241–250 of 587 posts
What’s dumb is even older tech has gone up. Look at microsd and usb thumb drives. There’s a lot of price gouging just because they can. There’s a real shortage and then there’s just “it’s memory so price go up”
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Would they? Cartels aren't known for massively increasing production to satisfy all demand. Far from it I'd say, they're more likely to expand supply to such a level that they can still reap massive profits. Very few countries/companies have the knowhow and willingness to be able to build more. OPEC is a perfect example of this behaviour. They set hearly production goals to keep prices high. Or the Quebec Maple Syrup…
But are the memory chip producers acting like a cartel? In the past they have not. When there was a shortage, they increased production as rapidly as they could build the new fabs, crashing the price of memory.
Well guess what :) They've done it before, they will do it again.
"To date, five manufacturers have pleaded guilty to their involvement in an international price-fixing conspiracy between July 1, 1998, and June 15, 2002, including Hynix, Infineon, Micron Technology, Samsung, and Elpida.[1]"
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Can you provide evidence for your claim? Most people take this statement at face value and I don’t understand why. I do some volunteer work supporting elderly people that have issues adapting to a digital only world and I am always pleasantly surprised by the performance of their old iPhones all the way down to the 8 (old phones they get from their kids) Also the coming iOS 27 release supposedly has some big performa…
Apple is known to slow older devices intentionally. They have admitted it. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67911517
500% in a year is just insane. I knew RAM prices were going up, but $3k+ for 128GB of DDR5 makes me wonder how much of this is actually AI demand, and how much is this just manufacturers taking advantage of it. They have done this in the past after all
It could be the economically rational thing to do if they think there is a bubble
After RAM prices climbed 200% between August and November of last year, a store associate at Micro Center encouraged me to buy some RAM sticks if I needed them because "prices might continue to rise for a few years". I told him that was ridiculous and nobody would tolerate it if prices got higher. How wrong I was...
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Same thing happened with eggs in the USA with bird flu used as an excuse.
Which reversed in about 6 months and now eggs are are their lowest prices in nearly a decade.
The situation is absolutely awful for anybody who needs significant memory or storage (or devices incorporating such). Even people who think they have enough for the next few years already could end up with an unpleasant surprise if they e.g. have a stick or two of RAM go bad or a GPU fry. I have a few machines with aging sticks that I'm hoping will manage to hold out until when/if things improve.
I built my machine in 2022 with 64GB of memory and upgraded to a 4090 at MSRP in 2023 so at this point I'm good but I fear the back end of the bathtub curve. I currently expect to have to hold on until 2029 and at that point the mobo and CPU will be 7 years old, and the GPU almost 6.
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I think it's probably for the best, the hyperconsumerism around electronics was getting out of hand. Computers are fast and have been fast for a while now. An iPhone 12 is probably more than fine to do iPhone things, if Apple didn't sabotage their old phones with poorly-written poor-performance software.
Can you provide evidence for your claim? Most people take this statement at face value and I don’t understand why. I do some volunteer work supporting elderly people that have issues adapting to a digital only world and I am always pleasantly surprised by the performance of their old iPhones all the way down to the 8 (old phones they get from their kids) Also the coming iOS 27 release supposedly has some big performa…
The situation is absolutely awful for anybody who needs significant memory or storage (or devices incorporating such). Even people who think they have enough for the next few years already could end up with an unpleasant surprise if they e.g. have a stick or two of RAM go bad or a GPU fry. I have a few machines with aging sticks that I'm hoping will manage to hold out until when/if things improve.
I bought a prebuilt with a 5090 a little over than one month ago, whole system was on sales. The cost of the prebuilt is now lower than today 5090 price.
The PS5/Xbox Series console generation is supposed to be wrapping up soon even though it barely feels like it got started. I don't sense there's appetite for more powerful consoles anytime soon (I don't believe the PS5 Pro made waves like the PS4 Pro did), and jumps in console performance are what determine when games start targeting higher system requirements. So I like to think I can get a good number of years of use out of this.