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The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

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Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#391

Post by Aerroon »

hackyhacky wrote: post #360
WalterBright wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why should society care about people making profits? The people making profits are the ones providing food, shelter, and phones to you.

> The people making profits are the ones providing food, shelter, and phones to you. I'm not worried about the guy making my sandwich at the corner deli. He's entitled to my money because he provides a valuable service. I am worried about the owner of FoodCo, who plays golf all day while his employees run the company. He provides literally no service to anyone at all, but makes more money than any employee. He then u…

Why doesn't a small village have a supermarket? If it's small enough then it won't have any store at all. Why? Because the business doesn't make enough money to justify it and the consequence of this is that none of the inhabitants of that village can "just go to the store to buy some milk". They either need to plan weeks or months worth of shopping in advance or have access to transport that can take them to a town that has a store.

The owner of FoodCo put in a lot of their money upfront to make the company happen in the first place. Your deli guy wouldn't have a job if the FoodCo guy hadn't done what he did.

I know that it's hard for people from rich (and high population) countries to understand, but the high variety of goods and services that exist are a consequence of people investing into businesses. Without them many of these businesses wouldn't exist, because most people are not rich enough to be able to fund a business on their own.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#392

Post by hackyhacky »

sokoloff wrote: post #390
hackyhacky wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is fine, except that one can't know in advance which companies will continue to be productive..that's why it's gambling.

Feel free to avoid it if you think it’s gambling. https://www.macrotrends.net/2324/sp-500-historical-chart-dat...

This does nothing to support your point.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#393

Post by tensor »

richforrester wrote: post #20
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #15

What was most surprising about all this to me was this line: > So modern DRAM manufacturing is an extraordinarily complex and expensive process. Building a single state-of-the-art DRAM fabrication facility, a “fab,” will cost you about $15 to $20 billion; acquiring all the necessary equipment, like lithography tools and etching machines, will cost you another few billion; and then it’ll take you a few years of produc…

Literally the most overwhelming thought, reading this, is "man, capitalism is a mistake" The amounts of money circulating whilst some of us struggle to make rent ... Nothing fair, or just, about this world we live in

No, capitalism isn't a mistake, unregulated capitalism is a mistake. The solution is simple, don't let companies merge/acquire after a certain size. Capitalism works when there is a healthy competitive market. It doesn't work when there are 1-3 big companies all fixing prices.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#394

Post by hackyhacky »

Aerroon wrote: post #391
hackyhacky wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The people making profits are the ones providing food, shelter, and phones to you. I'm not worried about the guy making my sandwich at the corner deli. He's entitled to my money because he provides a valuable service. I am worried about the owner of FoodCo, who plays golf all day while his employees run the company. He provides literally no service to anyone at all, but makes more money than any employee. He then u…

Why doesn't a small village have a supermarket? If it's small enough then it won't have any store at all. Why? Because the business doesn't make enough money to justify it and the consequence of this is that none of the inhabitants of that village can "just go to the store to buy some milk". They either need to plan weeks or months worth of shopping in advance or have access to transport that can take them to a town…

Your argument amounts to billionaire apologism and has nothing to do with my comment.

If a supermarket cannot be profitable in a small village, an investor isn't going to change that. The investor will invest in businesses that can be profitable.

> Your deli guy wouldn't have a job if the FoodCo guy hadn't done what he did.

People have had jobs since before civilization, and certainly before massive accumulation of wealth became the norm.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#395

Post by handle584 »

xbmcuser wrote: post #74
hcurtiss wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think Chinese businesses aren’t in it for the profits?

While these private companies exist and are in it for the profits, they don't control the government, meaning any potential price gouging is strictly regulated. The Chinese government actively prevents private companies from becoming too powerful or dominating an industry in the public eye. Instead, they foster competition by promoting and building up alternative companies. A great example of this is how they handled…

I don’t get the example, any payment in China is basically a duopoly between WeChat and Alipay, meanwhile in US there are visa, mastercard, American Express and discover counting credit card payment only.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#396

Post by everforward »

ethbr1 wrote: post #340
sokoloff wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they sell a device with 256GB of RAM as the lowest-spec device rather than making 8 32GB or 16 16GB machines as their entry-level? Apple’s not exactly famous for their low pricing on spec upgrades nor competing based on being the price leader…

If 256GB of RAM enables them to run on-device AI models that (for reasons) are a key feature differentiator? Personally, I think there's no way memory heavy inference moves on-device (vs cloud) due to the economics, but it's not impossible technology + platforms go that way for currently unforeseeable reasons.

I think there’s a realistic chance consumer inference moves on-device. I think it really depends on marketing.

My non-tech friends and family would probably be served perfectly fine by local models today, if they had a working web search tool. Their queries are often “soft” and don’t have an exact answer. My mom and aunt used it to pick a hairstyle, my mom used it to get an image of what a room would look like with particular drapes in it, etc. Stuff I think mid-sized local models like Gemma or smaller Qwens could do without issue. They just don’t have a device that will run them.

Businesses won’t move. They need a huge context so they can stuff a bunch of Confluence pages in it and 300 tools and it needs to read an entire codebase and yada yada. The hardware depreciation and electricity will probably make it a net zero or even cost more than paying for API access.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#397

Post by gib444 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #46

It's impressive that somehow, as if by coincidence, we're seeing the biggest inflationary drivers for decades, perhaps for centuries, all happening simultaneously. The Iran war is spiking the price of oil and will likely cause shortages of pretty much everything if it isn't ended. The Ukraine war is helping with that by destroying Russian refining capacity. The memory shortage is set to do the same to consumer electr…

And AI causing electricity infrastructure price rises for domestic consumers - aka forced indirect investment in AI companies.

Oops, sorry, wrongthink, I mean "due to the war in the Middle East", even though a large majority of gas in the UK comes from elsewhere (gas and electricity prices in the UK are supposedly very tightly coupled ?)

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#398

Post by handle584 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #255
sroussey wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But not open up to competitors like Visa.

Credit card processors are, as a natural aspect of their purpose, a deeply useful surveillance network.

In the opposite direction unionpay works at major US retailers directly or at least through a partnership with discover, even Alipay is available at CVS, while us processors presence in China is next to zero.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#399

Post by CamperBob2 »

hackyhacky wrote: post #384
CamperBob2 wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the subject of straw men, there is no such thing as "unfettered capitalism." That is something you invented to support your argument. Put another way, capitalism, like communism, is one of those pure ideologies that has never really been given a fair shake. In fact, human nature rules out the possibility of a fair trial for any pure ideology. We are political creatures, not ideological ones. If you really are beyo…

For all of your rah-rah capitalist boosterism, you failed to address the actual content of my argument, which is that the reason during the last 50 years that the China has had decreasing poverty, while the US has had increasing poverty, has nothing to do with capitalism, and everything to do with restrictions on capitalism (or their absence).

As others have pointed out, that's a naïve and frankly incorrect reading of Chinese history, but it's also not something that can be addressed here.

Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

#400

Post by zozbot234 »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #385
zozbot234 wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the existing MacBook needs less memory, it can use its current memory spec for higher-level uses that formerly required a MacBook Pro. That meaningfully affects the market.

You don't seem to understand supply and demand. That does not help the demand side for AI data centers - which is the vast majority of the market...

If your point is purely about supply and demand for datacenter HBM and LPDDR, you're probably right. Local model inference (using the existing memory stock) can make a dent in current use, but not in projected future uses that will plausibly involve much larger models.
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