Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business

https://investors.micron.com/news-releases/news-release-details/micron-announces-exit-crucial-consumer-business

by simlevesque • 8 months ago

763 388 8 months ago

investors.micron.com

haunter• 8 months ago

(Crucial the brand not the adjective)

They announced a month ago that their upstate NY fab was delayed by 2-3 years so the painting was on the wall

https://archive.md/WSsLm

https://www.syracuse.com/micron/2025/11/micron-chip-factorie...

delfinom• 8 months ago

They don't need the fab for Crucial the brand.

Anything the fab outputs will feed into Micron selling to datacenters

ZoneZealot• 8 months ago

Micron are estimated to have 23% and 21% of global revenue for DRAM and HBM in Q2 2025.

Their 'smaller' market, SSDs - has an estimated 13% of global NAND revenue.

https://counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/global-dram-and... https://counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/global-nand-mem...

I don't know their breakdown for consumer vs enterprise, but the Crucial brand is consumer focussed. Obviously enterprise at this point is incredibly lucrative.

We're gonna need a bigger pin.

consumer451• 8 months ago

Tangent: this is going to happen with SOTA LLMs as well, isn't it.

Consumers are so annoying. And by consumers, I mean "anyone can get an API key for the latest model."

palmotea• 8 months ago

When richer people than you want things, those things can become unavailable to you (or at least less available).

I really hope this bubble pops, all these investors lose their shirts, and prices come down to something reasonable.

Night_Thastus2• 8 months ago

When it eventually does, they'll just come up with something else. Nvidia got a taste of inflated prices from the Crypto and then AI, and they're not going to just let that go. If nothing exists they'll make something and hype it endlessly to try to keep this going.

thway15269037• 8 months ago

Then I sure hope Nvidia completely ceases to exist, like SGI, who, ironically, was decimated by Nvidia and cheap consumer hardware.

iamnothere• 8 months ago

Better hope it’s not something like potable water. Not even joking.

mfost• 8 months ago

This mostly means richer people have too much money if they can do that.

What's next, a new tech allowing you to turn food into money at a rate nobody can afford to eat anymore?

GCUMstlyHarmls2• 8 months ago

Universal p̶a̶p̶e̶r̶c̶l̶i̶p̶ Money Machine. I'd probably read that short story.

bilegeek• 8 months ago

Once the bubble pops, there will be a recession, lots of regular people will lose their jobs and won't be able to afford anything even IF prices come down.

They've got you coming and going.

kelnos3• 8 months ago

Yup. As much as I am skeptical of AI and do believe this is a bubble, I don't want to see a repeat of ~2000.

elzbardico• 8 months ago

MBA/Wall Street short term driven decision.

freetime2• 8 months ago

Crucial was always a brand that I associated with quality, and I used their memory to upgrade several MacBooks back when it was still possible to upgrade the memory on MacBooks.

That being said, the only SSD I’ve ever had fail on me was from Crucial.

In recent builds I have been using less expensive memory from other companies with varying degrees of brand recognizability, and never had a problem. And the days of being able to easily swap memory modules seem numbered, anyway.

hnuser123456• 8 months ago

I also had a Crucial SSD fail. I believe it was either 256GB or 512GB SATA, around 2013-2014. Right around the same time OCZ released a batch of SSDs that were so bad they went out of business, despite being a leader in performance. It was a fairly large story about defective silicon. Good lesson in not being too loyal to brand names.

linsomniac• 8 months ago

I've long (very, very long) been a storage snob. Originally via the IBM UltraStar drives, and continued with the Intel SSDs. Even with good backups, a drive failure is often a pain in the ass. Slightly less so with RAID.

IBM really locked me in on the Ultrastar back in the mid '90s. Sure, it has proven itself to be a great product. But some of the first ones I bought, one of the drives arrived failed. I called the vendor I bought it from and they said they wouldn't replace it, I'd have to get a refurb from IBM. So I called IBM, when I told them I had just bought it they said I needed to call the place I bought it from because otherwise I'd get a refurb. I explained I had already called them. "Oh, who did you buy it from?" I told them. "Can you hold on a minute?" ... "Hi, I've got [NAME] on the line from [VENDOR] and they'll be happy to send you a replacement."

robotresearcher2• 8 months ago

My most memorable RAM upgrade was adding 512KB to an Atari ST in 1988. Had to suck the solder out of 16x(16+2) factory flow-soldered through-holes, then solder in the 16 individual RAM chips and their decoupling capacitors. I was a teenager and hadn’t soldered before. I had no one to show me how, so I got a book from the library with pictures.

Was a huge relief that the machine come up successfully. But then it would lock up when it got warm, until I found the dodgy joint.

Was a very stressful afternoon, but a confidence builder!

I bet there are many people whose sole experience inside a computer is popping in some DIMMs. I’ll be kinda sad if those days are also gone. On the other hand, super integrated packages like Apple’s M-series make for really well-performing computers.

LargoLasskhyfv3• 8 months ago

Huh... I did that, too :)

And before that I duct-taped the insanely large 16KB RAM extension (from 1KB), so it doesn't reset with the slightest movement, on my Sinclair ZX81, which I've also assembled and soldered from a kit :)

0manrho9• 8 months ago

That's because the SSD business was little more than a carbon copy of most other consumer non Samsung or SK/Solidigm brands. They've been phison controller with some cheap NAND flash with a different coat of paint for generations now, or in the case of the portable/external ones, that plus a 3rd party enclosure and IO module that they'd contracted out. In terms of hardware, this sub-business-unit was no more "Micron" than Corsair is (Support may be a different story). Enterprise SSD's and Consumer ones diverged years ago, and today are about as different from one another as GPU's are from CPU's.

The only real difference between Crucial RAM and Micron's unbuffered RAM was which brand's sticker they put on it, with some binning and QA on the higher-end enthusiast SKU's and a heatsink. This sub-business-unit was almost entirely redundant to Micron.

And the days of being able to easily swap memory modules seem numbered, anyway.

I keep seeing people say this in threads across platforms discussing this news, and it baffles me. Why?

Macha2• 8 months ago

All the higher margin non consumer markets are moving away from socketed ram for integrated ram for performance and manufacturing cost reasons. It’s hard to see what the motivation for spending some of their limited foundry time on products that are only of interest to lower margin direct consumers if this keeps up

jijijijij4• 8 months ago

“The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage. Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments,” said Sumit Sadana, EVP and Chief Business Officer at Micron Technology.

"AI"-driven collapse will go down as the stupidest crisis in human history. The idiotic waste of gigantic amounts of civilizatory resources, for something that hasn't remotely proven useful yet, while simultaneously neglecting existentially mandated reforms and investments, in an outrageously obvious critical moment in time ... well that's gonna dwarf even historic missteps of organized religion and island cultures.

I am calling it now:

* Cancelled: Cyberpunk.

* New lore timeline: Hypepunk > Crash-Core > Silicon Gothic

* Historian epoch title: The Dark Ages.

Y_Y• 8 months ago

Indeed it was naive of us not to have called that controversial medieval lull in societal progress "The First Dark Ages".

jijijijij4• 8 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography)

The term is up for grabs again. Also, future historians may not categorize medieval times as we do. By then, libraries may have been converted to data centers and historic artifacts burned to fuel GPUs, or destroyed through hallucinated restoration advice. Remaining digital traces may have been exhaustively overwritten by verbose AI prose, or simply lost when AWS introduced generative DNS. In a 1000 years, the only preserved evidence of medieval times may be an LLM's summary of "A Knight's Tale".

jhack• 8 months ago

"The idiotic waste of gigantic amounts of civilizatory resources, for something that hasn't remotely proven useful yet"

https://ai.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/AI-S2501208

redbluered2• 8 months ago

Remember when AOL bought Time Warner?

I do think it's proven useful, much like the internet had in the nineties.

jijijijij4• 8 months ago

Dude, that's like someone's opinion. Also neural nets doing pattern recognition on x-ray images is not the reason Micron abandoned their consumer shovel business.

t1234s• 8 months ago

I've only ever bought crucial ram for the past 20 years.

Animats• 8 months ago

Wow. They're not selling off the business, they're totally exiting it.

This is a big loss. Crucial offered a supply chain direct from Micron. Most other consumer DRAM sources pass through middlemen, where fake parts and re-labeled rejects can be inserted.

walterbell4• 8 months ago

Should countries have a upper limit on the ratio of server:client memory supply chain capacity? If no one can buy client hardware to access the cloud, how would cloud providers survive after driving their customers to extinction?

