RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2998935/ram-is-so-expensive-samsung-wont-even-sell-it-to-samsung.html

by sethops1 • 8 months ago

412 413 8 months ago

DocTomoe• 8 months ago

I feel we have a RAM price surge every four years. The excuses change, but it's always when we see a generation switch to the next gen of DDR. Which makes me believe it's not AI, or graphics cards, or crypto, or gaming, or one of the billion other conceivable reasons, but price-gouging when new standards emerge and production capacity is still limited. Which would be much harder to justify than 'the AI/Crypto/Gaming folks (who no-one likes) are sweeping the market...'

JKCalhoun2• 8 months ago

Regardless of whether it is Crypto/AI/etc., this would seem to be wake-up call #2. We're finding the strangle-points in our "economy"—will we do anything about it? A single fab in Phoenix would seem inadequate?

baiwl• 8 months ago

What will we do with that fab in two years when nobody needs that excess RAM?

jacquesm3• 8 months ago

If 'the West' would be half as smart as they claim to be there would be many more fabs in friendly territory. Stick a couple in Australia and NZ too for good measure, it is just too critical of a resource now.

fullstop3• 8 months ago

Micron is bringing up one in Boise Idaho as well.

xzjis• 8 months ago

It's a political problem: do we, the people, have a choice in what gets prioritized? I think it's clear that the majority of people don't give a damn about minor improvements in AI and would rather have a better computer, smartphone, or something else for their daily lives than fuel the follies of OpenAI and its competitors. At worst, they can build more fabs simultaneously to have the necessary production for AI within a few years, but reallocating it right now is detrimental and nobody wants that, except for a few members of the crazy elite like Sam Altman or Elon Musk.

jacquesm3• 8 months ago

Why is this downvoted, this is not the first time I've heard that opinion expressed and every time it happens there is more evidence that maybe there is something to it. I've been following the DRAM market since the 4164 was the hot new thing and it cost - not kidding - $300 for 8 of these which would give you all of 64K RAM. Over the years I've seen the price surge multiple times and usually there was some kind of hard to verify reason attached to it. From flooded factories to problems with new nodes and a whole slew of other issues.

RAM being a staple of the computing industry you have to wonder if there aren't people cleaning up on this, it would be super easy to create an artificial shortage given the low number of players in this market. In contrast, say the price of gasoline, has been remarkably steady with one notable outlier with a very easy to verify and direct cause.

zorked• 8 months ago

This industry has a history of forming cartels.

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

sharpshadow• 8 months ago

There is also the side effect of limiting people to run powerful models themselves. Could very well be part of a strategy.

muvlon2• 8 months ago

But we're not currently switching to a next gen of DDR. DDR5 has been around for several years, DDR6 won't be here before 2027. We're right in the middle of DDR5's life cycle.

That is not to say there is no price-fixing going on, just that I really can't see a correlation with DDR generations.

itopaloglu837• 8 months ago

The manufacturers are willing to quadruple the prices for the foreseeable future but not change their manufacturing quotes a bit.

So much for open markets, somebody must check their books and manufacturing schedules.

dgacmu3• 8 months ago

In their defense, how many $20 billion fabs do you want to build in response to the AI ... (revolution|bubble|other words)? It seems very, very difficult to predict how long DRAM demand will remain this elevated.

It's dangerous for them in both directions: Overbuilding capacity if the boom busts vs. leaving themselves vulnerable to a competitor who builds out if the boom is sustained. Glad I don't have to make that decision. :)

itopaloglu837• 8 months ago

I don’t think they’re working at 100% capacity or don’t have any other FAB that they can utilize for other low profit stuff.

Let’s check their books and manufacturing schedule to see if they’re artificially constraining the supply to jack up the prices on purpose.

arijun• 8 months ago

If it’s an AI bubble, it would be stupid to open new manufacturing capacity right now. Spend years and billions spinning up a new fab, only to have the bottom of the market drop out as soon as it comes online.

itopaloglu837• 8 months ago

Assuming that opening a new fab is the only way to match the demand is simply asinine.

You can ramp up production in limited capacity, make long term contracts, or pass the manufacturing rust to the buyer. When we needed a vertical stabilizer for a legacy aircraft we paid for an entire production like to be built just to manufacture two tails, so there are tons of ways to do this if you want to be competitive. But instead this is a cartel like market where manufacturers colluded before, so they’re more likely to collude than spend billions doing anything.

Just open their books and schedules with a competent auditors and see if they’re artificially manipulating things or not.

davey48016• 8 months ago

Most of the things people say about efficient markets assume low barriers to entry. When it takes years and tens of billions of dollars to add capacity, it makes more sense to sit back and enjoy the margins. Especially if you think there's a non-trivial possibility that the AI build out is a bubble.

itopaloglu837• 8 months ago

We only need the memory manufacturers to not collude with each other, not even external pressure.

You want to tame their cartel like behaviors? Just get into their books and it would be clear as day if they’re artificially constraining the supply, and I’m not even talking about spending extra billions.

You cannot manufacture something that modern life depends on and not get government scrutiny.

filloooo• 8 months ago

Memory chips have always been a very cyclical business, that's why their stock prices remain relatively low despite a windfall happening.

itopaloglu837• 8 months ago

A commodity hardware that’s on the price decline for decades just quadruples in price and nobody makes any form of long term investment or even contracts to take advantage of the situation? It’s more likely to be a collusion than not.

jsheard• 8 months ago

To be fair, Samsung's divisions having guns pointed at each other is nothing new. This is the same conglomerate that makes their own chip division fight for placement in their own phones, constantly flip-flopping between using Samsung or Qualcomm chips at the high end, Samsung or Mediatek chips at the low end, or even a combination of first-party and third-party chips in different variants of ostensibly the same device.

morcus• 8 months ago

two versions of the same phone with different processors

That's hilarious, which phone is this?

namibj• 8 months ago

Several high end Galaxy S's AFAIK.

grincek• 8 months ago

This is the case as recent as of S24, phones can come with exynos or snapdragon, with exynos usually featuring worse performance and battery life

petcat• 8 months ago

Basically every Galaxy phone comes in two versions. One with Exynos and one with Snapdragon. It's regional though. US always gets the Snapdragon phones while Europe and mostly Asia gets the Exynos version.

