what if we cannibalize our long-term viability for a short-term gain says every dipshit in charge of tech hardware manufacturing.
you know when the bubble pops and they no longer have AI companies buying RAM they will switch back to consumers and keep the high prices.
if they’re still around when the financial shell game they’re playing finally comes to a stop. who am i kidding the government will bail them out.
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Absolutely
Keeping prices above what people are willing to buy for, while the majority of their business goes bust, is not a recipe to stay in business.
But consumers are stupid. when they start selling ram again at a high price we should all boycot buying computers. instead a lot of people will just accept the new price. we saw it after the pandemic, people just accepting prices instead of holding fast and forcing prices down.
You’re saying this as a comment on an article about how drastically sales have already dropped due to the price increases… people are already doing that.
I am talking about when the price is no longer based supply. When we see their market bottom out on AI one would expect to see the price drop. But looking at recent history these massive companies keep the price high because consumers see it as the new normal.
Consumers will find a way to eventually afford this price bump when its not food, shelter or medical care. It just takes a little longer when it is not a necessity.
Every business is doing this for everything. To different degrees but they are all chasing their “get our fortune now and get the fuck out because the sky is falling” mentality. Have been since Trump 1.0 and now it’s accelerating rapidly.
You have to remember that “get that bag” is practically inherit to business. We spend a lot of time and effort making it illegal to fuck people over and do bad business stuff, but kinda-sorta since Regan the businesses have slowly been winning that battle.
That’s every company, most upper management don’t stay in one position for more than 2 years. So the system is setup for short term gains because investors aren’t interested in long term investments and the blowback is the next guys problem. Who then is looking for the next big win to cover up the last guy issues without fixing anything. Then they bring in someone to clean up the mess and the cycle starts again.
Plus most consumers have short memories or don’t have an alternative so their stuck. There are small groups holding on but for 75% of the world’s population right now it’s Android or iOS, AMD or Intel, AMD or NVIDIA, Samsung or WD or Seagate or SanDisk, Att or Verizon, Apple or Microsoft, and so on.
how are they in control? market demand is an outside force
Makes sense. CPU/Mobo/RAM typically go together in a rebuild. Storage, case, PSU, perepherals, GPU can often carry over between builds as they’re all pretty backwards compatible.
Yeah. This makes pretty good sense. Make some ram and SSDs - lowee the price - and I’m sure Motherboard sales will go up.
It’s funny how people don’t want to buy motherboards without anything else
I only change motherboards when moving up to the next RAM format or CPU chipset. I stick with AMD due to cost and low thermals, and while their CPU generations shared the same interface I had one mobo for DDR3, one for DDR4, etc.
Can’t wrap my head around constantly upgrading the mobo to be honest. Sure, they have lots of features but I haven’t seen a situation where a mobo would be an upgrade worth doing without also upgrading everything else.
Just use Intel CPUs and you’ll understand, as they seem to invent a new incompatible socket every five minutes requiring a new mobo.
That is part of why I have avoided them, far easier to mix and match AMD stuff to meet my price points since their sockets stick around so long!
Each PC lasts me at least 5 years. I am three or so years on my 5800x3d with a 7090XT I picked up last year and the whole setup will probably still be rocking games past 2030.
Hah I just upgraded to that setup at the beginning of the year from a 2017 ryzen 1700 and GTX 1080 build.
It increased the longevity of this system by so much
The only time I’ve ever done that is during an upgrade chain that results in a motherboard not fitting into the case I need it to. Even then, the last one I bought was from a local used parts shop since I had an Intel 4670k I wanted to slap into a server.
How often do you upgrade your computer? I do the same but without really trying, it’s literally the case that by the time I start to feel I need a new pc there is already a new CPU socket, often several, and new ram format. I’ve almost never been able to actually reuse stuff. I imagine the only scenario where I could do that would be if some component straight up broke
Maybe every 5 or so years, and generally there has been something worth upgrading the mobo for like new connections for storage. So far it has been when it struggled with 75+ FPS in games that I care about at the settings I want.
Since it is so spread out I can’t say it is a solid pattern, but so far each CPU and mobo upgrade have been together with a new set of RAM and occasionally I get extra RAM in between. Hard drives/SSDs and GPUs are whenever but generally they are years apart too.
Yeah but it’s like the gearbox. While everything’s pulled apart, you may as well swap out the clutch, bearing, and flywheel too because they’ll need replacing again first. Especially if better versions of them are now supported.
because youd only swap mobos for either aesthetics(expensive, not often done) at best because you choose to downsize, or because you need more pci-e I/O.
the average user doesn’t use all their pci-e i/o, and the ones that do, are looking towards workstation motherboards, which is almost a completely different market from the consumer level stuff. It’s a game of, you know when you need more i/o, and if you needed it, you probably would have never bought the consumer level board in the first place.
On the plus side, indie games that don’t require a rocket ship for a PC have never been better. So, can still play some good stuff on my old clunker. Thanks to Steam/Proton, they run even better on my old computer.