It shouldn't be possible for one holding company (OpenAI) to silently buy all available memory wafer capacity from Samsung and SK Hynix, before the rest of civilization even has the opportunity to make a counteroffer.

jeffbee2• 8 months ago

If you asked me to estimate the weighted fraction of clients accessing cloud services using devices with retail DIMMs, I would say much less than 1%.

newsclues• 8 months ago

Devices like smartphones and tablets that are locked down will continue to exist.

It’s these pesky pc things that people do bad things like piracy with/s

venturecruelty2• 8 months ago

We can prevent this from happening by enforcing 100-year-old antitrust laws.

fn-mote• 8 months ago

These suggestions seem to me part of an absurd struggle against basic market economics.

This isn’t antitrust because the companies aren’t reselling it to you at a much higher price after cornering the market (cough cough Ticketmaster & scalpers).

mikestorrent• 8 months ago

What if we realize that 8 GB of memory is actually a tremendous amount, and experience a resurgence in desktop operating systems as people begin to prioritize memory for productive computation again instead of using up a gigabyte for a chat client?

Aurornis4• 8 months ago

Should countries have an upper limit on the ratio of server:client memory supply chain capacity? If no one can buy client hardware to access the cloud, how would cloud providers survive after driving their customers to extinction?

You mean a central planning, command and control economy? There is a lot of history of countries trying these things and they don’t have the outcome you want.

DRAM manufacturing is a global business. If one country starts imposing purchase limits for whatever reason, the DRAM consumers are going to laugh as they move their data centers and operations to another country that doesn’t try to impose their laws on a global market.

It shouldn't be possible for one holding company (OpenAI) to silently buy all available memory wafer capacity from Samsung and SK Hynix, before the rest of civilization even has the opportunity to make a counteroffer.

Good news: That’s not how markets work. DRAM manufacturers don’t list a price and then let OpenAI buy it all up. Contracts are negotiated. Market prices fluctuate.

No supplier of anything is going to let all of their inventory disappear to one buyer without letting the market have a chance to bid the price higher.

neilv4• 8 months ago

I wonder why they didn't pull a GE, and sell/license the brand. But I'm glad they didn't.

Yokolos• 8 months ago

Why would anybody buy it? This is a bad sign for consumer memory in general. It's more likely we're going to see more exits from this segment instead.

pmontra• 8 months ago

Maybe they keep the brand to resurrect it some years in the future when the surge of data centers has faded away and they'll have to find custumers between consumers.

LargoLasskhyfv3• 8 months ago

There is KLEVV, the outlet of SK Hynix. They are crass!

https://www.klevv.com/ken/main

And don't forget about https://www.nanya.com/en/

While I never had a problem with https://semiconductor.samsung.com/dram/module/ , I think they will be rare/more expensive now, or 'soonish'.

For chinese CXMT and YMTC there is https://www.biwintech.com/

We live in interesting times!

(Cackling madly...)

addaon• 8 months ago

Strange that Klevv is putting RGB LEDs on DIMMs, and Samsung isn't. Where does Samsung plan to put the advertisements?

Panzer04• 8 months ago

huh, that explains why they always seem to sell the best 6000CL30 RAM.

kvemkon• 8 months ago

KLEVV

Just looked at standard desktop: still no 64GB 5600MT/s modules. CUDIMMs are missing 32GB.

And don't forget about Nanya

BTW, what is the status of Elpida now?

_cenw3• 8 months ago

Hynix also started selling consumer SSDs with "SK Hynix" branding like 2-3 years ago. I guess we'll see how long that lasts.

jauntywundrkind• 8 months ago

With ram, you can verify pretty quick what you are getting.

I really wouldn't want to buy any NAND vendor until a bunch of years after they build a reputation. It's too scary to get a decent bargain SSD drive that actually oh secretly dies really early, doesn't actually have anywhere near the endurance it claims.

sheepscreek2• 8 months ago

They are rerouting RAMs for consumers to enterprise for server build up - for higher margins I’m sure. MAG7 will happily pay more but poor consumers like us can’t - this is more bad news for us.

UncleOxidant• 8 months ago

Wondering if we're going to have a situation in the future where we end up having to buy the hand-me-downs from industry after they're done with them (and thus kind of outdated tech)? Kind of seems like the days of building your own PC are numbered.

inferiorhuman• 8 months ago

  They are rerouting RAMs for consumers to enterprise for server build up

Enterprise? No. Micron is explicitly focusing on AI.

knowitnone3• 8 months ago

and when the AI boom pops, Micron is going to lose out on the consumer market. This is a horrible business decision. All they had to do was increase the price.

fransje26• 8 months ago

Pop already! Let's get all this nonsense over with.

hammock2• 8 months ago

Exiting the market. Not abandoning the factories. They will be retooled for AI market, which is more profitable.

This is like developers shifting from building homes targeted at homeowners to building build-to-rent neighborhoods for Blackrock and company xD

sakompella• 8 months ago

notably, Blackrock doesn't actually have any stake in housing. Plenty of other private equity firms do, of course.

adolph• 8 months ago

  Have you ever confused BlackRock with Blackstone? Despite their similar 
  sounding names, these two financial powerhouses represent distinct approaches 
  to investment management.

https://www.investing.com/academy/trading/blackrock-vs-black...

  Major news organizations and sector researchers describe the claim as 
  unfounded and often rooted in confusion between BlackRock Inc. and the 
  private-equity firm Blackstone Inc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackRock_house-buying_conspir...

Aurornis4• 8 months ago

Most other consumer DRAM sources pass through middlemen, where fake parts and re-labeled rejects can be inserted.

Large DIMM vendors are definitely not buying through middlemen.

Any vendor consuming a lot of RAM chips over a threshold will be negotiating contracts with RAM chip manufacturers. It’s not that hard even at medium scale.

IG_Semmelweiss• 8 months ago

Yep. I've followed Micron since before Y2k. I've seen the ups and downs of their stock. Seen a CEO literally crash and burn (RIP).

This is a mistake. The consumer business is a bet , which they excel at. Yes, its not printing money right now, but it is an option. Exiting the consumer business will mean they may miss insights into the next hot consumer trend.

The game for large companies like this should be to keep small bets going and literally, just survive. That's what Micron was doing, that's what NVIDIA did for a better part of a decade. Now that both are printing money.

Yet, Micron has decided its retiring from placing more bets. Mistake.

0manrho9• 8 months ago

What is there to sell? The brand itself has value I guess, but that "Direct Access" goes out the door the second they sell it, so there's no value specifically in that to anyone else.

Crucial is primarily a Marketing and Support company, they didn't really make anything although there was a small engineering team that did DIMM/Module binning, but mostly contracted out heatsinks to glue to Micron DIMMs. On the SSD side of things, they used Phison controllers with Micron flash, just like pretty much any other consumer SSD that isn't Samsung or SK/Solidigm.

Corsair, Gskill, Geil, etc don't buy components from Crucial, they get them Micron. Crucial closing their doors has no bearing on that as far as we can tell.

They probably considered dumping it on some Private Equity firm or something, but likely decided to keep the IP in case they decide to resurrect it in the future should the market landscape change.

It sucks that they're winding down crucial, but it makes sense. Frankly I'm surprised they didn't pull the trigger sooner, and by sooner I mean years sooner.

AnthonyMouse4• 8 months ago

They're not selling off the business, they're totally exiting it.

From what I understand, OpenAI just bought out a significant proportion of the capacity of Samsung and Hynix, which is the big reason prices just spiked. They're two of the three DRAM manufacturers, Micron being the third.

That gives us a good idea as to what Micron is doing here: They have contracts with their other customers to supply DRAM at whatever price they previously negotiated, but now prices are higher, and they don't have to honor supply contracts with Crucial because they own it. So they're taking all the supply that would have gone to Crucial and selling it to the high bidder instead.

Spinning off the brand in that context doesn't work, because then "Crucial" would need to come with supply contracts or they'd have no access to supply and have nothing to sell. Moreover, the supply constraint isn't likely to be permanent, and whenever prices come back down then Micron would still own the brand and could start selling under it again, which they couldn't if they sold it.

ethbr12• 8 months ago

Moreover, the supply constraint isn't likely to be permanent, and whenever prices come back down then Micron would still own the brand and could start selling under it again, which they couldn't if they sold it.

