Bought these Patriod SSDs recently, they are cheap but they are DRAMless apparently, I'm using them to replace the HDDs from 17 year old hardware so figure it's not terrible plus the read/write speed is still high
DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
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Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#512The market can stay irrational longer than I can stay solvent. I'm holding on to the hardware that I have.
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#513We need to come to terms with the possibly-irreparable harm that private capital has done to the West. Capital is long-past serving the interests of the broader public; but we're now past the point of capital serving the interests of the corporations its being invested into. The demand for shares in OpenAI and Anthropic is so high that its pushing their valuations into territories they can never hope to drive revenue to fulfill; the cycle of this massive warchest of private capital inside the AI industry has for all intents and purposes created a communist economic structure, with all of its faults. Grifting, favored suppliers; if the stories about SK Hynix and Samsung guaranteeing 40% of their wafer supply to OpenAI on a letter of intent they cannot follow through on are true, we're even getting good old fashioned communist mis-allocation of resources. The day may eventually come when the USG is forced with the decision of bailing out the trillion dollar OpenAI Corporation; taking a stake to add to their portfolio next to Intel and others; and maybe normies will then realize what is happening, but the writing has been on the wall for years.
I love capitalism; its ability to allocate resources on a macroeconomic scale to pick winners and more-importantly losers doesn't have a rival system. As a younger, more naive startup employee, I'm on the record making a total fool of myself responding to our CEO talking about struggling to find PMF by saying "then maybe our company doesn't deserve to exist" (yeah...) But the "capitalists" who run the world aren't actually interested in capitalism, and thus definitionally can't be capitalists. At least once upon a time we had filthy rich titans you could look up to, like Buffet and Gates (Epstein stuff aside); but at this point most of them aren't even enviable people. Despite being richer than God, people like Huang, Musk, Ellison, and Zuckerberg feel more like vampires; they want to spend their whole lives doing the exact same thing, getting richer and richer, refusing to put a ladder down for anyone else to take a shot at improving on what they've built. I actually have a modicum of respect for Bezos and, to whatever vanishingly small degree, Trump; at least they're trying something different.
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#514Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Pi isnt a loss leader for user acquisition nor do they get to enjoy Apples economy of scale. Apple can take a small loss on this and it will still be worth it if they retain the users in their ecosystem.
Is there any evidence that’s the case? They always had massively bigger margins than all other PC manufacturers so it’s unlikely they are selling it at a loss even if’s significantly reduced
I mean, it's Apple we're talking about. Selling at margins <50% can probably be considered "at a loss"
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#515Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W (512MB) and Pi3B (1G) are both still super cheap if you can cope with that much RAM.
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#516Helium supply issues are only going to make this worse. I feel like for the first time in our lives we might have seen peak technology for the next few years. Everyone is going to have to make do instead of depending on ever increasing performance.
> 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.
Parties would be more interesting if the balloons were filled with hydrogen gas anyway.
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#517Earlier quoted context omitted.
I bought a pair of 4 TB SSDs for like $300-350/ea two years ago. I don’t remember exactly. Around Christmas I tried to order one more. They wanted to above MSRP, like $500. Given the price of everything else I decided to just bite the bullet and do it. After about a month they canceled my order. Whether that’s because they didn’t actually have one and couldn’t get one, or because they just wanted to wait for the pric…
I built a new desktop in 2023 and repurposed my old desktop for my daughter. The old desktop had a couple of smaller SSDs so I swapped them out for a 2TB Samsung SSD. Paid $99 on Amazon. The exact same SSD is $479 on Amazon today. It's not a fancy super fast NVMe. It's a slow SATA drive. I have no idea why anyone would even consider building a PC with prices this inflated.
> I have no idea why anyone would even consider building a PC with prices this inflated.
I did recently, specifically targeting lower capacities for the components that have been increasing (RAM and storage).
It didn’t seem like prices would be going down for a while and I didn’t have a desktop pc otherwise, so just went for it. We’ll see how it all plays out but I don’t think it was a terrible decision, as long as prices stay high for a couple years it still makes sense to just suffer through the increases
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#518Earlier quoted context omitted.
When it becomes clear that the insanely expensive AI data center orders are not going to be filled, we can expect a huge reversal in the price of RAM and GPUs. There are 241 GW of orders on the pipeline but only a third of that is under construction and of that third, even less is being quickly finished and brought online, It’s estimated that just 3GW came online last year. https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-industry…
Don't count on it. There's a lot of money in killing other businesses, or even just keeping prices high. Even if the high prices are an accident, there is always someone looking to take advantage of any situation for profit.
I have to agree. You only have to look at car and junk food inflation from after covid.
The prices make no sense, but that doesn't matter, they got away with it and are fighting to hold onto high prices, even as consumers balk. Their solution? Ditch poorer consumers. New cars and (branded) junk foods are luxury items now, apparently.
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#519OTOH things which belong on microcontrollers are now being pushed back to microcontrollers for cost reasons, so there is a win to be found there.
Yeah, never understood why I would want an entire OS running just to blink an LED. I was going to make a pro-Arduino comment but I guess my LED example warrants little more than an R/C circuit and a transistor, ha ha. (Anyway, I still remember the thrill of writing assembly for a 68HC11 and getting a pair of hobby servos to respond.)
68HC11 would have been a luxury for us.
Re: DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
#520Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Parties would be more interesting if the balloons were filled with hydrogen gas anyway.
Reminds me of a demo my college physics professor did in our first class (presumably to get our attention).
He had two floating balloons, one about twice as big as the other. Pointed a blowtorch at the smaller one and it (of course) popped.
"That one was filled with helium. Now, there's only one gas less dense than helium..." and right as I thought to myself "he's not gonna do what I think he's gonna do", he pointed the blowtorch at the other balloon which exploded into a much larger (and much louder) fireball.
Attention captured, for sure.