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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

#621

Post by slaw »

handle584 wrote: post #615
slaw wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alipay is available only through Discover. Chinese processors have no presence in the US. In the same way in China you can use Visa and Mastercard through WeChat.

Source about alipay/discover partnership? I could not find any and it is hard to imagine how a card-based network can support a qrcode-based system. The acceptance of Alipay at CVS/Walgreens is native, meaning you pay by qrcodes, exactly what you do in China. Major merchants in the US do support UnionPay, even USPS(!) displays its logo. The problem used to be small/local merchants, but with the advent of modern PoS l…

alipay uses first data

unionpay uses pulse

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Data

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_(interbank_network)

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

#623

Post by samiv »

WalterBright wrote: post #580
samiv wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most employees have absolutely Zero leverage. Ask any Amazon warehouse worker how much liberties they have and how much in practice they can negotiate. Just because some employees have had some leverage doesn't change the underlying power dynamics between employers and employees. In fact we're now seeing this play out in software as well with the AI hype train and I expect a reality check to hit many people previousl…

> Most employees have absolutely Zero leverage. They can walk away at any moment and there's absolutely nothing Amazon can do about it. Amazon pays significantly above minimum wage. Why don't they pay minimum wage? Amazon benefits to warehouse workers include heavily subsidized health care (starting at $5 per week), up to 20 weeks of paid parental leave, prepaid college tuition, and a 401(k) company match. That's the…

Walk away and do what?

Most proletariats don't have that option since they need their incomes.

When an employee has exactly the options of taking it or leaving it is not leverage.

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

#624

Post by mrandish »

isr wrote: post #618
mrandish wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The first computer I ever used had 512K Mine had 4K of RAM and an 800 KHz CPU - and I was living in the future , man. No way I could use that much memory. After all I had to type in whatever program I wanted to run every time I turned it on. Then I got a manual audio cassette recorder and thought "Woah, I don't think it gets better than this!"

My first (vic20) had 3.5KB of ram. When I added a whopping 8KB memory expansion cartridge, I genuinely wondered if I could possibly get any of my BASIC programs to use it all. And when I upgraded from tapes to the 1541 floppy drive (5.25" floppies), it was like "thats it - I have INFINITE possibilities now" Simpler times :)

> the 1541 floppy drive

Ah, the legendary 1541. We used to joke it was the only floppy drive on any 8-bit micro that was actually slower than some dial-up modems. It wasn't actually slower, but it was really slow compared to most other 8-bit computer's drives (unless you added after-market accelerators).

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

#625

Post by KronisLV »

Two predictions.

The people responsible for throwing the consumer segment under the bus will see no repercussions for this - nobody is going to jail, consumers get screwed.

The memory prices will never return to the pre-shortage prices. They’ll use this as an excuse to subtly increase the base prices and the orgs that sell the devices will also do a similar increase, also past what the BOM changed by.

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

#626

Post by rldjbpin »

try-working wrote: post #596

The Big 3 memory producers are really super charging their Chinese competitors CXMT and YMTC. They will IPO this year and they will be able to get massive funding for their build outs. If the Big 3 had been more prudent, they could have kept profits lower and avoided this, but now they've probably dug their own grave and will see massive decline in profits starting from 2027/2028 when Chinese capacity really comes on…

while it looks like outlandish fantasy today, looking forward to their competitors dumping consumer memory in a couple year's time.

regardless, this industry goes through such cycles (which have killed weaker companies and made the situation worse). high time for the memory "OPEC" to disband.

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

#627

Post by mft_ »

jurgenburgen wrote: post #595
rationalist wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it's a possibility, do you believe it is likely enough in the very near future to the point where you are betting on it? Perhaps shorting TSMC? If I did so when I first thought about it, I would be broke by now.

Not shorting TSMC, I’ve lost too much money shorting and it’s just too easy to lose because of timing even if you eventually are correct. I’ve overweighted EU weapons manufacturers because a Taiwan war will be coupled with an expansion of the war in Europe. With the US busy trying to fight China, Russia will for sure make a bigger move in Europe. European defense budgets will 10x.

Big picture, I think you're right that there will be continued and increased EU spending on weapons. But... Russia is basically at full capacity just standing still (or losing slowly) in Ukraine. Do they even have the ability (people, weapons, fuel, money, logistics) to significantly expand the war further?

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

#628

Post by xg15 »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #601
_DeadFred_ wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure "only the Chinese model can solve the normies pain" is a great look. Lately consumers are told capitalism is cheap TVs, phones, and computers while housing, healthcare, education, energy, and food climbed further out of reach. The "bread" part of bread and circuses has shrunk dramatically, "but at least you're getting cheaper circuses" is what they've been saying. Now you're saying only a heavily state-direc…

> Lately consumers are told capitalism is cheap TVs, phones, and computers while housing, healthcare, education, energy, and food climbed further out of reach. Who says this? The latter are heavily regulated and not exposed to market forces, which is why they didn’t get cheaper, unlike TVs etc.

The result of equivalent deregulation would be slums and shantytowns. But hey, cheap rent! I don't think this is s desirable outcome either.

Also, from the article:

> In other words: you can buy a computer thousands of times more powerful than the best consumer device from 40 years ago, for something like 0.3 percent of the price. No other good in history has experienced a decline in cost on that scale: poor people can now carry around in their pockets computers many orders of magnitude more powerful than what the richest slice of the world’s population could afford a few decades ago.

That extreme level of efficiency increase is something very specific to computers and not something translatable to other areas of the economy.

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

#629

Post by pseudohadamard »

gblargg wrote: post #172
simonw wrote: post #2

The headline here under-serves the article in my opinion: this is a fascinating, deep explanation of how the memory market works and why increased demand for HBM (used by big GPU racks) hurts the availability of wafers for DDR and LPDDR (used by laptops and phones).

This also put a lot into perspective: > these memory makers have learned a very particular lesson from the unforgiving history [deep drops in demand] of their industry: always leave demand unmet I can't blame them for keeping some reserve demand ready so they keep having customers over the years.

It's more than that though. Memory is a series of boom-and-bust cycles. Also, it costs around $15 billion and takes 2-3 years to build a fab. So if you were to start now, you'd have a pretty good chance of hitting the next bust right after spending $15 billion. It's not necessarily some sinister conspiracy, it's because execs are reluctant to be the ones to take the blame for setting fire to $15 billion. Looks kinda bad on your CV.

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

#630

Post by bornfreddy »

array_key_first wrote: post #556
mr_toad wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Most companies are showing high revenue and profit and still laying off huge segments of their workforce. Largely due to the stock market - a lot of non-AI players are facing lowering stock price.

High revenue and profit are not relevant - employees cost money, so if company feels it could do without them, the layoffs happen. Low revenue and loss would be another reason for layoffs too, of course.
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