My understanding is that the Exynos is inferior in a lot of ways, but also cheaper.

muvlon2• 8 months ago

Not one phone, they did this all over the place. Their flagship line did this starting with the Galaxy S7 all the way up to Galaxy S24. Only the most recent Galaxy S25 is Qualcomm Snapdragon only, supposedly because their own Exynos couldn't hit volume production fast enough.

intrikate• 8 months ago

I might be out of date, but last I knew, it was "most of them."

International models tended to use Samsung's Exynos processors, while the ones for the North American market used Snapdragons or whatever.

lkramer• 8 months ago

To be honest, this actually sounds kinda healthy.

_aavaa_2• 8 months ago

Sears would like to have a word about how healthy intra-company competition is.

itsastrawman• 8 months ago

The opposite, nepotism, is very unhealthy, so i think you're correct.

dgemm• 8 months ago

It's a forcing function that ensures the middle layers of a vertically integrated stack remain market competitive and don't stagnate because they are the default/only option

zoeysmithe• 8 months ago

n/a

fransje26• 8 months ago

Yeah, makes absolute sense.

A bit like Toyota putting a GM engine in their car, because the Toyota engine division is too self-centered, focusing to much on efficiency.

EMM_386• 8 months ago

Isn't this how South Korean chaebols work?

They operate with tension. They're supposed to have unified strategic direction from the top, but individual subsidiaries are also expected to be profit centers that compete in the market.

MagicMoonlight• 8 months ago

That’s really good business. Everyone is pushing to be the best rather than accepting mediocrity.

DavidPeiffer• 8 months ago

I worked with some supply chain consultants who mentioned "internal suppliers are often worse suppliers than external".

Their point was that service levels are often not as stringently tracked, SLA's become internal money shuffling, but the company as a whole paid the price in lower output/profit. The internal partner being the default allows an amount of complacency, and if you shopped around for a comparable level of service to what's being provided, you can often find it for a better price.

Terr_• 8 months ago

I think this is a good time to reference a comic showing software companies' various "Org Charts", especially the one for Microsoft.

https://goomics.net/62

awongh• 8 months ago

This seems to be for chips put in phones in 2026? I thought these orders were booked further in advance, or is that only for processors?

shevy-java• 8 months ago

AI companies must compensate us for this outrage.

A few hours ago I looked at the RAM prices. I bought some DDR4, 32GB only, about a year or two ago. I kid you not - the local price here is now 2.5 times as it was back in 2023 or so, give or take.

I want my money back, OpenAI!

toss1• 8 months ago

Yup.

And even more outrageous is the power grid upgrades they are demanding.

If they need the power grid upgraded to handle the load for their data centers, they should pay 100% of the cost for EVERY part of every upgrade needed for the whole grid, just as a new building typically pays to upgrade the town road accessing it.

Making ordinary ratepayers pay even a cent for their upgrades is outrageous. I do not know why the regulators even allow it (yeah, we all do, but it is wrong).

fullstop3• 8 months ago

I bought 2x16 (32GB) DDR4 in June for $50. It is now ~$150.

I'm kicking myself for not buying the mini PC that I was looking at over the summer. The cost nearly doubled from what it was then.

My state keeps trying to add Data Centers in residential areas, but the public seems to be very against it. It will succeed somewhere and I'm sure that there will be a fee on my electric bill for "modernization" or some other bullshit.

moregrist• 8 months ago

Usually the narrative for externalizing these kinds of costs is that the investment will result in lots of jobs in the upgrade area.

Sometimes that materializes.

Here the narrative is almost the opposite: pay for our expensive infrastructure and we’ll take all your jobs.

It’s a bit mind boggling. One wonders how many friends our SV AI barons will have at the end of the day.

h2zizzle5• 8 months ago

This is important to point out. All the talk about AI companies underpricing is mistaken. The costs to consumers have just been externalized; the AI venture as a whole is so large that it simply distorts other markets in order to keep its economic reality intact. See also: the people whose electric bills have jumped due to increased demand from data centers.

I think we're going to regret this.

amarcheschi• 8 months ago

Americans are subsidizing ai by paying more for their electricity for the rest of the world to use chatgpt (I'm not counting the data centers of Chinese models and a few European ones though)

Forgeties795• 8 months ago

I am so glad I built my PC back in April. My 2x16gb DDR5 sticks cost $105 all in then, now it’s $480 on amazon. That is ridiculous!

basscomm• 8 months ago

I'm also glad I overbought RAM when I did my last PC upgrade in January, because who knows when I'll be able to do that again.

The 96GB kit I bought (which was more than I needed) was $165. I ended up buying another 96GB kit in June when I saw the price went up to $180 to max out my machine, even though I didn't really need it, but I was concerned where prices were going.

That same kit was $600 a month ago, and is $930 today. The entire rest of the computer didn't cost that much

Uvix• 8 months ago

DDR4 manufacturing is being spun down due to lack of demand. The prices on it would be going up regardless of what's happening with DDR5.

bell-cot• 8 months ago

The problem is further upstream. Capitalism is nice in theory, but...

"The trouble with capitalism is capitalists; they're too damn greedy." - Herbert Hoover, U.S. President, 1929-1933

And the past half-century has seen both enormous reductions in the regulations enacted in Hoover's era (when out-of-control financial markets and capitalism resulted in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression), and the growth of a class of grimly narcissistic/sociopathic techno-billionaires - who control way too many resources, and seem to share some techno-dystopian fever dream that the first one of them to grasp the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc... trophy will somehow become the God-Emperor of Earth.

nyeah• 8 months ago

It'll be fine.

nickjj3• 8 months ago

I'm running a box I put together in 2014 with an i5-4460 (3.2ghz), 16 GB of RAM, GeForce 750ti, first gen SSD, ASRock H97M Pro4 motherboard with a reasonable PSU, case and a number of fans. All of that parted out at the time was $700.

