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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

#531

Post by m4x »

mrandish wrote: post #504
m4x wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A world where Apple has invested in their own fabs, so they can sell devices with drastically more RAM than their competition at entry-level prices.

The point of my GP post was that due to being one of the world's biggest and longest-term buyers, Apple is already paying very close to actual manufacturing costs + amortized capex because RAM is an undifferentiated commodity. Owning the factory themselves doesn't reduce the actual manufacturing cost + amortized capex that Apple would have to pay their own factory. Apple is already buying RAM at the lowest possible m…

Isn't one of the points of the article that memory manufacturers leave demand unmet for their own financial safety? In which case, nobody (including Apple) is paying close to manufacturing costs. There isn't enough memory to go around and prices are extremely inflated.

You're talking about the "best" things Apple could do with their money, in terms of investment returns, but I think that misses the point that Apple literally can't buy enough memory at any price.

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

#532

Post by WalterBright »

hackyhacky wrote: post #498
WalterBright wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started my own software business with no capital.

That's very impressive. How did you write software without a computer?

The school had one. When I wasn't at school, I wrote code in spiral notebooks.

Today you can buy a computer for $25. https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=raspberry+pi

You can pick up a keyboard at the thrift store for about $5, and a monitor for maybe $15.

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

#533

Post by fsckboy »

since any given day here there will be a majority unconcerned or actually defending code bloat, well now, this uniinteresting topic is just chickens-coming-home-to-roost. All the benefits of Moore's law are not gone, today's prices reflect a very large N of an exponential decline of cost per bit; these price increases are linear, not even a 2nd order polynomial, so why all the angst? go to your room and clean up your code.

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

#534

Post by andriy_koval »

fittingopposite wrote: post #316

Like Taleb says: "I've never seen a shortage not followed by a glut." Just wondering when this time is and got how long end consumers should wait for prices to fall again strongly.

Did he ever check housing market in certain developed areas?

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

#535

Post by cogman10 »

FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #447
Aerroon wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if this is actually true in the long-term though. If they were to flood the market with lots of high capacity memory, then I think our programs would start using more memory too. As a result we might end up needing more memory faster compared to if they keep demand unmet. Just consider that a chat application today takes more memory than a full 3D game with thousands of users (including chat) + the operating…

They are running fabs at 100% capacity. New fabs take many years to build, cost billions, and are out of date within a few process moves. One cannot simply "flood the market" or the Chinese would have done it ages ago.

> and are out of date within a few process moves.

The fabs themselves (especially for memory) are being retooled for process moves. At least that's what micron has been doing.

But otherwise I agree. Micron has a new fab being built that was started around 2020. It's nowhere near finished.

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

#536

Post by hackyhacky »

WalterBright wrote: post #527
hackyhacky wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Musk creating wealth has taken nothing from me. How about you? That's exactly what he'd like you to believe. Where did that money come from? Did he just print it himself? > Musk creating wealth has taken nothing from me. How about you? Considering that billionaires are actively involved in writing the laws that ostensibly apply to them (see also: regulatory capture), I hardly think that legality should be highest b…

> Where did that money come from? The value created by his company. That value can be turned into money by selling shares of it (stocks), or by borrowing against it (bonds). Money is created by banks. When banks loan you money, that money is created by a notation in the bank's ledger. But they only loan money on collateral, which would be in this case the value of the company. The money gets destroyed (!) when the lo…

> The value created by his company.

A company is just a legal fiction. It doesn't do anything without people. The value was actually created by the people who work for Musk. In other words, those employees create a large value, and are paid a relatively low compensation. The difference goes to Musk, who contributed no value at all.

That's called theft.

> Money is created by banks.

Huh? No it plainly is not.

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

#537

Post by giobox »

jnovek wrote: post #468
giobox wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For older hacker news readers who have lived through multiple RAM price spikes - it has held true for decades so far. Making memory is one of the most vicious tech markets to compete in.

The last one I remember was after the 2011 tsunami. I think things are worse these days because memory isn’t just a chip that you toss on a board anymore, it’s now frequently delivered in the same package as the CPU.

There was the 2007 spike following the Windows Vista release when a huge chunk of the corporate market had to buy new machines, there was also the Hynix fire in 2013, to pick a few recent ones. The 2007 spike was pretty rapidly killed by the famous global financial crisis that followed.

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

#538

Post by WalterBright »

hackyhacky wrote: post #502
WalterBright wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a long enough time line, all the money ends in very few hands. You're assuming the economy is zero sum, which it obviously is not.

> You're assuming the economy is zero sum, which it obviously is not. That assumption does not follow from my statement. What I do assume is that the easiest way to make money is to have money, which means that the rich and get richer and the poor get poorer. We've already seen that the rise of billionaires correlatives with an increase in wealth inequality and poverty.

Gambling is zero sum, so it does follow from your statement.

> the rise of billionaires correlatives with an increase in wealth inequality and poverty

The rise of the wealthy in the 19th century corresponded with scores of millions of people rising out of poverty into the middle class and beyond.

> What I do assume is that the easiest way to make money is to have money, which means that the rich and get richer and the poor get poorer.

Creating value does not make the poor poorer.

Consider the wealth in America today. Compare it with the wealth in America in 1800. Where did all that wealth come from? Rich European immigrants?

Did you know that when Rockefeller built Standard Oil, the price of kerosene dropped 70%. Just who exactly was he "robbing"?

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

#539

Post by hackyhacky »

WalterBright wrote: post #530
joe_mamba wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you count being a Doordash or Uber eats self employed sole proprietorship as "endless business opportunities", then yeah you could be right.

I had a paper route as a boy. It was definitely a business, as I contracted with the newspaper publisher for it. I bought the papers from the publisher, delivered them, and collected money from the customers. How much money I made was a function of how many customers I could sign up for delivery. I made enough to buy a car. Real estate agents operate in much the same way.

Have we already gotten to the part of the conversation where you just admit that your entire understanding of economics is based on a handful of personal anecdotes?

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

#540

Post by rjh29 »

andybak wrote: post #461
rjh29 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few days ago Gemini redid their rate limits, making images/audio/video generation much more expensive, shrunk limits across the board (including a new weekly limit) and added more expensive tiers. At the moment you can pay $20/month to do thousands of expensive queries a month (involving file uploads, the Pro model, extended thinking), and evidence suggests that heavy users are not profitable.

I agree that heavy users are probably not profitable but that's the way the economics of subscription services tends to work across the board. I'm arguing that even if inference isn't profitable right now it's not orders of magnitude off. Whatever pricing emerges for models equivalent to current frontier models won't be significantly higher than the current API pricing. There are already enough small companies withou…

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