Why not just announce limited supply, then, instead of exiting?

This seems like a "automaker invests more in financing arm, because it's the most profitable" concentration mistake, towards an industry with wide concerns over intermediate term financial sustainability.

torginus• 8 months ago

I think others will pick up the slack. The Chinese seem to be pretty good at producing competent Flash/DRAM products (I don't think they are behind that much). They also don't seem to be all in on the AI craze, so maybe we will buy their stuff if nothing else?

Simulacra• 8 months ago

This is very sad. Ive been using Crucial for decades, the most reliable I have ever had.

m4r1k• 8 months ago

I have also bought Crucial for decades. Great quality and reliability for a fair price. Anybody doing anything semi-professional will be impacted by this questionable decision.

lambchoppers• 8 months ago

If you are going to sell shovels for a gold rush its pretty silly to keep rational market compatibility on things like prices, defect rate, packaging, correct contents.. Probably better to spare the brand (for a reboot?) and also not compete as much with all that junk when it shows up again on eBay.

throwaway484762• 8 months ago

What a disaster for Micron. Having a consumer facing brand is 'crucial' for brand awareness. Micron is the smallest of the big 3 in DRAM and the only one in America. They're going to be swallowed up and replaced by CXMT.

httpz2• 8 months ago

The brand aware "consumers" are really just DIY PC builders, which is relatively a small number. Enterprise DRAM business is doing so great that Micron just doesn't see the consumer market is worth chasing.

This is bad for consumers though since DRAM prices are skyrocketing and now we have one less company making consumer DRAM.

theelous3• 8 months ago

The people who occupy the b2b ram buying kind of jobs are not aliens from another planet. Brand awareness in consumer markets, especially ones that are so closely tied to people's jobs (nerds gonna nerd) is going to have a knock on effect. It's not like a clothing brand or something.

mrcwinn2• 8 months ago

You’re exactly wrong. In the race to supply AI data center, there is no “consumer” (in the sense I think you mean) making or influencing a buying decision. Without a clear path to increase supply, why take $1 when you can have $6 or $7?

LargoLasskhyfv3• 8 months ago

https://www.biwintech.com/

dboreham• 8 months ago

Micron had infinite brand awareness in the electronics industry long before they made SSDs. Heck they don't even use their own name for those products. They've been a memory vendor for more than 40 years and they're the only vendor with US domestic memory fabs. Something tells me their future will be just fine. Disclosure: Micron stock holder.

throwaway484762• 8 months ago

Every low end IoT box made in china will be 'encouraged' to use CXMT aided by state subsidies. This will shrink the market for market price DRAM. When the AI bubble pops DRAM makers will discover the importance of diversification.

ajross• 8 months ago

What a disaster for Micron.

Almost certainly this is because of a windfall for Micron, at least in the short term. Datacenter memory demand is going through the roof, and that was where margins were highest already. It makes no sense to continue to try to milk a consumer brand that can be sold at, what, a 20% markup over generics?

Most likely Micron was planning this forever, and the current market conditions are such that it's time to pull the trigger and retool everything for GPU memory.

Spooky23• 8 months ago

Micron is chasing AI glory. Their stock valuation has no room for consumer business, which is a distraction.

You can’t think about companies like it’s 2024. We’re in a gilded age with unlimited corruption… Anything can happen. They can sign a trillion dollar deal with OpenAI, get acquired by NVidia, merge with Intel, get nationalized by Trump, etc.

drdec• 8 months ago

Micron is chasing AI glory.

Sounds to me like they are using the tried and true method of selling equipment to the people rushing for gold

benatkin• 8 months ago

That's planned, not a disaster. They've deprioritized brand awareness. Siemens for instance doesn't need brand awareness, if they did, they'd pick an english name.

0manrho9• 8 months ago

Considering how many people don't realize Crucial is a Micron brand, or that Micron components are in a lot of non-crucial consumer brand products, I'd argue it wasn't that crucial.

Especially considering that there's little innovation in the consumer DRAM and SSD spaces vs their enterprise counterparts that Micron can flex their talent in.

potwinkle• 8 months ago

This seems a bit foolish? Even just limiting stock to paper launches and massively raising the price would let you say "oh, it's just the market" but here it makes them look like they're putting all their eggs in one basket.

neilv4• 8 months ago

Sad. I've been buying Crucial as an attempt to avoid counterfeits, both buying direct and on eBay. Every DIMM and SSD from them has been perfect so far.

(ProTip: When you see 'Crucial'-labeled DIMMs with chips that don't have the Micron 'M' logo, I wouldn't buy that, or I would send it back.)

httpz2• 8 months ago

I'm half joking but if this AI boom continues we're going to see Nvidia exit from consumer GPU business. But Jensen Huang will never do that to us... (I hope)

goda90• 8 months ago

They are already making moves that might suggest that future. They are going to stop packaging VRAM with their GPUs shipped to third-party graphics card makers, who will have to source their own, probably at higher cost.

bpye• 8 months ago

I think Nvidia realises that selling GPUs to individuals is useful as it allows them to develop locally with CUDA.

pizlonator• 8 months ago

This is a huge reason.

tomasphan• 8 months ago

There is a couple reasons why Jensen won't take off the gaming leather jacket just yet:

1. Gaming cards are their R&D pipeline for data center cards. Lots of innovation came from gaming cards.

2. Its a market defense to keep other players down and keep them from growing their way into data centers.

3. Its profitable (probably the main reason but boring)

4. Hedge against data center volatility (10 key customers vs millions)

5. Antitrust defense (which they used when they tried to buy ARM)

BizarroLand• 8 months ago

6. Techies who use NVidia GPUs in their PCs are more likely to play with AI and ultimately contribute to the space as either a developer or a user

hyperbovine• 8 months ago

1. Gaming cards are their R&D pipeline for data center cards. Lots of innovation came from gaming cards.

No way that is true any more. Five years ago, maybe.

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1izlt9w/nvidi...

bluescrn• 8 months ago

Might almost be a good thing, if it means abandoning overhyped/underperforming high-end game rendering tech, and taking things in a different direction.

The push for 4K with raytracing hasn't been a good thing, as it's pushed hardware costs way up and led to the attempts to fake it with AI upscaling and 'fake frames'. And even before that, the increased reliance on temporal antialiasing was becoming problematic.

The last decade or so of hardware/tech advances haven't really improved the games.

swinglock• 8 months ago

The latest DLSS and FSR are good actually. Maybe XeSS too.

babypuncher3• 8 months ago

The push for ray tracing comes from the fact that they've reached the practical limits of scaling more conventional rendering. RT performance is where we are seeing the most gen-on-gen performance improvement, across GPU vendors.

Poor RT performance is more a developer skill issue than a problem with the tech. We've had games like Doom The Dark Ages that flat out require RT, but the RT lighting pass only accounts for ~13% of frame times while pushing much better results than any raster GI solution would do with the same budget.

whatevaa2• 8 months ago

DLSS Transformer models are pretty good. Framegen can be useful but has niche applications dure to latency increase and artifacts. Global illumination can be amazing but also pretty niche as it's very expensive and comes with artifacts.

Biggest flop is UE5 and it's lumen/nanite. Reallly everything would be fine if not that crap.

And yeah, our hardware is not capable of proper raytracing at the moment.

officeplant2• 8 months ago

Honestly, I'd prefer it. It might get AMD and Intel more off their ass for GPU development. I already stopped buying Nvidia gpus ages ago before they saw value in the Linux/Unix market, and I'm tired of them sucking up all the air in the room.

cmsj3• 8 months ago

Intel GPUs are probably not going to last much longer, considering they did a deal with nvidia for integrated GPUs.

CTDOCodebases• 8 months ago

The way things are going no one will be able to afford a PC.

Instead we will be streaming games from our locked down tablets and paying a monthly subscription for the pleasure.

20after43• 8 months ago

You will own nothing and be happy.

venturecruelty2• 8 months ago

Why would anyone sell a handful of GPUs to nobodies like us when they could sell a million GPUs for thousands apiece to a handful of big companies? We're speedrunning the absolute worst corpo cyberpunk timeline.

kelnos3• 8 months ago

Because when you lose even one of those big companies in your handful, it tanks your business. Customer diversity is a good thing.