I've never been more fearful of components breaking than current day. With GPU and now memory prices being crazy, I hope I never have to upgrade.

I don't know how but the box is still great for every day web development with heavy Docker usage, video recording / editing with a 4k monitor and 2nd 1440p monitor hooked up. Minor gaming is ok too, for example I picked up Silksong last week, it runs very well at 2560x1440.

For general computer usage, SSDs really were a once in a generation "holy shit, this upgrade makes a real difference" thing.

Barathkanna2• 8 months ago

I agree with you on SSDs, that was the last upgrade that felt like flipping the “modern computer” switch overnight. Everything since has been incremental unless you’re doing ML or high-end gaming.

asenna• 8 months ago

I know it's not the same. But I think a lot of people had a similar feeling going from Intel-Macbooks to Apple Silicon. An insane upgrade that I still can't believe.

pstadler• 8 months ago

This and high resolution displays, for me at least.

wdfx• 8 months ago

The only time I had this other than changing to SSD was when I got my first multi-core system, a Q6600 (confusingly labeled a Core 2 Quad). Had a great time with that machine.

simlevesque4• 8 months ago

I've had this with gen5 PCIe SSDs recently. My T710 is so fast it's hard to believe. But you need to have a lot of data to make it worth.

Example:

    > time du -sh .
    737G .
    ________________________
    Executed in   24.63 secs

And on my laptop that has a gen3, lower spec NVMe:

    > time du -sh .
    304G .
    ________________________
    Executed in   80.86 secs

It's almost 10 times faster. The CPU must have something to do with it too but they're both Ryzen 9.

jug• 8 months ago

I thought so too on my mini PC. Then I got myself my current Mac mini M4 and I have to give it to Apple, or maybe in part to ARM... It was like another SSD moment. It's still not spun up the fan and run literally lukewarm at most my office, coding and photo work.

sneak11• 8 months ago

Am I crazy for thinking that anyone using computers for doing their job and making their income should have a $5k/year computer hardware budget at a minimum? I’m not saying to do what I do and buy a $7k laptop and a $15k desktop every year but compared to revenue it seems silly to be worrying about a few thousand dollars per year delta.

I buy the best phones and desktops money can buy, and upgrade them often, because, why take even the tiniest risk that my old or outdated hardware slows down my revenue generation which is orders of magnitude greater than their cost to replace?

Even if you don’t go the overkill route like me, we’re talking about maybe $250/month to have an absolutely top spec machine which you can then use to go and earn 100x that.

Spend at least 1% of your gross revenue on your tools used to make that revenue.

ambicapter• 8 months ago

I don't spend money on my computers from a work or "revenue-generating" perspective because my work buys me a computer to work on. Different story if you freelance/consult ofc.

mitthrowaway23• 8 months ago

Yes? I think that's crazy. I just maxed out my new Thinkpad with 96 GB of RAM and a 4 TB SSD and even at today's prices, it still came in at just about $2k and should run smoothly for many years.

Prices are high but they're not that high, unless you're buying the really big GPUs.

ChromaticPanic• 8 months ago

That's crazy spend for anyone making sub 100K

kotaKat• 8 months ago

I mean, as a frontline underpaid rural IT employee with no way to move outward from where I currently live, show me where I’m gonna put $5k a year into this budget out of my barren $55k/year salary. (And, mind you - this apparently is “more” than the local average by only around $10-15k.)

I’m struggling to buy hardware already as it is, and all these prices have basically fucked me out of everything. I’m riding rigs with 8 and 16GB of RAM and I have no way to go up from here. The AI boom has basically forced me out of the entire industry at this point. I can’t get hardware to learn, subscriptions to use, anything.

Big Tech has made it unaffordable for everyone.

Krssst• 8 months ago

One concern I'd have is that if the short-term supply of RAM is fixed anyway, even if all daily computer users were to increase their budget to match the new pricing and demand exceeds supply again, the pricing would just increase in response until prices get unreasonable enough that demand lowers back to supply.

Clent• 8 months ago

This is a crazy out of touch perspective.

Depending on salary, 2 magnitudes at $5k is $500k.

That amount of money for the vast majority of humans across the planet is unfathomable.

No one is worried about if the top 5% can afford DRAM. Literally zero people.

vultour• 8 months ago

Yes, that's an absolutely deranged opinion. Most tech jobs can be done on a $500 laptop. You realise some people don't even make your computer budget in net income every year, right?

nickjj3• 8 months ago

I try to come at it with a pragmatic approach. If I feel pain, I upgrade and don't skimp out.

======== COMPUTER ========

I feel no pain yet.

Browsing the web is fast enough where I'm not waiting around for pages to load. I never feel bound by limited tabs or anything like that.

My Rails / Flask + background worker + Postgres + Redis + esbuild + Tailwind based web apps start in a few seconds with Docker Compose. When I make code changes, I see the results in less than 1 second in my browser. Tests run fast enough (seconds to tens of seconds) for the size of apps I develop.

Programs open very quickly. Scripts I run within WSL 2 also run quickly. There's no input delay when typing or performance related nonsense that bugs me all day. Neovim runs buttery smooth with a bunch of plugins through the Windows Terminal.

I have no lag when I'm editing 1080p videos even with a 4k display showing a very wide timeline. I also record my screen with OBS to make screencasts with a webcam and have live streamed without perceivable dropped frames, all while running programming workloads in the background.

I can mostly play the games I want, but this is by far the weakest link. If I were more into gaming I would upgrade, no doubt about it.

