Am I allowed to complain about this or do I have to get my VC's approval first
DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
161–170 of 592 posts
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#162It's not easy to do hobbies.. I keep needing more money..
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#163what are the barriers to new DRAM supply coming online?
Startup costs measured in the billions, with no guarantee of success, and a long payback time horizon in a market that almost everyone thinks is - in one way or another - a bubble.
Oh yeah, the market is also getting intense scrutiny from powerful geopolitical entities that are quite explicit that they don't believe in fair play or consistent, stable rules.
Would you place that bet?
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am in the UK. Not the US! > If you were offering 5x MSRP and you couldn't get a video card... I don't believe you. My 1080Ti had died. I had to use a 8800GTS from the late 2000s for about a year. As that was the only GPU I had. I have no iGPU on my CPU. There was at one time, no stock available. Not on Amazon, Not on Overclockers, Not on Scan. They had some weird lotto system taking place on most sites. Scalpers cl…
Okay, UK, maybe that changes things more than I expected. But what about ebay and the sites that replaced classified ads? And is it unreasonable for me to say that you could have bought a US listing and had it reshipped? Edit since you added: Scalpers claimed to have cards. But I wouldn't risk sending a lot of money to some random seller on ebay. Even with ebay's buyer protection? Well not to be mean but I think "I r…
> Even with ebay's buyer protection?
I've had problems with it before (I can't remember specifics as it was a while ago). I'd rather not going through the hassle and/or risk in the first place.
There are still plenty of scams on ebay. During this era there were people scamming. e.g the box for a GPU. Listing the entire specs and then putting right at the bottom of the listing it was only the box and not the card.
> Well not to be mean but I think "I refused to use ebay" invalidates your claim that you couldn't buy a card.
What you are doing is being hyper-pedantic. It is fucking tiresome when people do this online.
If you are going to be a smart arse, I will modify my statement to say "I could not get a card from a reputable online store as they were all out of stock and did not wish to risk buying from a less reputable one".
I would be foolish to trust some overpriced (or underpriced) listing on ebay. I've had an ebay/paypal account now for 25+ years, I've learned to never do this because I got screwed every time I did.
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#165In the Dwarkesh podcast with Semi-Analysis's Dylan Patel they forecast the phone market will shrink by 50% this year because of RAM prices:
But that’s the high end of the market, which is only a few hundred million phones a year. Apple sells two or three hundred million phones annually. The bulk of the market is mid-range and low-end. It used to be that 1.4 billion smartphones were sold a year. Now we’re at about 1.1 billion. Our projections are that we might drop to 800 million this year, and down to 500 or 600 million next year.
We look at data points out of China from some of our analysts in Asia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. They’ve been tracking this, and they see Xiaomi and Oppo cutting low-end and mid-range smartphone volumes by half.
Yes, it’s only a $150 BOM increase on a $1,000 iPhone where Apple has some larger margin. But for smaller phones, the percentage of the BOM that goes to memory and storage is much larger. And the margins are lower, so there’s less capacity to even eat the margins. And they have also generally tended not to do long-term agreements on memory.
Why this is a big deal is that if smartphone volumes halve, that drop will happen in the low and mid-range, not the high end.
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#166DRAM pricing is killing the everything market. We just had a vendor uplift our quote 50% per unit for some machines because of a mix of memory + supply chain issues.
That’s strange, there aren’t wider market supply chain issues outside of DRAM. Maybe your vendor is just throwing excuses around.
Yeah. Not true. Or send me the name of your server vendor. I’m buying.
Having issues with both price and availability on NVMe, SATA flash, starting to see some CPUs, and for a personal project high density spinning rust (24TB+).
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ultra clean rooms with massive air handling systems can't recapture all their helium? Or is this just a temporary thing based on where processing is located?
AFAIK they recapture most, but recapturing all simply isn't possible / financially feasible. And they use a lot of helium, so even if they capture most of it, the losses are still higher than the currently available supply.
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Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#168There are ups and downs in the prices of components. Often people forget that during COVID prices were high for SBCs because of supply chain issues. Video cards just were not available in the UK and afterwards (every supplier had long lead times) and are still relatively expensive (at least there are now lower priced options). Raspberry Pis you couldn't get hold of and many people (Jeff Included) was using a website…
This time is different. https://ca.pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/#ram.ddr5.60... The price for a couple of 32GB sticks is now over $1200 after being stable at about $200 for several years until last September. That's not a blip; that's 6-fold hike and there is no sign it is slowing down any time soon.
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#169This is a good thing. Pis were priced too low for OEMs and too high for hobby work. It's no longer an accessible board for fledgling hackers . Reclaim hardware for your nephews, which is good for the environment, too.
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#170“Killing” is strong phrasing. Yes, a $250 mini PC I bought last year is now $350. Is this pricing bad? Yeah, compared to what it was. Is this the end of the world? Not really, and we’ve seen price spikes for all kinds of PC components in the past. It’s rarely permanent.
I think the post is pertaining to SBC's, to which mini-pc's threaten the viability of as well.