Motherboards used to be $100, $200 for the high end. Now they want $300+, ram is crazy, storage, video cards, etc. I'm not surprised sales for these components is hitting a wall.
> Motherboards used to be $100, $200 for the high end. Now they want $300+ Entry level motherboards are still $100. $300+ is a very high end motherboard. The existence of very high end products is confusing because it can give the impression that you have to buy a $300 motherboard because it exists. If you compare features side by side you're rarely missing anything important for the entry level motherboards. Some pe…
Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI
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Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Smaller manufacturers will fold, and larger ones will leave the consumer market (like Micron/Crucial did), before the market has a chance to bounce back. If and when it does recover, it will be a market of much fewer choices.
A somewhat comparable historical example is the destruction of the Swiss watch industry in the 70s with the advent of quartz and digital watches. A Rolex Daytona today is known as a very fancy and even hard-to-get watch. In the 70s they were practically giving them away with other watch purchases because electronic watches were taking their lunch. The bigger takeaway, I think, is the destruction and folding eventuall…
The only reason you have those watch brands to mention is because they are non-functional status symbols. People that want a watch buy something else.
The same way, people that want a computer will buy from whoever is actually selling them. Manufacturers that want to sell only to datacenters won't last for long.
Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI
#193Not just motherboards. Cases, PC accessories (fans, etc), consumer SSDs, and more. Cases are especially hard hit, apparently, as they're already quite a low margin business. Personally, I see little reason to upgrade from my AM4 platform. It's never been easier to hold on to aging hardware with the advent of DLSS stretching older cards further, diminishing returns on the newer gen GPUs, and the 'realism' of video gam…
I invested quite a bit in enterprises level homelab equipment 2020 to 2025 (about 10k). Happy I made it before the big bang. Eg. my SAS he8 drives will last at least till 2035. But what then? I want my children to be free, too.
Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI
#194AI is simultaneously the reason you can't buy a motherboard and the reason you don't need to build a PC anymore. The industry is eating itself from both ends.
Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI
#195Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI
#196Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
> my 1U 1Us have the most compromised ventilation and compensate with loud fans running at high speeds.
Yeah, it certainly wasn't the quietest choice for form-factor, but the fact remains: all server grade hardware are not optimizing for noise. They are meant to be running in datacenters, not livingrooms, so noise was never a concern for them. A nice thing about consumer-grade hardware is they are optimizing for both sound and power consumption because those devices are designed to be around humans. So I certainly hope…
Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
My parents bought a mid-tier PC for $3,000 (in 1995 dollars) and there was still a thriving PC industry at those prices! While things are getting more expensive now (and that sucks) we have had it really good for a long time.
How much money was left to spend on hobbies considering the cost of education and real estate at the time?
Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI
#199When photosynthesis first appeared, the oxygen it produced poisoned the existing life. Sulfur-breathers basically disappeared. In the geologic record the oxygen shows up as massive layers of iron oxide which we mine and turn into steel now. New things can radically shake up the existing environment, the degree of shakeup is the measure of how radical it is.
Re: Motherboard sales 'collapse' amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI
#200PC is the last major open platform. While other platforms like Android and becoming less open, PC in general is becoming more open than it's been in a long time as heavy MacOS/Android/iOS competition is creating a focus on open standards and all-time high strong Linux support gives people a place to land and tinker/hack to their heart's content. I think we will see an abandonment of consumer grade PC components and i…
Realistically a Mac Mini will probably blow a lot of things out of the water on price / performance. Even an older one.