======== PHONE ========

I had a Pixel 4a until Google busted the battery. It runs all of the apps (no games) I care about and Google Maps is fast. The camera was great.

I recently upgraded to a Pixel 9a because the repair center who broke my 4a in a number of ways gave me $350 and the 9a was $400 a few months ago. It also runs everything well and the camera is great. In my day to day it makes no difference from the 4a, literally none. It even has the same storage space of which I have around 50% space left with around 4,500 photos saved locally.

======== ASIDE ========

I have a pretty decked out M4 MBP laptop issued by my employer for work. I use it every day and for most tasks I feel no real difference vs my machine. The only thing it does noticeably faster is heavily CPU bound tasks that can be parallelized. It also loads the web version of Slack about 250ms faster, that's the impact of a $2,500+ upgrade for general web usage.

I'm really sensitive to skips, hitches and performance related things. For real, as long as you have a decent machine with an SSD using a computer feels really good, even for development workloads where you're not constantly compiling something.

gr4vityWall• 8 months ago

maybe $250/month (...) which you can then use to go and earn 100x that.

25k/month? Most people will never come close to earn that much. Most developers in the third world don't make that in a full year, but are affected by raises in PC parts' prices.

I agree with the general principle of having savings for emergencies. For a Software Engineer, that should probably include buying a good enough computer for them, in case they need a new one. But the figures themselves seem skewed towards the reality of very well-paid SV engineers.

macNchz• 8 months ago

What is the actual return on that investment, though? This is self indulgence justified as « investment ». I built a pretty beefy PC in 2020 and have made a couple of upgrades since (Ryzen 5950x, 64GB RAM, Radeon 6900XT, a few TB of NVMe) for like $2k all-in. Less than $40/month over that time. It was game changing upgrade from an aging laptop for my purposes of being able to run multiple VMs and a complex dev environment, but I really don’t know what I would have gotten out of replacing it every year since. It’s still blazing fast.

Even recreating it entirely with newer parts every single year would have cost less than $250/mo. Honestly it would probably be negative ROI just dealing with the logistics of replacing it that many times.

kube-system6• 8 months ago

I agree with the general sentiment - that you shouldn't pinch pennies on tools that you use every day. But at the same time, someone who makes their money writing with with a pen shouldn't need to spend thousands on pens. Once you have adequate professional-grade tools, you don't need to throw more money at the problem.

jfindper8• 8 months ago

I’m not saying to do what I do and buy a $7k laptop and a $15k desktop every year
I buy the best phones and desktops money can buy

Sick man! Awesome, you spend 1/3 of the median US salary on a laptop and desktop every year. That's super fucking cool! Love that for you.

Anyways, please go brag somewhere else. You're rich, you shouldn't need extra validation from an online forum.

ceejayoz• 8 months ago

Am I crazy for thinking that anyone using computers for doing their job and making their income should have a $5k/year computer hardware budget at a minimum?

Yes. This is how we get websites and apps that don't run on a normal person's computer, because the devs never noticed their performance issues on their monster machines.

Modern computing would be a lot better if devs had to use old phones, basic computers, and poor internet connections more often.

hansvm2• 8 months ago

Most people who use computers for the main part of their jobs literally can't spend that much if they don't want to be homeless.

Most of the rest arguably shouldn't. If you have $10k/yr in effective pay after taxes, healthcare, rent, food, transportation to your job, etc, then a $5k/yr purchase is insane, especially if you haven't built up an emergency fund yet.

Of the rest (people who can relatively easily afford it), most still probably shouldn't. Unless the net present value of your post-tax future incremental gains (raises, promotions, etc) derived from that expenditure exceeds $5k/yr you're better off financially doing almost anything else with that cash. That's doubly true when you consider that truly amazing computers cost $2k total nowadays without substantial improvements year-to-year. Contrasting buying one of those every 2yrs vs your proposal, you'd need a $4k/yr net expenditure to pay off somehow, somehow making use of the incremental CPU/RAM/etc to achieve that value. If it doesn't pay off then it's just a toy you're buying for personal enjoyment, not something that you should nebulously tie to revenue generation potential with an arbitrary 1% rule. Still maybe buy it, but be honest about the reason.

So, we're left with people who can afford such a thing and whose earning potential actually does increase enough with that hardware compared to a cheaper option for it to be worth it. I'm imagining that's an extremely small set. I certainly use computers heavily for work and could drop $5k/yr without batting an eye, but I literally have no idea what I could do with that extra hardware to make it pay off. If I could spend $5k/yr on internet worth a damn I'd do that in a heartbeat (moving soon I hope, which should fix that), but the rest of my setup handily does everything I want it to.

Don't get me wrong, I've bought hardware for work before (e.g., nobody seems to want to procure Linux machines for devs even when they're working on driver code and whatnot), and it's paid off, but at the scale of $5k/yr I don't think many people do something where that would have positive ROI.

pharrington• 8 months ago

are you paid by the FLOP?

neogodless• 8 months ago

Have you ever heard of the term "efficiency"?

It's when you find ways to spend the minimum amount of resources in order to get the maximum return on that spend.

With computer hardware, often buying one year old hardware and/or the second best costs a tiny fraction of the cost of the bleeding edge, while providing very nearly 100% of the performance you'll utilize.

That and your employer should pay for your hardware in many cases.

dghlsakjg• 8 months ago

If you are consistently maxing out your computers performance in a way that is limiting your ability to earn money at a rate greater than the cost of upgrades, and you can't offload that work to the cloud, then I guess it might make sense.

If, you are like every developer I have ever met, the constraint is your own time, motivation and skills, then spending $22k dollars per year is a pretty interesting waste of resources.

DOes it makes sense to buy good tools for your job? Yes. Does it make sense to buy the most expensive version of the tool that you already own last years most expensive version of? Rarely.

iberator• 8 months ago

Extremist point of view, and NOT optimal. Diminishing performance per $...