And they're not selling a handful of GPUs to nobodies like us; they're selling millions of GPUs to millions of nobodies.

whatevaa2• 8 months ago

They will constrain supply before exiting. It's just not smart exiting, you can stop developing and it will be a trickle, also will work as insurance in case AI flops.

leoc• 8 months ago

In the words of Douglas Adams, there are those who say that this has already happened.

Brainlag• 8 months ago

Jensen is to paranoid to do it. But whoever comes after him will do it ASAP.

Macha2• 8 months ago

They did get burned when crypto switched to dedicated hardware and nvida were left with for them huge surpluses of 10xx series hardware. But what they’re selling to AI companies now is a lot more different from their consumer gear

adrr• 8 months ago

Keep the retail investors happy so they keep pumping your stock.

pabs32• 8 months ago

Wonder if Google will ever start selling TPUs.

gnabgib• 8 months ago

Beyond the Coral, you mean? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_Processing_Unit#Edge_TP...

cmsj3• 8 months ago

They already have: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/tpuv7-google-takes-a-s...

RedShift1• 8 months ago

Their MX500 series SSDs were just king of price, performance and reliability. I even installed them in industrial PCs with intense vibrations and large temperature cycles, they're still chugging along like it's nothing.

tkfoss• 8 months ago

Just bought one last week, sadly not many options left for 2.5" SSDs

deltoidmaximus• 8 months ago

I've been reduced to buying samsung 970 evos. The supply of DRAM supporting SATA SSDs has really dried up.

Felger4• 8 months ago

Agreed, the first gen MX500 with M3CR023 fw proved IMHO to be the second most reliable SATA SSD 2.5" form factor with the Samsung 860 range SSDs (860 Evo / Pro).

Sadly, the MX500 is now difficult to find in western europe. Only lower grade BX500, still quite reliable but not as fast as the MX500 with cache + DRAM.

Had quite a lot of controller issues (become sluggish for periods of time) with the sandisk/WD ones like green/blue and SSD plus.

tuetuopay4• 8 months ago

Huh, I've had the opposite experience with the BX500. Hit a bit hard on them and the SSD drops off the bus. Or fill them up to 80% and witness them crawl to a stop. Dirt cheap drives, but don't ask too much of them.

AndroTux• 8 months ago

I’m sure that decision will look real smart in 3 years time.

20after43• 8 months ago

Can tell if sarcastic.

GCUMstlyHarmls2• 8 months ago

Ask me again in 3 years.

redbluered2• 8 months ago

This will surely maximize quarterly profits until the next cloud or AI bust.

Diversification is resilience.

Putting consumer on hold makes some sense. An exit? This will be written about in business books.

jakebasile2• 8 months ago

This decision reflects Micron’s commitment to its ongoing portfolio transformation and the resulting alignment of its business to secular, profitable growth vectors in memory and storage. By concentrating on core enterprise and commercial segments, Micron aims to improve long-term business performance and create value for strategic customers as well as stakeholders.

What the fuck does "secular" even mean in this context? Is there religious DRAM?

What a short-sighted, boneheaded move. I'm so tired of the MBA-ificiation of every single part of my life.

x0x0• 8 months ago

secular is the opposite of cyclical in business. ie a long-term trend.

And same. Though blowing significant fractions of a trillion dollars into (imo) investments that are never gonna return anything near to making that a good plan (ex a government bailout) will inevitably redirect huge portions of stuff we care about. The world's gdp is about 90T iirc; that is basically taking 1/90th of the stuff the world does in a year and putting it into ai.

thewebguyd3• 8 months ago

Is there religious DRAM?

RAM optimized for TempleOS and Holy-C

jakebasile2• 8 months ago

If only this were the case.

20after43• 8 months ago

Yes, the MBAs and private equity firms are about 80% of the way through ruining everything that was ever good in the world. They've been accelerating exponentially. Probably won't be long now. I like to think it can't get much worse but I thought that several times before and I've been proven wrong each time. Optimism is getting much harder to hold on it.

KapKap66• 8 months ago

They didn't mess up Valve yet :)

umanwizard• 8 months ago

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/secular

alecco2• 8 months ago

Another Big Tech company getting hollowed out to maximize short term profits.

listenallyall2• 8 months ago

This brand has existed for what, 20+ years? You dont think they can look at long-term trendlines of revenue and expenses?

Please explain how this is "short term" thinking.

alecco2• 8 months ago

Betraying a decades-long loyal customer base for a bunch of AI companies that might get wiped out in a couple of years.

mrcwinn2• 8 months ago

Even less consumer supply means higher prices. What’s fascinating is the very thing that enabled AI — gaming - may be one of the early casualties as it gains in priority.

aeternum• 8 months ago

Seems foolish, I've been a long-term shareholder in Micron but this seems aimed at short-term profit maximization. So I guess I'll be a short-term shareholder now.

officeplant2• 8 months ago

Nearly every pc in my current collection has Crucial ram. My main desktop has a Crucial NVME drive, and I've got 2.5in SATA SSDs from Crucial in family computers.

I don't want to have to start buying obscure keysmash chinese brands for normal looking affordable hardware.

God dammit Micron.

Crontab• 8 months ago

That's a shame. I liked buying RAM from them.

goo• 8 months ago

Micron leadership probably just heard about Roko's basilisk.

shirro2• 8 months ago

Like Pascal's wager that absurdity is an appeal to stupidity. I expect the people running these companies are more interested in a different type of wager. One where they risk the future of the company to pump shares and make a quick profit.

MisterTea• 8 months ago

I hate everything about this. Nothing good is coming from this AI hype bubble.

shirro2• 8 months ago

Insane decision. This whole bubble is irrational.

JonChesterfield• 8 months ago

Uh shite. That's the goto for ssds with capacitors on, such that when the power dies they're able to leave things in a reasonable state.

All the samsung ones I've tried have died within a year. Fast until they died I suppose.

Any recommendations for nvme in a post-micron world?

danparsonson2• 8 months ago

Use a UPS?

donatj• 8 months ago

This seems like a very short-sighted mistake...

The AI memory bubble is going to bust eventually. They have such enormous brand recognition and are known for selling a quality-first product.

To just throw that all away is insane.

For the last ten plus years I have only bought Crucial RAM. I am well beyond disapointed to hear this.

kccqzy• 8 months ago

Agreed. The RAM in my current PC is 64GB of DDR4 from Crucial. Now I seriously don’t know which brand I can trust when I build my next PC.

trashface• 8 months ago

Bummer. Crucial had a lifetime warranty on memory. So when my 2012 Macbook pro cooked the aftermarket memory I had put in it, they replaced it for free. A few years later same system cooked the new memory chip. Again they replaced it no charge. Got six years out of it before keyboard failed, would have bricked itself far earlier if not for crucial.

sgnelson• 8 months ago

I feel like the "democratization of technology" is on the back slide. For the longest time, we had more and more access to high end technology at very reasonable price points.

Now it feels like if you're not Facebook, Google, OpenAI, etc. etc. computation isn't for you.

I hope this is just a blip, but I think there is a trend over the past few years.

thewebguyd3• 8 months ago

I also hope its just a blip, but I don't actually think it is.

The democratization of technology was something that had the power to break down class barriers. Anyone could go get cheap, off the shelf hardware, a book, and write useful software & sell it. It became a way to take back the means of production.

Computing being accessible and affordable for everyone = working class power.

That is why its backsliding. Those in power want the opposite, they want to keep control. So we don't get to have open devices, we get pushed to thin clients & locked boot loaders, and we lose access to hardware as it increasingly only gets sold B2B (or if they do still sell to consumers, they just raise prices until most are priced out).

When the wealthy want something, that something becomes unavailable to everyone else.

mschuster912• 8 months ago

Those in power want the opposite, they want to keep control. So we don't get to have open devices, we get pushed to thin clients & locked boot loaders

While it's undeniable that MAFIAA et al have been heavily lobbying for that crap... the problem is, there are lots of bad actors out there as well.

I 'member the 00s/10s, I made good money cleaning up people's computers after they fell for the wrong porn or warez site. Driver signatures and Secure Boot killed entire classes of malware persistence.

indemnity• 8 months ago

Arguably Google and others like them would not even exist without access to cheap off the shelf hardware in their early days.

