411–420 of 592 posts
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This time is different. https://ca.pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/#ram.ddr5.60... The price for a couple of 32GB sticks is now over $1200 after being stable at about $200 for several years until last September. That's not a blip; that's 6-fold hike and there is no sign it is slowing down any time soon.
https://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX00115488
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This is an extinction event for the low-cost cell phone companies. How are they going to survive if they can't sell their $100 phones profitably for 2 years? I think many of the low-end companies will simply sell their allocations of RAM and close up shop.
This is huge problem for developing countries. Most people here have $100-$200 phones. iPhone is a luxury.
In the Dwarkesh podcast with Semi-Analysis's Dylan Patel they forecast the phone market will shrink by 50% this year because of RAM prices: But that’s the high end of the market, which is only a few hundred million phones a year. Apple sells two or three hundred million phones annually. The bulk of the market is mid-range and low-end. It used to be that 1.4 billion smartphones were sold a year. Now we’re at about 1.1…
This coming from an android user, that recently bought iphones for my daughters. Paying 600$ for not even top-of-the-line phones does not scream low-end to me.
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This one might last longer. The AI race is on, and the US tries its best to make it as expensive for China as possible to participate in it. Every dollar China spends on GPUs they get at markup is one not spent on building navy ships. If there is an escalation over Taiwan, then that will cause the loss of most of the world's high grade chip manufacturing capacity. TSMC is busy doing technology transfers into the US,…
Hypothetically what would happen if China took over Tawain and TSMC?
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My favorite part would have to be where you can’t remember the actual, structurally crucial piece of information that your argument rests on and just said that you didn’t feel like getting a GPU off eBay. >I've had problems with it before (I can't remember specifics as it was a while ago). I'd rather not going through the hassle and/or risk in the first place. As your evidence that > Doomers IMO are just click baitin…
> My favorite part would have to be where you can’t remember the actual, structurally crucial piece of information that your argument rests on and just said that you didn’t feel like getting a GPU off eBay. You are misunderstanding what is being said. I suspect it is deliberate. It is often said that "Prevention is often better than the cure". Similarly it is often better not to risk spending your money unwisely than…
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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.
iPhone 12 wasn't low end
You buy a new phone every two years, it comes with a camera, a cpu, a gpu, a host of sensors. Same as phones did two years ago, and ten years before that.
I don’t use my current smart phone in any ways that are different to the iMate PDA2K I had twenty years so.
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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.)
The device integrity is a bigger deal, this is also a backup for some banking apps so if they don't work it kind of defeats the purpose. I removed all other apps to minimize the attacks surface.
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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.
If you're not a phone power user, you can get by on old low end stuff. When my pixel 4a died of a bad screen crack a couple years ago, I replaced it with a random used 4a on ebay for $80. Two years later and it's still completely fine for all my purposes (texting, phone calls, chrome browsing, tolerable camera, etc.), although I still haven't accepted google's deal for a free battery swap yet from sheer laziness. I'v…
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Will it be such a big deal though? Currently people are swapping out their phones for another model that's exactly the same but with a different number at the end of the name every 12 months. This could just mean that the unnecessary churn dies down a bit, and companies taking advantage of it have to find a new line of business.
> Will it be such a big deal though? Currently people are swapping out their phones for another model that's exactly the same but with a different number at the end of the name every 12 months. I don't think they do that at the low-end (nor the high-end, though that doesn't matter here - higher-end manufacturers have a small margin they can eat into). People on the low-end phones want a new phone, they just cannot af…