Proper calculation is: cost/ performance ratio. Then buy a second from the list:)

crote• 8 months ago

Sorry, but that's delusional.

For starters, hardware doesn't innovate quickly enough to buy a new generation every year. There was a 2-year gap between Ryzen 7000 and Ryzen 9000, for example, and a 3-year gap between Ryzen 5000 and Ryzen 7000. On top of that, most of the parts can be reused, so you're at best dropping in a new CPU and some new RAM sticks.

Second, the performance improvement just isn't there. Sure, there's a 10% performance increase in benchmarks, but that does not translate to a 10% productivity improvement for software development. Even a 1% increase is unlikely, as very few tasks are compute-bound for any significant amount of time.

You can only get to $15k by doing something stupid like buying a Threadripper, or putting an RTX 4090 into it. There are genuine use-cases for that kind of hardware - but it isn't in software development. It's like buying a Ferrari to do groceries: at a certain point you've got to admit that you're just doing it to show off your wealth.

You do you, but in all honesty you'd probably get a better result spending that money on a butler to bring your coffee to your desk instead of wasting time by walking to the coffee machine.

dragonwriter• 8 months ago

Am I crazy for thinking that anyone using computers for doing their job and making their income should have a $5k/year computer hardware budget at a minimum?

Yes, you are crazy for saying that.

but compared to revenue it seems silly to be worrying about a few thousand dollars per year delta.

There is a very wide range of incomes of people using their computers, and, more to the point, $5k/yr on hardware is way past the point where, for most people using their computer for income, additional hardware expenditure has any benefit to income generation.

Even if you don’t go the overkill route like me, we’re talking about maybe $250/month to have an absolutely top spec machine which you can then use to go and earn 100x that.

Most people using their computer to earn income do not earn anywhere close to $25,000/mo ($300k/yr), and hardware expenditures aren't the limiting factor holding them back.

Also, the minimum of $5k/yr you suggested is not $250/mo, but more than 1.5× that at $417/mo.

Spend at least 1% of your gross revenue on your tools used to make that revenue.

Median annual wage for a US software developer is ~$140k per most recent BLS numbers, and that's one of the higher-paying fields of work that people use computers for. Neither your original $5k per year nor even the $3k/year suggested by your later $250/mo suggestion are warranted by your 1% on tools rule for most people earning income with their computer, especially on hardware alone, as that is far from all of the "tools" that are relevant to most computer work.

imtringued2• 8 months ago

Malagasy data annotators work for like $100 a month. You're pretty crazy to suggest that they should spend more on the hardware than they earn from it.

kube-system6• 8 months ago

I've never been more fearful of components breaking than current day.

The mid 90s was pretty scary too. Minimum wage was $4.25 and a new Pentium 133 was $935 in bulk.

tossandthrow2• 8 months ago

If you were in minimum wage jn the 90s your lifelihood likely didn't rely on Pentium processors.

Also, it is frightening how close that is to current day minimum wage.

morsch• 8 months ago

Are you sure? From what I can tell it's more like 500 USD RRP on release, boxed.

Either way, it was the 90s: two years later that was a budget CPU because the top end was two to three times the speed.

nickjj3• 8 months ago

The mid 90s was pretty scary too.

If you fast forward just a few years though, it wasn't too bad.

You could put together a decent fully parted out machine in the late 90s and early 00s for around $600-650. These were machines good enough to get a solid 120 FPS playing Quake 3.

microtonal2• 8 months ago

That's kinda like saying the mid-20s were pretty scary too, minimum wage was AMOUNT and a MacBook M4 Max was $3000..

In the mid-90s me and my brother were around 14 and 10, earning nothing but a small amount of monthly pocket money. We were fighting so much over our family PC, that we decided to save and put together a machine from second-hands parts we could get our hands on. We built him a 386 DX 40 or 486SX2 50 or something like that and it was fine enough for him to play most DOS games. Heck, you could even run Linux (I know because I ran Linux in 1994 on a 386SX 25, with 5MB RAM and 20MB disk space).

trollbridge4• 8 months ago

In the mid 90s mere mortals ran a 486DX2 or DX4.

Pentium 60/66s were in the same price tier as expensive alpha or sparc workstations.

TacticalCoder• 8 months ago

For general computer usage, SSDs really were a once in a generation "holy shit, this upgrade makes a real difference" thing.

The last one were I really remember seeing a huge speed bump was going from a regular SSD to a NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD... Around 2015 I bought one of the very first consumer motherboard with a NVMe M.2 slot and put a Samsung 950 Pro in it: that was quite something (now I was upgrading the entire machine, not just the SSD, so there's that too). Before that I don't remember when I switched from SATA HDD to SATA SSD.

I'm now running one of those WD SN850X Black NVMe SSD but my good old trusty, now ten years old, Samsung 950 Pro is still kicking (in the wife's PC). There's likely even better out there and they're easy to find: they're still reasonably priced.

As for my 2015 Core i7-6700K: it's happily running Proxmox and Docker (but not always on).

Even consumer parts are exceptionally reliable: the last two failures I remember, in 15 years (and I've got lots of machines running), are a desktop PSU (replaced by a Be Quiet! one), a no-name NVMe SSD and a laptop's battery.

Oh and my MacBook Air M1's screen died overnight for no reason after precisely 13 months, when I had a warranty of 12 months, (some refer to it as the "bendgate") but that's because first gen MacBook Air M1 were indescribable pieces of fragile shit. I think Apple got their act together and came up with better screens in later models.

