I've been buying a "new" used iphone for $100-150 now, every few years, for over a decade. My "new" used Dell laptop I bought a few months ago for $40 which became a linux system in just an hour. All good here.
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
#62What was most surprising about all this to me was this line: > So modern DRAM manufacturing is an extraordinarily complex and expensive process. Building a single state-of-the-art DRAM fabrication facility, a “fab,” will cost you about $15 to $20 billion; acquiring all the necessary equipment, like lithography tools and etching machines, will cost you another few billion; and then it’ll take you a few years of produc…
> Apple in particular has $20B in its couch cushions I wonder how long it REALLY took them to move from intel to apple silicon, which they don't even make. It might be easy, like a consumer deciding to generate their own electricity (pv on the roof) or it might be slightly harder, like a consumer deciding to generate their own electricity by drilling for oil, refining it, etc...
Well, they acquired PA Semi in 2008, they used their first chip (the A4) in the iPad in 2010, and they progressively iterated using the chip in phones until they announced the switch from Intel in 2020 (concurrently, more or less, with the A14). So it took them 12 years and 10 different chips.
Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics
#63This is the biggest memory repricing cycle I've ever seen in my life; some degree of high price/limited availability and "free RAM with purchase of Doritos" cycle is always expected, but this has been the worst one yet. As other commenters have pointed out but I might have missed in the article, compute maturation is amplifying memory constraints right now and making it worse. Device upgrade cycles are getting longer…
So with compute stagnating and memory constrained, my money is on vendors taking this as an opportunity to gradually shift away from a yearly release cadence and slow down to a biennial cycle that alternates between budget and flagship launches every other year.
For example, Apple might make fewer iPhone 18 and let it sell out frequently. They’ll use their RAM supplies mostly for the Pro phones.
I don’t think Apple will stop releasing new iPhone Pros every year. The business is too big.
Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Farms are failing where? More than usual?
they are not failing, our Socialist President provides billions in handouts for Farmers so they gonna be just fine
if they are large corporation owned farms as many small family owned farms are going to go bankrupt in the next 2 years because of the price of fertilizer and diesel and higher interest rate.
Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics
#65What was most surprising about all this to me was this line: > So modern DRAM manufacturing is an extraordinarily complex and expensive process. Building a single state-of-the-art DRAM fabrication facility, a “fab,” will cost you about $15 to $20 billion; acquiring all the necessary equipment, like lithography tools and etching machines, will cost you another few billion; and then it’ll take you a few years of produc…
> it seems they'd be a prime candidate to spin up their own memory fab.
While Apple et al certainly have the money to tilt up their own fab, they're savvy enough to understand the memory market's long history of constant boom/bust cycles. I still remember the huge DRAM shortage in late 80s forcing my startup at the time to delay launching our new product for a year.
People assume Apple cares about vertically integrating cost but they're actually focused on integrating margin. Apple has billions in cash on hand and when they think about what to do with it, a key metric is Return on Capital, especially the margin that capital will generate. Since a core metric public companies are judged on is blended margin, they are looking for ways their bags o' cash can be put to work generating revenue at margins that will pull their current average margin up vs down.
Averaged over time, mainstream memory devices are historically one of the worst margin areas of the semi market. It's super expensive to tilt up a fab on a new node but once you do, turning the crank faster to make a lot more chips isn't too hard because mainstream DRAM tends to be quite uniform. So when a fab on a new node and/or RAM generation first opens, the margins tend to be pretty great. But as the node matures and/or the RAM generation goes from 'new' to 'commodity', competition heats up as everyone gets better at making more faster. Then they're tempted to maximize revenue by cutting prices until their mature fab is at 101% utilization. And that eventually drives margins down until someone's selling near cost to sustain their low-price-enabling volume - with occasional dips below cost when they get stuck holding excess inventory. That's why cash-rich companies with high margins like Apple are delighted to buy DRAM built with Other People's Money. As long as the DRAM market is under competitive pressure, Apple gets to shop their huge orders around to get the absolute lowest price on RAM that was built with other investor's low margin dollars.
Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics
#66It's impressive that somehow, as if by coincidence, we're seeing the biggest inflationary drivers for decades, perhaps for centuries, all happening simultaneously. The Iran war is spiking the price of oil and will likely cause shortages of pretty much everything if it isn't ended. The Ukraine war is helping with that by destroying Russian refining capacity. The memory shortage is set to do the same to consumer electr…
> Meanwhile the AI fad is seeing huge layoffs.
This is really the only point I disagree with. Layoffs are being blamed on AI, but they are really a hangover of the covid hiring boom, and subsequent bust.
All the tech money is going into building data centres (and the gas turbines that power data centres), and it turns out that programmers don’t have the relevant skills to build gas turbines.
Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
This quote has nothing to do with capitalism. Please note that "commerce" and "capitalism" are not synonymous, and that the former does not imply the latter. Capitalism is in no way a prerequisite for technological development.
Capitalism is in no way a prerequisite for technological development. Really? Who else builds stuff?
You don't have to demonstrate this kind of ignorance of human history on main.
Aren't you embarrassed? Do you value knowledge even a little bit?
When did capitalism begin? How was 'stuff' created and distributed prior to that? How do other, distinct and contemporaneous modes of production create 'stuff'?
Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Thanks to capitalism, I don't have to toil in the fields. No, that's thanks to commerce not to capitalism. Capitalism benefits those those who hold capital, which is not me. The fact that there are more than enough resources for no one to live in poverty should suggest to you that something is wrong with the distribution system. "It's true, Mr/Ms Rationalist, that our patented Miracle Medical Snakeoil caused a thir…
> > Thanks to capitalism, I don't have to toil in the fields. > No, that's thanks to commerce not to capitalism. Capitalism benefits those those who hold capital, which is not me. Are you toiling in the fields? It seems to me like your attitude is that "If I can't be rich, then no one should be rich." > The fact that there are more than enough resources for no one to live in poverty should suggest to you that somethi…
> It seems to me like your attitude is that "If I can't be rich, then no one should be rich."
The problem with capitalism is not that some people get rich and some people don't. The problem is that of an unfair playing field.
Everyone has a body and a mind, and commerce allows us to rent out those features in exchange for pay. People who are smarter or stronger or work harder or work more will be able to benefit more. That's how I got rich. But there's a limit to how rich I can get, because I have only one body and one mind and there are a finite number of hours in the day.
The other way to get rich is to own things. If you own a factory or real estate or bonds you get to charge other people and make a profit even though you are expending no effort. And in this case there is no limit on your profit, because you can use your profit to buy more capital and make more profit from that. The result is eventually a winner-take-all economy, where the winners own an increasing amount of society and everyone else pays them to use it. If that sounds familiar, it should, because it's feudelism, and is the eventual end state of capitalism.
You should really read a bit about the philosophy that you're arguing so vehemently for, apparently without knowing anything about it.
> So instead of two thirds of the world not living in poverty, everyone should live in poverty equally?
No, that's ridiculous.
Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics
#69Maybe if we're lucky we get more memory efficient software. ehh who am I kidding.
Last week I spent some extra time on a ticket in order to write a slight refactor that saves some RAM. If I had asked my boss for an extra day to implement this I would have been chastised for not delivering faster.
Thankfully my colleagues saw the value in what I was doing. I smuggled the optimization into my PR with their approval. Anecdotal, but there are still people who care about efficiency out there.
That being said, unless your manager is John Carmack, or you work in embedded systems, time spent on reducing memory footprints is seen as wasteful by the business.
Re: The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics
#70It's impressive that somehow, as if by coincidence, we're seeing the biggest inflationary drivers for decades, perhaps for centuries, all happening simultaneously. The Iran war is spiking the price of oil and will likely cause shortages of pretty much everything if it isn't ended. The Ukraine war is helping with that by destroying Russian refining capacity. The memory shortage is set to do the same to consumer electr…
US tariffs are mostly dead. Ruled illegal and being refunded. Second attempt at tariffs has also been stopped. And inflation over the past 5 years is still milder than the late 70s and definitely milder than what has been seen in Turkey or Argentina or Zimbabwe.
Not to mention that some of the effects that OP cited are either deflationary (like layoffs and automation), or clearly cyclic (like the memory boom bust stages, experienced just a few years ago post COVID).