EasyMark2• 8 months ago

I don't see how it can be a blip if AI actually turns out to be successful. They'll likely gobble up any lose hardware for their datacenters until only scraps are left or the AI bubble pops if AGI isn't achieved in the next few years and stock values fall off a cliff

kreco• 8 months ago

Interesting take.

In a naive way, when rich entities are interested in a limited resource it's basically over.

Somehow I can see a parallel with the housing crisis where the price go higher and higher.

I can't see both of them ending anytime soon unless there is a major paradigm shift in our life.

nxor• 8 months ago

What's causing the housing crisis?

DevX101• 8 months ago

Software has been moving in the right direction. Tons of open source projects for every application imaginable. But hardware has gotten more closed. You can't replace batteries in phones, they get pre-loaded with state level spyware, laptops today have about the same hard drive space as 10 years ago to drive cloud usage, and GPUs and now memory seem to be becoming increasingly cost prohibitive for consumers.

thescriptkiddie• 8 months ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgADKpMStts

nish__• 8 months ago

It's definitely just a blip.

renewiltord• 8 months ago

This is an unreal thing to say. Dude I can buy a chip on eBay with almost a gigabyte of L3 cache. That’s never been possible before.

AlfredBarnes• 8 months ago

100% agree.

A little foil hat conspiracy i supposed, but the big companies saw nobodies become incredibly wealthy over the last decade, and this is the new companies protecting their position by limiting technology.

EasyMark2• 8 months ago

It's likely that all the mega cloud and AI companies want regular people forced to go to them for solutions and buying up any companies that might pose a potential for allowing that. In response they will use a small percentage of the trillions being thrown at them to eliminate those companies that allow for self hosting or mid tier providers to thrive.

antonvs• 8 months ago

I'm not a fan of ultra big tech, but I don't get the concern here exactly.

What high end technology do you want that you can't get?

In the 90s, I paid nearly $10k for a high-end PC. Today, I can get something like an Nvidia RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell for ~$8k, with 24,064 CUDA cores and 96 GB RAM, that's capable of doing LLM inference at thousands of tokens per second.

I realize the prices from this example are a bit steep for many people, but it's not out of line historically with high-end hardware - in fact the $10k from the 90s would be something like $25k today.

My point is I don't see how "if you're not Facebook, Google, OpenAI, etc. etc. computation isn't for you." I'd love an example if I'm missing something.

jmward012• 8 months ago

I am a huge believer in AI, but the build-out right now, justified or not, will definitely hit a slowdown at some point. Not being diverse in their customer base could really hurt them later on. Sometimes you keep something going for tomorrow's business even if it is costing you something today.

_cenw3• 8 months ago

AI being a useful component in our futures (depending on how much as a society we'll shun slop) and the current scale of AI investment being a line-go-up bubble are complementary, not exclusive.

It really is just dotcom all over again.

zarzavat2• 8 months ago

It's just a brand. They can start it up again later if enterprise demand falls.

jmward012• 8 months ago

I hear the cries of a thousand people in marketing right now. Building a brand takes time. I could see this if they were thinking they needed to re-invent the brand and to help with that they were strategically taking a break but that seems like a stretch.

qalmakka• 8 months ago

There's a huge difference between "AI" and "tech bros and finance guys getting amazed by an LLM that talks back to them without realising it's just a language model and not intelligence, so they started chucking the massive piles of cash they had lying around the world to evade taxes to them in a pyramid scheme of colossal scale". We currently are heading more and more towards the latter, and when it crashes it will sow so much distrust and curse the "AI" name so much that we'll probably get a decades-long AI winter after that. In the end none of this nonsense will help the world towards getting better AI any time soon.

Already most "AI researchers" outside of the big corps have basically turned in the last 3 years from "people training their models and doing research" to "webdev plugging into other people's APIs to use LLMs they don't know crap about". When, not if, the big AI bubble bursts, the damage done to the sector will be immense

croes• 8 months ago

At the moment AI is to me like the debunked assumption of the existence of the Moai on Easter Island.

We cut down our trees to build more AI datacenter sculptures to please the AI gods.

Or the nuclear craze of 50s where radioactuve material where stuffed in everything like toothpaste, cream etc.

nix0n• 8 months ago

First, AI took all the hype.

Now, AI is taking all the RAM.

Soon, AI will be taking all the electricity.

gjvc3• 8 months ago

i don't know why you are getting downvoted, as power planning is a real problem right now when planning new data center builds.

junon• 8 months ago

Because it's a meme response, which generally don't go over well on HN.

neop1x• 8 months ago

Exactly. It is already wasting enormous amounts of energy for silly inefficient AI nonsense. The price of energy will go up due to high demans and at the same time it also produces a lot of heat. I am not seeing a very optimistic future for mankind...

eqvinox• 8 months ago

Enterprise customers pay more and buy in bulk.

Uh, isn't that normally a contradiction? bulk is cheaper(???)

danparsonson2• 8 months ago

The products they buy command a premium. Consumers are generally more price-conscious.

rietta3• 8 months ago

This sucks! I know more about software than hardware. Crucial is the only ram I have bought for decades now. As a practical matter does this mean one needs to buy DDR5 ram now from MicroCenter for a build planned for next year? I just put 128gb into my latest Linux workstation. I had been planning to build a new NAS to replace my aging TrueNas (nee FreeNAS). I was just thinking about possibly building another dev box after being very happy with this AMD 9950x performance.

pwnna• 8 months ago

Does this impact the western digital and SanDisk brands too? IIRC those brands got folded into Crucial.

zvolsky• 8 months ago

In May this year, the 2x48GB Crucial SODIMM kit sold for £180. Today, the same kit is £275 in the Crucial Amazon store, and sales are limited to one unit per customer. The free market price seems to be over £500. Not a good time to be building a Mini PC or DIY laptop.

thelastgallon• 8 months ago

Sounds like an opportunity for Chinese companies to step in and dominate, they have their playbook with solar, batteries, EVs.

Felger4• 8 months ago

Gotta love Phison controllers then... despite noticeable progress with modern NVMe controllers, I still wish you good luck.

Or even worse : Maxio

tim--• 8 months ago

Wasn't Micron using Phison controllers in basically every single SSD they made?

Felger4• 8 months ago

Very sad news. Crucial Micron is (soon "was") an great brand for computer assembly and upgrade. It is sad to see the brand rushing to the "easy money" stream. This won't be forgotten when the current bubble will evenually pop and they might meet the same fate as the now forgotten Elpida (who bought Qimonda wich also failed).

The MX500 1st gen (fw M3CR023) was the second best SATA SSD range with the kings the Samsung 860 Evo and Pro. P3 and P3+ were very good drives with great princing for some time, not comparable to the Samsung 970 Evo and Evo+ though.

Never had a failure on about 500 units of crucial MX300/500/P1/P3/P3+/P5. Always updated their firmwares, though.

Comparatively, had lot of sluggish controllers on Sandisk/WD green/blue SATA SSD, and some BX500. But a lot better than any entry level generic Phison S3111 based SSD.

Also very few failures with DDR3/4 DIMMs and SODIMMs. Less than with Kinston and Corsair modules. About the same as Samsung OEM modules from HP/Dell.

Now let's just hope Samsung will not follow in their tracks. I don't see WD-Sandisk going corporate only since they do not make DRAMs modules.

iancmceachern• 8 months ago

Bummer, growing up we had a Micron computer. There was a time where they made whole computers. Now they don't even make memory.

dzonga• 8 months ago

consumers getting told 'get fucked' in 2025 is the motto of the day while companies chase those juicy a.i profits

well hopefully we see more proliferation of system of chips / unified architectures such as the one offered by apple being offered by amd, intel etc for consumer stuff.

tonymet• 8 months ago

Such a great reputation over the decades . It felt good to have something USA made in the build . What a shame.

linguae4• 8 months ago

I'm sad. I'm a software guy, not much of a hardware expert, so please bear with me if I"m too pessimistic. However, I feel that if trends like this continue, it might be the end of enthusiast-level personal computing as we know it. No more being able to head down to the electronics store and purchase RAM, motherboards, processors, GPUs, storage, and other components. We're going to be limited to locked-down terminals connected to cloud services, both of which provided by a small number of multinational corporations. If we're lucky, we might still have USB peripherals.