Don't worry too much: PCs are quite reliable things. And used parts for your PC from 2014 wouldn't be expensive on eBay anyway. You're not forced to upgrade to a last gen PC with DDR5 (atm 3x overpriced) and a 5090 GPU.

genewitch8• 8 months ago

fyi someone or something is downvoting your recent posts to oblivion, and i didn't see any obvious reason.

dontlaugh2• 8 months ago

It’s motherboards that tend to fail the most. I had one fail this year, albeit for the first time.

aposm• 8 months ago

A few years later but similarly - I am still running a machine built spur-of-the-moment in a single trip to Micro Center for about $500 in late 2019 (little did we know what was coming in a few months!). I made one small upgrade in probably ~2022 to a Ryzen 5800X w/ 64GB of RAM but otherwise untouched. It still flies through basically anything & does everything I need, but I'm dreading when any of the major parts go and I have to fork out double or triple the original cost for replacements...

Cerium• 8 months ago

Don't worry, if you are happy with those specs you can get corporate ewaste dell towers on ebay for low prices. "Dell precision tower", I just saw a listing for 32gb ram, Xeon 3.6ghz for about 300 usd.

Personally, at work I use the latest hardware at home I use ewaste.

cestith• 8 months ago

At home some of my systems are ewaste from former employers who would just give it to employees rather than paying for disposal. A couple are eBay finds. I do have one highish-end system at a time specifically for games. Some of my systems are my old hardware reassembled after all the parts for gaming have been upgraded over the years.

silverquiet• 8 months ago

I got a junk Precision workstation last year as a "polite" home server (it's quiet and doesn't look like industrial equipment, but still has some server-like qualities, particularly the use of ECC RAM). I liked it so much that it ended up becoming my main desktop.

vondur2• 8 months ago

Ha, I bought one of those for $500 from Ebay. It's a dual Xeon Silver workstation with a Nvidia Quadro P400 8GB, 128GB RAM and 256G SSD. I threw in a 1TB SSD and it's been working pretty well.

gpderetta2• 8 months ago

surely these will soon be scavenged for ram? Arbitrage opportunity?

ge96• 8 months ago

Optiplex's used to be my go to the SFF, I had a 1050ti in there not crazy but worked for basic gaming

zzzeek2• 8 months ago

ive dealt a bit with ewaste kinds of machines, old Dells and such and have two still running here, the issue is they use a crapton of power. I had one such ewaste Dell machine that I just had to take to the dump it was so underpeforming while it used 3x more power than my other two Dells combined.

trollbridge4• 8 months ago

I have some Dell server with dual Xeons and 192GB RAM. It is NUMA but that’s fine for Docker workloads where you can just associate them with a CPU.

The RAM for that is basically ewaste at this point, yet it runs the workloads it needs to do just fine.

agapon2• 8 months ago

Used RDIMM / LRDIMM prices have also started going up, quickly.

mikepurvis2• 8 months ago

For a DDR3-era machine, you'd be buying RAM for that on Ebay, not Newegg.

I have an industrial Mini-ITX motherboard of similar vintage that I use with an i5-4570 as my Unraid machine. It doesn't natively support NVMe, but I was able to get a dual-m2 expansion card with its own splitter (no motherboard bifurcation required) and that let me get a pretty modern-feeling setup with nice fast cache disks.

forinti• 8 months ago

You can still get brand new generic motherboards for old CPUs.

I swapped out old ASUS MBs for an i3-540 and an Athlon II X4 with brand new motherboards.

They are quite cheaper than getting a new kit, so I guess that's the market they cater to: people who don't need an upgrade but their MBs gave in.

You can get these for US$20-US$30.

prmoustache• 8 months ago

As other mentionned, there are plenty of refurbished stuff and second hand parts that there isn't any risk of finding yourself having to buy something at insane prices if your computer was to die today.

If you don't need a GPU for gaming you can get a decent computer with an i5, 16GB of ram and an nvme drive for usd 50. I bought one a few weeks ago ago.

the__alchemist5• 8 months ago

Man, it was just GPU for a while. But same boat. I regret not getting the 4090 for $1600 direct from Nvidia. "That's too much for a video card", and got the 4080 instead. I dread the day when I need to replace it.

jakogut3• 8 months ago

The Radeon RX 9070 XT performs at a similar level to the RTX 5070, and is retailing around $600 right now.

adventured2• 8 months ago

You could still easily build a $800-$900 system that would dramatically jump forward from that machine.

$700 in 2014 is now $971 inflation adjusted (BLS calculator).

RTX 3060 12gb $180 (eBay). Sub $200 CPU (~5-7 times faster than yours). 16gb DDR4 $100-$120. $90 PSU. $100 motherboard. WD Black 1tb SSD $120. Roughly $800 (which inflation adjusted beats your $700).

Right now is a rather amazing time for CPUs, even though RAM prices have gone crazy.

Assume you find some deals somewhere in there, you could do slightly better with either pricing or components.

ls6123• 8 months ago

GPU prices are actually at MSRP now for most cards other than the 5090.

bilegeek• 8 months ago

Problem is MSRP is also inflated, and Covid has locked that in. Arc Battlemage is the only exception I see.

square_usual• 8 months ago

You can still buy DDR4 for pretty cheap, and if you're replacing a computer that old any system built around DDR4 will still be a massive jump in performance.

hnu0847• 8 months ago

Don't all RAM manufacturers offer a lifetime warranty?

That said, if the shortage gets bad enough then maybe they could find themselves in a situation where they were unable/unwilling to honor warranty claims?

SoftTalker• 8 months ago

I've never heard of a lifetime warranty on anything in the enterprise space. Maybe consumer stuff, where it's just a marketing gimmick.

acters• 8 months ago

I am still running an i5 4690k, really all I need is better GPU but those prices are criminal. I wish I got a 4090 when I had the chance rip

genewitch8• 8 months ago

intel arc b580 (i think that's the latest one) isn't obnoxiously priced but you're going to have to face the fact that your PCIE is really very slow. But it should work.

if you want to save even more money get the older Arc Battlemage GPUs. I used one it was comparable with an RTX 3060; i returned it because the machine i was running it in had a bug that was fixed 2 days before i returned it but i didn't know that.

