costs billions to do so. They will let the hyperscalers buy their supply at a premium and wait for the bust. Then they will shift back to the consumer space. Hardware is going to be expensive for awhile but its not as dire as the article makes it out to be.

> Hardware is going to be expensive for awhile but its not as dire as the article makes it out to be.

At the same time, the article’s argument that the value of personal computer ownership is only going to rise, in terms of the value of speech, not strictly in terms of the value of lunch, is important to call out.

I’m glad I held on to my 2009 MacBook, for example, as it still functions today as an active part of my homelab, at an amortized yearly cost of practically the price of taking a nice steak dinner once a year.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#28

Post by guessmyname »

barrkel wrote: post #15

I don't buy the central thesis of the article. We won't be in a supply crunch forever. However, I do believe that we're at an inflection point where DC hardware is diverging rapidly from consumer compute. Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node. Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute that you rent, or buy a time…

> I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop - 768G of RAM, 96 cores, 96 GB Blackwell GPU - last October, before RAM prices spiked […]

768GB of RAM is insane…

Meanwhile, I’ve been going back and forth for over a year about spending $10k on a MacBook Pro with 128GB. I can’t shake the feeling I’d never actually use that much, and that, long term, cloud compute is going to matter more than sinking money into a single, non-upgradable machine anyway.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#30

Post by aurareturn »

Capitalism at work. There is more value to be generated by moving resources to data centers for the moment. This isn't some me be insensitive or anything. It's the same people who are buying iPhones and PCs who are demanding more compute for AI.

There could be a swing in the future where people will demand local AI instead and resources could shift back to affordable local AI devices.

Lastly, this thesis implies that we will be supply constrained forever such that prices for personal devices will always be elevated as a percentage of one's income. I don't believe that.

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