The sad thing is that we enthusiasts are a small market compared to the overwhelming majority of computer users who don't mind locked-down devices, or at least until they've been bitten by the restrictions, but if there are no alternatives other than retrocomputing, then it's too late. For decades we enthusiasts have been able to benefit from other markets with overlapping needs such as gaming, workstations, and corporate servers. However, many on-premise servers have been replaced by cloud services, the workstation market has been subsumed by the broader PC market, and PC gaming has faced challenges, from a push toward locked-down consoles to challenges in the GPU market due to competition with cryptocurrency mining and now AI.

One of the things I'm increasingly disappointed with is the dominance of large corporations in computing. It seems harder for small players to survive in this ecosystem. Software has to deal with network effects and large companies owning major platforms, and building your own hardware requires tons of capital.

I wonder if it's possible even for a company to make even 1980s-era electronics without massive capital expenditures? How feasible is it for a small company to manufacture the equivalent of a Motorola 68000 or Intel 386?

I'd like to see a market for hobbyist computing by hobbyist computer shops, but I'm not sure it's economically feasible.

axiolite• 8 months ago

I've seen things going the opposite way. It's only recently that an average person could jump on eBay and get assembled low-level electronic module/boards for cheap, and assemble into their project.

Yes, you'll probably have difficulty walking into a STORE to buy PC components, but only because online shopping has been killing local shops for decades now. You'll find it easy to get that stuff online, for better prices.

PCs, since the very start, have been going through a process of being ever more integrated each generation. Not too many people install sound cards, IDE controllers, etc., anymore. CPUs, GPUs, and RAM are about the only holdouts not integrated on the motherboard these days. It's possible that could change, if CPUs and GPUs becomes fast enough for 99% of people, and RAM gets cheap enough that manufacturers can put more on-board than 99% of people will need. And while you might not be happy about that kind of integration, it comes with big price reductions that help everyone. But we're not there yet, and I can't say how long down the road that might be.

tharkun__• 8 months ago

Not my experience. I've been able to go to a local store to buy PC components for more than 35 years now and last did to upgrade the RAM in the laptop to be eligible for Win11. Online only was not cheaper and local store had it available same day. Local store does have online presence and is a chain tho.

Mouse replacement on a weekend coz old one broke same story (button smashed in and not usable at all any longer). Online not cheaper, no same day available at any price, Amazon delivery without Prime no next day either. Local chain store had it for immediate pickup and I was gaming again in 30 minutes.

aleph_minus_one• 8 months ago

Yes, you'll probably have difficulty walking into a STORE to buy PC components, but only because online shopping has been killing local shops for decades now.

Rather: very commonly the local shops don't stock the parts that I would like to buy, and it is often hard to find out beforehand which kind of very specialized parts the local shop does or doesn't stock.

True story concerning electronic components: I went to some electronic store and wanted to buy a very specialized IC, which they didn't stock. But since the sales clerk could see my passion for tinkering with electronica, he covertly wrote down an address of a different, very small electronics store including instructions which tram line to take to get there (I was rather new to the city), which stocks a lock more stuff that tinkerers love. I guess the sales clerk was as disappointed with the range of goods that his employer has decided to concentrate on as I was. :-)

On the other hand, lots of former stores for PC component now have whole lots of shelf rows with mobile phone cases instead. I get that these have high sales margins, but no thanks ...

Thus, in my opinion it is not online shopping that killed local shops, but the fact that local shops simply don't offer and stock the products that I want to buy.

throw0101d• 8 months ago

It's only recently that an average person could jump on eBay and get assembled low-level electronic module/boards for cheap, and assemble into their project.

People have been tinkering with electronic/electric modules for decades:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathkit

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiKey

6r17• 8 months ago

At this point it's getting ridiculously easy to justify the acquisition of such manufactory - I wonder if there are existing players in other categories (be it hardware or even software) that are considering about trying to get into this field. I mean - I get it that someone like OVH may not have the caps yet to handle something like this - but I wouldn't be surprised if they could find a good company to partner with - same is for pretty much everywhere.

I'm really wondering about hardware as well but today's tech is surprising in it's scale and requirements - I wouldn't be surprised if we could do mid 70's tech as hobbyist today - but further than that...

rietta3• 8 months ago

I too am very sad. This has been my brand of ram for a long time. I’m also more of a software guy than hardware, but I appreciate being able to have high-performance gaming class systems for my work. It runs circles around much of the stuff my colleagues run, including in deployment in various cloud environments.

Aurornis4• 8 months ago

It’s never been easier to be a hobbyist or a small electronics company. Honestly I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Micron is exiting this business because it’s a commodity. It’s everywhere. There are numerous companies producing parts in this space. Their investments are better spent on other things.

I wonder if it's possible even for a company to make even 1980s-era electronics without massive capital expenditures? How feasible is it for a small company to manufacture the equivalent of a Motorola 68000 or Intel 386?

I don’t know what your threshold is for massive capital expenditure, but you could get a tapeout for a 68000 clone easier than at any point in history. There are now even takeout services that will let you get a little piece of a shared wafer for experimenting with making your own chips for very low prices. There are even accessible tools available now.

The hobby and small scale situation is better now than at any point in history. I don’t know how anyone can be sad about it unless they’re ignoring reality and only speculating based on the most cynical online takes about how the future is going to do a complete 180.

khhu2bnn• 8 months ago

Micron is exiting this business because it’s a commodity. It’s everywhere. There are numerous companies producing parts in this space. Their investments are better spent on other things.

Numerous as in plenty? Or basically three? Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron make up over 90% of the market share of DRAM. Micron saying goodbye to the consumer market basically leaves us with yet another duopoly.

vablings• 8 months ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS5ycm7VfXg

Here is a video of Sam Aloof who now runs Atomic Semi with Jim Keller. It likely took thousands of dollars to make his own custom Z2 chip that only has 1200 transistors and its nowhere near the likes of the 68k or Intel 386. They might have more advanced stuff now at Atomic Semi but they haven't announced anything

toomim• 8 months ago

It's like the loss of Radio Shack, all over again.

seanmcdirmid5• 8 months ago

Apple CPUs come with their own GPUs on die and RAM in the chip package now. How much more is going to be put on the chip and assembled in increasingly fine grained processes?

AnthonyMouse4• 8 months ago

Apple puts the RAM in the chip package because they integrate the GPU, and then they want to be able to have multiple channels to feed the GPU without having that many slots. (Their entry level models also don't have any more memory bandwidth than normal PC laptops and there is no real reason they couldn't use a pair of SODIMMs.)

But low end iGPUs don't need a lot of memory bandwidth (again witness Apple's entry level CPUs) and integrating high end GPUs makes you thermally limited. There is a reason that Apple's fastest (integrated) GPUs are slower than Nvidia and AMD's fastest consumer discrete GPUs.

And even if you are going to integrate all the memory, as might be more justifiable if you're using HBM or GDDR, that only makes it easier to not integrate the CPU itself. Because now your socket needs fewer pins since you're not running memory channels through it.

Alternatively, there is some value in doing both. Suppose you have a consumer CPU socket with the usual pair of memory channels through it. Now the entry level CPU uses that for its memory. The midrange CPU has 8GB of HBM on the package and the high end one has 32GB, which it can use as the system's only RAM or as an L4 cache while the memory slots let you add more (less expensive, ordinary) RAM on top of that, all while using the same socket as the entry level CPU.

And let's apply some business logic to this: Who wants soldered RAM? Only the device OEMs, who want to save eleven cents worth of slots and, more importantly, overcharge for RAM and force you to buy a new device when all you want is a RAM upgrade. The consumer and, more than that, the memory manufacturers prefer slots, because they want you to be able to upgrade (i.e. to give them your money). So the only time you get soldered RAM is when either the device manufacturer has you by the short hairs (i.e. Apple if you want a Mac) or the consumers who aren't paying attention and accidentally buy a laptop with soldered RAM when their competitors are offering similar ones for similar prices but with upgradable slots.

So as usual, the thing preventing you from getting screwed is competition and that's what you need to preserve if you don't want to get screwed.

markhahn• 8 months ago

You must surely know that Apple didn't originate any of that.

tianqi• 8 months ago

This is a classic slippery slope fallacy. Micron's reversible exit from one of its businesses is clearly does not signify the end of the PC era. As long as the demand for DIY PCs persists, there will be suppliers providing the products needed. If you follow the industrial memory market, you probably know that it is currently experiencing a severe supply shortage. I think Micron's decision simply reflects the current market situation.