I was seriously considering getting a b580 or waiting until the b*70 came out with more memory, although at this point i doubt it will be very affordable considering VRAM prices going up as well. A friend is supposedly going to ship me a few GTX 1080ti cards so i can delay buying newer cards for a bit.

testing22321• 8 months ago

I got a used M1 MacBook Air a year ago.

By far the fastest computer I’ve ever used. It felt like the SSD leap of years earlier.

davely• 8 months ago

About a month ago, the mobo for my 5950x decided to give up the ghost. I decided to just rebuild the whole thing and update from scratch.

So went crazy and bought a 9800X3D, purchased a ridiculous amount of DDR5 RAM (96GB, which matches my old machine’s DDR4 RAM quantity). At the time, it was about $400 USD or so.

I’ve been living in blissful ignorance since then. Seeing this post, I decided to check Amazon. The same amount of RAM is currently $1200!!!

VHRanger• 8 months ago

Same, I got 96GB of high end 6000MHz DDR5 this summer for $600CAD and now it's nearly triple at $1500CAD

genewitch8• 8 months ago

what are you doing with that old 5950x?

phantasmish• 8 months ago

I’m worried about the Valve mini PC coming out next year.

Instant buy $700 or under. Probably buy up to $850. At, like, $1,100, though… solid no. And I’m counting on that thing to take the power-hog giant older Windows PC tower so bulky it’s unplugged and in a closet half the time, out of my house.

KronisLV• 8 months ago

If I needed a budget build, I'd probably look in the direction of used parts on AliExpress, you can sometimes find good deals on AM4 CPUs (that platform had a lot of longevity, even now my main PC has a Ryzen 7 5800X) and for whatever reason RX 580 GPUs were really, really widespread (though typically the 2048SP units). Not amazing by any means, but a significant upgrade from your current setup and if you don't get particularly unlucky, it might last for years with no issues.

Ofc there's also the alternate strategy of going for a mid/high end rig and hoping it lasts a decade, but the current DDR5 prices make me depressed so yeah maybe not.

I genuinely hope that at some point the market will get flooded with good components with a lot of longevity and reasonable prices again in the next gens: like AM4 CPUs, like that RX 580, or GTX 1080 Ti but I fear that Nvidia has learnt their lesson in releasing stuff that pushes you in the direction of incremental upgrades rather than making something really good for the time, same with Intel's LGA1851 being basically dead on arrival, after the reviews started rolling in (who knows, maybe at least mobos and Core Ultra chips will eventually be cheap as old stock). On the other hand, at least something like the Arc B580 GPUs were a step in the right direction - competent and not horribly overpriced (at least when it came to MSRP, unfortunately the merchants were scumbags and often ignored it).

snickerbockers5• 8 months ago

For general computer usage, SSDs really were a once in a generation "holy shit, this upgrade makes a real difference" thing.

I only ever noticed it on my windows partition. IIRC on my linux partition it was hardly noticeable because Linux is far better at caching disk contents than windows and also linux in general can boot surprisingly fast even on HDDs if you only install modules you actually need so that the autoconfiguration doesn't waste time probing dozens of modules in search of the best one.

dotancohen5• 8 months ago

How to determine which modules are actually needed, on a Debian system?

PHGamer• 8 months ago

you should upgrade to a used or new 12900k with DDR4 since its still cheaper than dd5 even if it is up. then get a used 3080ti with 12gb. youll be able to do proper h.265 decode/encode with that for up to 4k (unfortuantly not 8k but hey no one really has that yet)

rasz• 8 months ago

Do yourself a favor and order $25 Xeon E3-1231 v3/E3-1241 v3 from China. Those work in all desktop motherboards. Used DDR3 ram is also so cheap you can bump to 32GB for another $20.

easy cheap upgrades. CPU will be noticeable straight away, ram only if you are running out.

nipperkinfeet• 8 months ago

I'm glad I kept my ageing Dell Studio XPS 7100. I need to stock up on some Dell Precision towers from the surplus in case my Studio XPS 7100 breaks. This AI bubble needs to burst soon.

Barathkanna2• 8 months ago

When RAM gets so expensive that even Samsung won’t buy Samsung from Samsung, you know the market has officially entered comic mode. At this rate their next quarterly report is just going to be one division sending the other an IOU.

Ericson23142• 8 months ago

Overleverage / debt, and refusing to sell at a certain price, are actually very different things though. OpenAI might be a tire fire, but Samsung is the gold pan seller here, and presumably has an excellent balance sheet.

rafaelmn• 8 months ago

Apple is going to be even more profitable in the consumer space because of RAM prices ? I feel like they are the only player to have the supply chain locked down enough to not get caught off guard, have good prices locked in enough in advance and suppliers not willing to antagonize such a big customer by backing out of a deal.

londons_explore3• 8 months ago

Apple software typically seems to give a better user experience in less RAM in both desktop and mobile.

For the last 10+ years apples iPhones have shipped with about half the ram of a flagship android for example.

Miraste2• 8 months ago

They used to, but they've caught up. The flagship iPhone 17 has 12GB RAM, the same as the Galaxy S25. Only the most expensive Z Fold has more, with 16GB.

RAM pricing segmentation makes Apple a lot of money, but I think they scared themselves when AI took off and they had millions of 4GB and 8GB products out in the world. The Mac minimum RAM specs have gone up too, they're trying to get out of the hole they dug.

fennecbutt2• 8 months ago

People always make this argument. But could you please expand on what you think is actually in memory?

code:data, by and large I bet that content held in ram takes up the majority of space. And people have complained about the lack of ram in iPhones for ages now, particularly with how it affects browsers.

Dibby0532• 8 months ago

the only player to have the supply chain locked down enough to not get caught off guard What?

Miraste2• 8 months ago

Tim Cook is the Supply Chain Guy. He has been for decades, before he ever worked at Apple. He does everything he can to make sure that Apple directly controls as much of the supply chain as possible, and uses the full extent of their influence to get favorable long-term deals on what they don't make themselves.

