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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

#131

Post by dyauspitr »

lesuorac wrote: post #33
swatcoder wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what happens if the market settles back down or the leading memory tech pivots away from what you invested all this capital and time chasing? You'd need a very strong, very particular forecast to make such a costly bet. And conversely, it may say something about their internal forecasts that they're not making the bet.

> And conversely, it may say something about their internal forecasts that they're not making the bet. Idk if you can read into it that way. All these companies have cafeterias but you don't see them investing into farmland so they can get their bananas a few cents cheaper. But also why bother spending 20B on a fab when you can invest 20B into TSMC and let them build the fab?

Because having every major company in America’s eggs in one basket is as insane as it gets, especially with China bearing down on Taiwan.

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

#132

Post by ivewonyoung »

autoexec wrote: post #120
ivewonyoung wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why aren't those people lining up to try and emigrate to non-capitalistic countries for a allegedly better life? Instead for the past century we have almost everyone in the world wanting or not minding moving to the hypercapitalist USA. Ironically almost all the countries with emigration controls and exit visas in the past century were noncapitalistic countries trying to stop their people from fleeing to capitalis…

I don't know what you would define as "non-capitalistic" or why you'd limit your options to only those countries, but the idea that people can just pack up and go to live wherever they feel like is incredibly naive. The reasons Americans don't just move to whatever country they think they'd enjoying living in the most are often the same reasons most people all over the world don't. They have a life here. Family, frie…

Those factors apply to non Americans wanting to move to the US but it's apparent that there is heavy demand to the extent of millions taking dangerous trips and breaking laws just to get a foot into the USA. You cant find such latent demand to the same extent via surveys or visa applications in the other direction.

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

#133

Post by MagicMoonlight »

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…

It’s hilarious that they’ll spend a trillion renting GPUs instead of just making their own.

Even if you were nowhere near state of the art, being able to produce millions of your own cards every year at cost would save you a lot of money.

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

#134

Post by eecc »

dyauspitr wrote: post #131
lesuorac wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And conversely, it may say something about their internal forecasts that they're not making the bet. Idk if you can read into it that way. All these companies have cafeterias but you don't see them investing into farmland so they can get their bananas a few cents cheaper. But also why bother spending 20B on a fab when you can invest 20B into TSMC and let them build the fab?

Because having every major company in America’s eggs in one basket is as insane as it gets, especially with China bearing down on Taiwan.

That’s an entirely different framework, one that doesn’t concern investment decisions of Apple or Google.

I do agree that USA and EU could foot the bill and subsidize a couple billions in such industrial infrastructure, perhaps taking back a cut of the profit rather than privatizing all of it.

But they’re not doing it, or are making pitiful efforts at that

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

#135

Post by swiftcoder »

aurareturn wrote: post #63
stego-tech wrote: post #27

This is the biggest memory repricing cycle I've ever seen in my life; some degree of high price/limited availability and "free RAM with purchase of Doritos" cycle is always expected, but this has been the worst one yet. As other commenters have pointed out but I might have missed in the article, compute maturation is amplifying memory constraints right now and making it worse. Device upgrade cycles are getting longer…

So with compute stagnating and memory constrained, my money is on vendors taking this as an opportunity to gradually shift away from a yearly release cadence and slow down to a biennial cycle that alternates between budget and flagship launches every other year. My bet is that vendors will simply discontinue their low margin phones, which are usually the budget phones. For example, Apple might make fewer iPhone 18 an…

> For example, Apple might make fewer iPhone 18 and let it sell out frequently. They’ll use their RAM supplies mostly for the Pro phones.

Apple has a second option that may not be open to most other vendors - as they've just demonstrated with the MacBook Neo, they could cut the RAM in half on the budget models. One good cycle of optimising the hell out of their (almost entirely native) software stack, and iOS would once again sing on a 4GB SKU.

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

#136

Post by ma2kx »

hcurtiss wrote: post #105
shimman wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are but the difference is that China doesn't want to encourage monopolies and have zero qualms in jailing or executing bad business leaders.

There absolutely are monopolies. There are, in fact, many state run enterprises. Where do you get these ideas?

But those are mostly companies who provide a public service, or am I wrong?

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

#137

Post by MagicMoonlight »

rationalist wrote: post #104
jurgenburgen wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Taiwan war that the world is sleepwalking into is going to wipe out so much chip capacity that the current inflation will look like a blip.

While it's a possibility, do you believe it is likely enough in the very near future to the point where you are betting on it? Perhaps shorting TSMC? If I did so when I first thought about it, I would be broke by now.

The point to short will be when the Chinese army forms up.

With Ukraine we saw it. It was incredibly obvious. Hilariously the Ukrainians themselves saw the huge army on their border and told everyone it wasn’t going to happen and refused to build any defences. Taiwan will be the same. But the satellites will give everyone enough warning.

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

#138

Post by swiftcoder »

mrandish wrote: post #5

The deep dive on memory market dynamics and the LLM bubble distortion is great. But another cause of declining smart phone sales is simply that the devices have matured and aren't improving at nearly the same rate. From 2008 to around 2015, upgrading every two years could make a meaningful difference. From ~2015 to ~2020 upgrading every three years might be worth considering. I just upgraded my top of the line flagsh…

Yeah, I mostly upgraded to get the magnetic charger on the back of my iPhone. Weren't a lot of other compelling reasons - the already pretty great cameras improved a bit, the screen is a bit nicer, but otherwise its much the same slab of glass.

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

#139

Post by p0w3n3d »

I heard that one company buying all the product or a majority of the product is called a monopoly practice.

  If a dominant buyer locks up most of the supply chain through exclusive contracts, it prevents rival companies from getting the materials they need to survive, which violates laws like Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

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

#140

Post by eecc »

dyauspitr wrote: post #128
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…

Apple, Google Microsoft Amazon should all set up memory and CPU fabs. I don’t understand why they don’t do it. $400 million ASML machine is chump change and you can almost certainly find/train locals or provide incentives to immigrants to come here as workers to fill the roles there.

Well, isn’t Musk doing something similar with his new solar panels fab?

Frankly it’s ridiculous how we (the West) dropped renewables like a hot potato because it became synonymous with subsidizing China’s dominance in the field.

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