I don’t understand what their long-term plan is here. Even if AI isn’t a bubble eventually all of the AI companies are going to get to a point where they don’t need more compute because they’re working on algorithmic optimisations because they decide that that’s cheaper.
Then they’re going to have to pivot back to the consumer market. Except by that point it won’t even be a consumer market because China will have eaten their lunch.
I read a great article recently that tries to analyze what exactly went down and for what reasons. And most importantly, the effects it’s going to have on different hardware prices: https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram-deal
Yeah that’s widely considered to be the article about it tbh
How dare you suggest that there is a future beyond next quarter!
It’s such a shame to see high-performance computing and gaming more broadly become largely unaffordable. Hell, prior to the DRAM shortage, the current-generation game consoles were already MORE EXPENSIVE than they were at launch. And it’s just going to get worse.
Like it was before. In the, not so long ago, past a high end pc was too expensive for the average user.
None of this is “high performance computing”. Are you simulating nuclear explosions? Airflow around supersonic aircraft? Sequencing DNA?
This is all entertainment, it’s useless, it turns people into potatoes. Digital garbage to make AI fat people fart videos.
Good riddance I say.
Burst the fucking bubble already. I’m edging so hard right now.
I went from thinking about a full rig upgrade, to just buying the best used processor and GPU my am4 board could handle with my current PSU and ddr4 ram.
Went from a ryzen 1600x and a Nvidia 1060 to a ryzen 5 5600x and a Radeon rx 6600 xt. I’ll be able to ride that out for a few years no problem.
The artificial price hikes actually saved you money. Noice!
funny i bought exactly the same CPU and GPU half a year ago. Someone in my city sold these for 200€.
I was going to go for an AM5 board and everything, but couldn’t afford it. My older parts were from 2016 and not even terrible. Its funny how little the hardware requirements have changed in the games and OS area. I am still using the same 16g RAM and PSU from 2016.
Ryzen 5600x here, was rocking a 6700 XT but found a good deal on a RX 9070 for $540 right around when the RAM prices increased. Already have 32 GB RAM, so I’m set for a while.
Yeah, I had the ram, but the 6600xt was the most I could buy without having to also upgrade my PSU.
I also decided to do a mild upgrade in my AM4 board rather than shell out for marginal upgrades. I’m rocking the 5700x3d 5700xt build.
This is hilarious. Intel after many years finally fixed their manufacturing process, but won’t be able to sell chips because of memory crunch
If only they had a solid state technology that expanded system memory… Shutting down optane comes to bite them, again.
Next up: MSI, ASUS, … are pulling out of the consumer market due to falling revenue causing major price hikes.
Do MSI and ASUS have enough corporate/enterprise sales to offset the loss of consumer demand? With the RAM companies the consumer crunch is caused by AI companies bidding up the price of raw memory silicon well beyond what makes financial sense to package and solder onto DIMMs (or even directly solder the packages onto boards for ultra thin laptops).
Asus is a significant ODM, supplying boards for brands like HP. I’m not sure what lines/models they make today, but they are a lot bigger than just their consumer lines.
I fear they will pull a GPU and the storage prices will be permanently 50% higher after.
This does seem likely, especially if it’s as the article claims and this continues into 2028. After 2 and a 1/2 years of triple digit profits nobody is going to be satisfied with a measly 14% or whatever markup they were getting before.
I’m on ryzen 9 5900x, rtx 3080, 32 GB DDR4, with mobo and psu that’s ~€850 today and it will play most modern games on high settings 1080p at +100 fps. Computer hardware these days is a lot more like car hardware than it used to be. Generational improvements aren’t as big and the price for a used 5 year old unit is a ⅓ of a new one. Unless you absolutely need the latest and greatest go with a used last gen.
Same specs as you except 5800x3D. Same sentiments at 1440p.
Same here, except 64GB of RAM, I can’t even remember how much that cost 4 years ago but I’m afraid to check the receipt at this point.
Or gpu prices or hdd/ssd prices that never recovered from the tsunami. Consumers just keep getting fucked.
Prices don’t generally recover; any reason for a price rise is a reason to make it the new norm.
Used to be, competition would spring up and keep them in check, but now that the entire market is 6 companies in a trench coat, any new competitor would just be acquired or forced out of business with legal demands or supplier tampering.
These companies have been found guilty of collusion in other markets (lcd panels anyone?) so what you are saying while factually correct, is in fact because of the failure to address the post collusion market. A fine is paid and then business as usual. It’s like a chicken vs egg argument except instead of just recognizing it doesn’t matter and regulate a market properly we use it as perfect justification for doing nothing.
A rising tide drowns those who can’t swim.
Wow, I can’t believe my plan for a cheap motherboard worked.
We need global laws against gouging
Yeah, they can be enforced by the power rangers across borders.
It’s a pipe dream, sadly.
Welp, sucks to be a motherboard manufacturer. Always getting dragged along by other component manufacturers.
They had a little bit of reprise with the surge of SFF PCs but not much.