Ygg2• 8 months ago

Micron's reversible exit from one of its businesses is clearly does not signify the end of the PC era.

No one is saying that it's the sole culprit. But when average PCs start costing $3000+ from now on, it seems like the end of an era.

AndrewKemendo• 8 months ago

It’s not going away it’s shifting to robotics

You should look into what’s happening with DIY robotics because it looks eerily similar to what I experienced in the early to mid 90s with PC hardware and software

And you can do way more than just host a bbs with robots

throwaway2037• 8 months ago

It is interesting that your comment made no mention of single board computers (SBC) like Raspberry Pi. These are the more likely future of hobbyist computing as the price to develop custom PCBs is lower than ever. Yes, you need to buy the components, but it will come a day where you shop by parts then some LLM arranges the parts on an SBC. Finally, you review the the PCB layout, and click a button to place an order with PCBWay or a competitor. X days later a tiny board appears at your house exactly built to spec and runs Linux. The coolest part: The cost is so low that millions and millions of more (young) people can join the hobbyist computing party.

throwup238• 8 months ago

I wonder if it's possible even for a company to make even 1980s-era electronics without massive capital expenditures? How feasible is it for a small company to manufacture the equivalent of a Motorola 68000 or Intel 386?

Very feasible but it would have to be redesigned around the cell libraries used in newer nodes since the i386 was manufactured on >1um size nodes.

Prototypes would cost around $1-2k per sq mm at 130nm and $10k per sq mm at 28nm (min order usually around 9 sq mm). Legacy nodes are surprisingly cheap, so non-recurring engineering will generally be the bulk of the cost. The i386 was originally >104 sq mm but at 1um, so you could probably fit the entirety of a i386 clone in 1-2 sq mm of a 130nm chip. Packaging it in the original footprint and the lead times on prototypes would probably be more annoying than anything.

PaulRobinson• 8 months ago

I'm more optimistic as I think about SBC manufacturers, plenty of other manufacturers wanting to service this market, and companies like Framework (warts and all - I don't think they're perfect) didn't really exist a couple of decades ago.

I'm actually a big fan of Apple hardware (when you crunch the numbers for base spec machine and when you're able to get discounts, the price/performance for the half-life you get is incredible), but I'm also planning to get back into home-brew builds a bit more over the next year: I need to build a NAS, a home lab, I might look at a gaming rig... and I'm far from alone.

So yes, it's a niche market, but a profitable one for a lot of players, and one that Micron will be glad is still available to them when the data centre bubble bursts.

gjvc3• 8 months ago

I'd like to see a market for hobbyist computing by hobbyist computer shops, but I'm not sure it's economically feasible.

Jump in the DeLorean and head to the 1980s / 1990s

hbarka• 8 months ago

I still have a sense of melancholy and cultural loss from the closing of Fry’s Electronics.

dominicrose2• 8 months ago

We will still ba able to buy Raspberry Pis, install Linux and self-hosted solutions. We don't have to do what everyone else is doing.

freedomben• 8 months ago

I don't think any SBCs will be a replacement for quite some time. At what point will there be a raspberry pi with 128 GB of RAM and a 16/32 core? That's what I'm running right now, and I really hope I don't have to downgrade in the future.

M95D• 8 months ago

I think you should split the problem into hardware and software parts:

- Hardware

We won't have any hardware without secure boot and we won't have the signing keys. Signed firmware is required for everything x86, everything Apple, everything mobile, probably everything ARM too. Rockchip ARM could still boot without signed firmware last time I checked a few years ago, but I'm not sure about the newer CPUs.

[ Short story: I have an Asus Tinkerboard S. It came with an unprovisioned emmc onboard. Just empty. A few years ago I made the mistake of trying the official OS from Asus. It automatically set up the CPU to boot from emmc first and provisioned the emmc with boot0, boot1 and rpmb. These partitions can't be written and can't be removed. Their creation is a one-way operation according to emmc standards. Now I have to keep the emmc masked because it won't boot otherwise. So beware of any devices with emmc. ]

You can, of course, use MCUs for general computing today. ESP32 is pretty powerful - it's probably 4 times faster than a 486, certainly more powerful than an i386 or a 68000 you suggested. The big problem here is memory, graphics and software. No MMU requires a completely new OS. Linux (uclinux) could boot at some point without a MMU, but it won't fit in 540KB memory. MCUs can access external memory (PSRAM), but via slow buses and it's paged. Also there are no hi-speed buses for graphics.

There is some hope coming from the chinese CPUs. AFAIK, they don't support secure boot at all. I'm planning on getting one as soon as their proprietary firmware/UEFI/ACPI and be replaced by uboot.

- Software

It's useless to make a i386 or 68000 today. There's nothing but old software for them. Not even linux has i386 support anymore. This is an even bigger problem than hardware. Much, much bigger. To have any hope of a minimally useful computing platform, we need a working browser on that platform. This is an absolute requirement. There's no way around this. I had to abandon Win98, then WinXP, and soon Win7 because of no working browser.

Linux is generally usable today, but as soon as Linus retires, it's going to fall into the same user-lockdown like all others. The basic infrastructure is all in place: secure boot, root login basically deprecated, access rights and security settings administered by the distro and package manager, not the user, no per-program firewall rules, automatic updates as standard, surveillance infrastructure via udev (hardware events), dbus (software events) and gtk accessibility (input events), etc. Linus fought hard to keep them outside the kernel, but he won't live forever.

To have any hope of privacy and/or freedom our personal computers we need to turn the security paradigm completely on it's head: users are not the threat - programs are. The user should login as root (or system account in Windows) and every program, including services, should run under their own limited accounts with no access to the rest of the system, especially user's files.

Of all OSs today, Gentoo portage is probably the easiest package manager to tweak into creating accounts and groups for programs instead of users and Gobo Linux has the best separation of programs in it's filesystem. I'd love to see a merger of these two.

Hobbyist computing? Ha! First get a browser working.

hyghjiyhu• 8 months ago

I think this is an incorrect zero-sum mindset. Yes in the short term there is a fixed amount of GPUs, ram etc. But in the long run the money from ai and crypto is invested in building factories, researching new nodes etc. These investments will lead to better and cheaper products trickling down to everyone.

skirge• 8 months ago

not going to happen as long as business hardware != consumer hardware

barrkel2• 8 months ago

I feel this vibe. It's part of the reason I invested in a monster home workstation - threadripper 9995wx, 768gb ecc ram, 96gb Blackwell pro. I expect it may easily be the last proper home PC I buy that is scaled in line with the scaling that I grew up with in the 80s and 90s.

Increasingly, what we have are mobile terminals - possibly with a dock for monitor connections - for remote big iron. And the continuous push from governments for more control - seemingly synchronous demands for age gating (i.e. requiring IDs) and chat snooping - males me think this remote hardware won't really be yours before long.

Windows, caught up in the LLM mania, is to be left by the wayside too.

jack_tripper• 8 months ago

The Terry Davis tinfoil-hat version of me has a theory that this wider industry trend of pushing away consumers from general purpose home computers towards only using remote datacenters from locked down mobile/thin edge devices, is supported by both industries and governments because:

Number one, you become a recurring subscription instead of a one and done deal, making it incredibly profitable for industry

And number two, the government can more easily snoop on your data when it's all in the cloud versus a HDD box in your closet.

Granted, I think we're far away from that future, but I do feel that's the future the powers that be desire and they can use various mechanism to force that behavior, like convenience, and pricing, like for example making PC parts too expensive for consumers and subsidizing cloud and mobile devices to accelerate the move, and once enough consumers only know how to use Apple or Google devices they'll be less inclined to spend more money to build a PC and learn what a Linux is.

abustamam• 8 months ago

Whoa that definitely sounds like a monster rig! Out of curiosity, how much did that cost? Blackwell alone can be $10k+! It's definitely an investment, especially since it may soon become a relic, not in terms of specs, but in terms what manufacturers will actually end up making.

matheusmoreira• 8 months ago

It's not just market forces. Computers are actually too subversive for the powers that be to allow mere citizens to have them.

Give citizens computers and they have encryption. This alone gives them a fighting chance against police, judges, three letter agencies, militaries.

Give citizens computers and they can wipe out entire sectors of the economy via the sheer power of unrestricted copying.

