> Helium supply issues are only going to make this worse. I believe helium, although important constitutes a small percent of the cost of semiconductors, so its effect on price will be less severe. It will be more noticeable in other uses of helium though - party balloons could get very expensive etc.
> although important constitutes a small percent of the cost of semiconductors, so its effect on price will be less severe You should think about this some more.
I thought about it more. He's right though so I'm not sure what the extra thinking was meant to do...
Duckduckgo did not help me with "SBC meaning". Here, no help either. Guess I am asking an LLM next, which I hate.
Single Board Computer. Yes, it might help to explain such acronyms in the article. And yes, if you think the name is slightly misleading, I agree: most PC mainboards today are also "single board computers" - you don't have to add any additional cards to get a functional PC (unless you consider RAM modules and M.2 SSDs cards).
This comment makes no sense to me. I exclusively use very low-end phones from Xiaomi. I buy a new one roughly every two years. Each new phone has a better screen, camera, CPU/GPU, charging, and sometimes more RAM/storage.
Take a look at a comparison of the iphone 17 and the iphone 12 https://www.apple.com/iphone/compare/?modelList=iphone-17,ip... Is the newer model better? Sure! But it had 4k 60fps video, optical image stabilisation, a "super retina display" etc five generations ago. The specs have kept improving, but it's not a quantum leap in performance.
> My Samsung Galaxy S8 died at 7 years. Yikes, that is a long time! How many times did you fix it (screen or battery)?
I just replaced my OnePlus 5 a couple of months ago at over 8.5 years old. No repairs needed, battery was a bit crippled in active use, especially making calls, but fine for a mostly idling phone. In idle it still lasts longer than a 1.5 year old iPhone 15. I still use it for by backup phone number SIM, as it slowly gets to ~9 years old. The bigger issue was no more OS updates since 2020, and no Play updates since 20…
OnePlus 5 runs great with custom ROMs, including potentially ones based on mainline Linux as opposed to AOSP. (The Linux support is not as good as OP 6/6T but getting there pretty nicely.)
This is my greatest concern. So many small players will be wiped out. Consolidation is assured. Always great for consumers to be under the thumb of increasingly large companies.
Are there really that many small players? Aren't they all just subbrands of Xiaomi, Lenovo and Oppo?
There are a bunch of subbrands but there are also a lot of genuine small Android phone companies, especially in China.
Some of these serve some interesting niches that might now disappear due to this DRAM supply issue, e.g. Unihertz for extra small phones or CAT for extra durable worksite phones.
Smartphones are widely available on the used goods market though, perhaps even more so than second-hand SBCs or old PCs. The "low and mid range" can be filled by the former high end.
My Samsung Galaxy S3 died after 8 years. EMMC failure. Just started boot looping while I was asleep. Everything gone. Known issue. My Samsung Galaxy S8 died at 7 years. Some kind of thermal failure, I was able to recover my data by keeping the phone in the freezer while I copied. Known issue. My Samsung Galaxy S21? I figure I've got another year or two in it before it, too, dies. Having beautiful dead phones that hav…
Yeah, the Flash has a wear lifetime. Battery has a finite lifespan too. Anything over five years is pretty good going. My wife managed that with a Nokia 1020, the last and best of the Windows phones.
Like everything else, phones need to be backed up.
Duckduckgo did not help me with "SBC meaning". Here, no help either. Guess I am asking an LLM next, which I hate.
Maybe you should have search for "SBC abbreviation" instead, as it's not exactly a philosophical question. It's a TLA (spoiler: TLA stands for Three Letter Acronym).
SBC (single board computer) is a fairly widely used term.
Even before the hikes, SBCs were $50-$100 a pop, compared to pennies for basic MCUs and maybe $4 for high-performance ones. People were clearly willing to pay 100x more just for familiarity and the ecosystem ("hats", forums, etc). I don't know if 300x is going to make more hobbyists see the light, or just result in fewer of them being able to afford the hobby?
> People were clearly willing to pay 100x more just for familiarity and the ecosystem This is obviously logical. If I know how to program in Python or JS but not C and am familiar with SSH, I can do something with a SBC in a few minutes. I get paid $200/hr. If I spent even one hour to learn what I need to deal with a microcontroller, the time cost is four times the cost of materials if I stick with what I know. How m…
Microcontrollers don't really make sense for hobbyists (unless their hobby is programming microcontrollers, of course). They only make sense when you think about deploying an application at scale, at which point the per-unit price becomes important. OTOH, if your hobby project goes viral and you want to profit from selling SBCs with it preinstalled, a cheaper SBC is a plus, but that's not very likely to happen...