The future is bleak. Computer freedom is dying. Everything then word "hacker" ever stood for is dying. Soon we will no longer have our own systems, we will have no control, we will be mere users of corporation and government systems. Hacking will go extinct, like phreaking.

This fact brings me a profound sadness, like something beautiful is about to perish from this earth. We used to be free...

jama211• 8 months ago

Alright this might be taking things a little too far… the free software movement is stronger than it’s ever been and hardware is also more accessible than it’s ever been. Losing this one company is simply not a death bell of the entire enthusiast computing market.

saurik• 8 months ago

This isn't "we are only going to sell products to big companies" nor is it "we are only going to make products that are locked down appliances"... the "consumer" versions of these products are just cheaper unreliable parts that lack the error correction or power loss protection of the enterprise parts, and in a world where we routinely have disks with tens of terabytes of storage in computers with a terabyte of memory, the argument for why "consumer" grade parts can even make sense to exist is pretty weak. It maybe sucks that, in the very short term, there will be a quick uptick in prices, but focusing on the better parts will also help bring their prices down... and, fwiw, they really aren't that bad to begin with: you can build a micro-ATX machine with a Xeon or an EPYC in it for what feels like a pretty reasonable price.

blindriver• 8 months ago

If this AI bubble bursts and the anticipated demand evaporates, this will be one of the biggest debacles in the history of American business, akin to New Coke.

IAmGraydon3• 8 months ago

Akin to New Coke? Are you being serious? It’s several orders of magnitude worse than that.

retrochameleon• 8 months ago

"We're still going to make memory, just not for peasants."

theoldgreybeard3• 8 months ago

Every day I hate AI and big tech more and more. Just when I think I couldn’t hate them anymore, they find a way.

IAmGraydon3• 8 months ago

AI and big tech are just the ultimate expression of human greed. What you hate is human nature.

jijijijij4• 8 months ago

What you hate is human nature.

Such a defeatist take. Human nature is to come up with culture to check human nature. Human nature is to feel community expulsion as badly as physical pain, because human nature is to punish anti-social behavior. We are equally capable of love, empathy, anger and violence. What isn't human nature, is watching everything taken from you, while you tell yourself that's just the way things are. That's pathology.

theoldgreybeard3• 8 months ago

No. I refuse to just sit back and accept being abused by the elite just because "well, that's just the way it is", "that's human nature". Holy war is also human nature. Revolution is human nature.

kragen• 8 months ago

My understanding of this is Crucial is going out of business because the alternative was raising their prices. Is that accurate?

rzerowan• 8 months ago

Probably inevitable since they got banned from their largest market[1] in the fallout of the semi/chip bans , with the addded disadvantage that their only play to recoup profits would be through narrowing market ang hiking prices. And here we are - im pretty certain the other DRAM cartel members are willing to play along , as long as their profits spike.

[1] https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20251017180/why...

IAmGraydon3• 8 months ago

Hard to believe Micron leadership is this stupid, but here we are. They’ll deserve the result.

rietta3• 8 months ago

It was 2017 that I decided to go all in ensuring that my main work computers were built from parts sourced via the local Micro Center. The real eye-opening situation is even if I have a top line most expensive MacBook Pro or most expensive Dell laptop with full warranty, the truth is anytime there was a hardware issue which happened every 2 to 3 years it would destroy a day or more of work. you cannot have it fixed and returned to you the same day being able to have more redundancy in the ability to source individual parts locally is a gigantic financial benefit when you’re livelihood depends on a working high-performance systems as a high-end consultant. I also ensure that I have two laptops capable of running my work though neither perform as highly as my high-end gaming class workstation.

vdupras• 8 months ago

I'm wondering, at what point could we consider that DRAM is in "market failure" state?

tiahura• 8 months ago

Bad news for Boise.

fullstop• 8 months ago

Why? Micron will still fabricate things there... just not for us.

dev1ycan• 8 months ago

The US put YMTC in a black list just so that they wouldn't outcompete Micron... and now Micron just gave up by itself, and YMTC was set back so now it can't supply the RAM market either, great job guys!

noipv4• 8 months ago

We should have a consumer Coop for computer hardware, so that we can negotiate prices and availability.

darkteflon• 8 months ago

Despite not really needing it yet, I took the opportunity to go straight to Amazon and pick up a 2tb 2230 for my Steam Deck. I’m also going to upgrade the homelab to an M4 Mini now, despite having decided earlier this month that the current N100 was fine for a few more years. Genuinely feels like whatever is happening is going to fundamentally change the way these products are marketed and sold in a permanent way.

nottorp• 8 months ago

Hey, I got an Akamai banner when I loaded the site.

They're one of the 0.1% left that don't use Cloudflare :)

m4tu4g• 8 months ago

then you'll be surprised when you do `$dig www.{microsoft,apple}.com`

arisAlexis• 8 months ago

The way GPUs went. It's not a bubble.

fasteo• 8 months ago

$MU, another ticker to short

ErneX2• 8 months ago

And it seems Supermicro also stopped selling standalone motherboards.

https://www.spectrumsourcing.com/spectrum-news-feed/industry...

lazyweb• 8 months ago

Oh snap, that's crazy. In a bad way.

Going forward, customers must order the full server system to obtain the motherboard.

ErneX2• 8 months ago

I have a home server with one of their X11 boards, it is almost 8 years old. It is a bad time to upgrade but once I do it will have to be one from ASrock Rack I guess.

alliao• 8 months ago

they've never done me wrong over the years with crucial whether it's ssd or memory... godspeed and i'm sad to see a good player quit.

uyzstvqs• 8 months ago

Lots of demand, limited supply. So who wants to build a DRAM manufacturer? It sounds intimidating, but I'm positive we can figure it out.

ZuLuuuuuu• 8 months ago

Looks like Crucial is not so crucial for Micron's business anymore.

pmdr2• 8 months ago

Time to launch a RAM-renting startup, kind of like Netflix in its DVD era.

ulfw• 8 months ago

“The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage. Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments,” said Sumit Sadana, EVP and Chief Business Officer at Micron

AI is destroying so much. God knows how bad things will get once the bubble bursts.

maztaim• 8 months ago

For me they were always the reasonable choice from a cost, speed, and reliability perspective.

poemxo• 8 months ago

Will this impact B2B or just dramatically increase cost to business customers? Some industries require US-based supply chains, in my organization all our RAM and SSDs are Micron.

daft_pink2• 8 months ago

To be fair, the market has to be impacted by the Shift to non-upgradable devices.

At least in my house, most of the computers can't be upgraded with Crucial parts, because they use Apple Silicon.

0manrho9• 8 months ago

Disagree. has very little to do with it. Though it finally clicked why I keep seeing people repeat this, it's Apple users. (Not a dig btw, I can totally see why it'd feel that way from their POV).

For starters, in the past, Crucial RAM wasn't really compatible with the Apple devices that did have socketable/upgradeable RAM. Technically some of their laptops/imacs did, but Apple really didn't want you servicing/upgrading those on your own, Crucial DIMMs weren't QVL approved by Apple (even though it'd generally work), and those were all SO-DIMMs not standard desktop DIMMs. The Mac Pros and what not that had upgradeable ram were all (L)RDIMM, not UDIMM. Crucial didn't make (L)RDIMM, that was Micron's market. Point being, this change in dynamic from Apple had virtually no impact on Crucial, as it was a market they never really served, or at least certainly not in the past decade.

The consumer market isn't shifting to non-upgradeable devices. There are more and more of them, but they're largely either not a market Crucial served to begin with (Apple), or supplementing the consumer devices that do have upgradeable RAM (Steam Deck, very compact HTPC's/Thin Clients, things that aren't really desktop replacements).

daft_pink2• 8 months ago

But the Market has shifted, Mac is increasing in marketshare and that shift is even higher on expensive laptops, where people get expensive upgrades.

Two or three years ago, I bought an XPS 15 with minimum memory specs and immediately maxed the RAM to 64gb and threw in a 2tb nvme drive. Last year I purchased a M3 Macbook Pro and made no upgrades. I don’t expect to go back to PC, because the Mac performance is so great and the power managment actually works.

When I threw my XPS 15 in my bag, it often comes out of my bag with no battery. The Mac not only gets awesome battery life, but it doesn’t randomly discharge when closed and sleeps properly.

_zagj• 8 months ago

Generative AI really is the gift that keeps on giving.

Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business

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