In the past this has resulted in stuff like Samsung Display sending their best displays to Apple instead of Samsung Mobile.

potato3732842• 8 months ago

You make more money selling the good stuff. It's like this in just about every industry.

venturecruelty5• 8 months ago

Why bother selling to regular consumers at all then? One or two big companies can have everything, and the rest of us can have nothing. And we will like it.

SanjayMehta• 8 months ago

In the 90s, Motorola Mobile used Cypress SRAMs and not Motorola SRAMs.

Pricing.

maxglute• 8 months ago

Kdrama on this when?

monster_truck• 8 months ago

Based on my time working for Samsung this does not surprise me. The silos within fight against one another more than they ever bother to compete with anyone else

meindnoch• 8 months ago

I've bought 2x16GB Samsung ECC RAM last week for $150.

DustinBrett• 8 months ago

Ironically that site was eating up my RAM. PC World has some issues, Chrome & Firefox.

time4tea• 8 months ago

Dec 2023:

96GB (2x48) DDR5 5x00 £260 today £1050

128GB (4x32 ) DDR5 5x00 £350 today £1500

Wut?

Edit: formatting

dehrmann• 8 months ago

ECC memory has been one of my better investments in the past two years, and now because of the crashes it might have prevented.

bpye• 8 months ago

Kind of wish I went for 2x48GB last year, not 2x32GB. Oh well.

tehlike• 8 months ago

Just earlier this year I pad 35$ for 64gb lrdimm stick (420$ total for 12).

Now each stick is over 180$.

araes• 8 months ago

Somebody had PC Part Picker [1] on a different thread. Found it kind of helpful. 3x, 3.5x, and 4x is relatively common across most memory types. DDR4-3200 2x32GB is one of the few that appears to have flattened slightly at 2.5x, although most DDR4-3200 is not as severe as other DDR4 or DDR5. None of the other lines appear to have flattened significantly yet.

[1] https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/memory/

khannn7• 8 months ago

"The price of eggs has nothing on the price of computer memory right now.". A dozen eggs went to ~$5. They are eggs and most people use what, max 12 eggs a month? Get out of here with that trite garbage. Everyone knew that the egg shortage was due to the extreme step the US does of culling herds infected with avian flu and that they were transitory.

542458• 8 months ago

Surprisingly, apparently Americans average 279 eggs per year per person or 24 per month.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/02/28/why-ameri...

(This is not a comment making any judgements about cost or the state of the economy, I was just surprised to find it that high)

red-iron-pine3• 8 months ago

cuz eggs are in breakfast sandwiches, are ingredients in pastries, act as binders in things like meatloaf or fried chicken, etc. etc.

baud147258• 8 months ago

Maybe if you include all the eggs in processed food like cookies or cakes and in restaurants or other catering operations you reach that number? And eggs consumed at home could still be around 12 per person?

silisili4• 8 months ago

That sounded high to me as well(probably because I rarely eat eggs), but then I remembered my parents who each eat two per day which isn't that uncommon I guess.

xboxnolifes2• 8 months ago

The average person buys, what, 0 ram per month? Which cares.

khannn7• 8 months ago

The average person buys a phone amortized at 36 months minus trade-in value. So they do indeed buy ram every month but it's a line item on a phone bill.

th0ma5• 8 months ago

There was also a lot of profiteering going on? This was talked about quite a bit? And it's still going on in other markets with other things like cars??

khannn7• 8 months ago

"Profiteering"? Truth is... the game was rigged from the start

venturecruelty5• 8 months ago

Sorry, we have to starve so the two dairy distributors can have another good quarter. I hear gruel is cheap, for now.

n8cpdx3• 8 months ago

Eggs have traditionally been an extremely cheap protein staple.

A typical pattern might be to have two eggs for breakfast (a whopping 120 calories), boiled eggs for lunch/snack (another 60-120 calories), and of course baking, but I will pretend that people don’t bake.

A more typical serving for an adult breakfast might be 3 eggs if not supplemented.

For mom and dad and the little one, you’re now at 35 (2+2+1+2)x5 eggs per week. When your cost goes from $6 (2x18 @3) to $16 (2x18@8) per week, you notice.

Obviously the political discourse around this was not healthy. But eggs suddenly becoming a cost you have to notice is a big deal, and a symbol for all of the other grocery prices that went up simultaneously.

If you’re a typical HN user in the US you might be out of touch with the reality that costs going up $10/week can be a real hardship when you’re raising a family on limited income.

The peak was actually closer to $8/dozen, my math has been conservative at every step, the situation is worse than I describe.

khannn7• 8 months ago

Parents in the US don't feed their kids eggs for breakfast, it's majority cereal or breakfast bars. Maybe some yogurt but that's almost always upper middle class or above.

"If you’re a typical HN user in the US you might be out of touch with the reality that costs going up $10/week can be a real hardship when you’re raising a family on limited income.".

Skill issue. Oatmeal is very cheap and filling. The aforementioned yogurt. Nothing, yeah nothing, because the average person is obese here and nothing is exactly what they need for breakfast. A piece of fruit like the perennial classic banana for breakfast. Complaining about egg prices comes from the camp of "I tried nothing and nothing worked".

me551ah• 8 months ago

It is absolutely the worst time to be a gamer. First it was the GPU prices that went up and NVIDIA started to focus on their enterprise cards more and more RAM prices. I don’t think I’ve seen the price of computer components go up so much.

qwertox• 8 months ago

I had planned to build a new workstation this fall, all the parts were in the list. but seeing the ram go from 300€ (96 GB) to 820€, in-stock for 999€, in under a month made me decide that i will continue using that laptop from 2019 for maybe another 1.5 years.

It's a ridiculous situation and these companies, whoever they are, should be somewhat ashamed of themselves for the situation they're putting us in.

That goes specially for those MF at OpenAI who apparently grabbed 40% of the worldwide DRAM production, as well as those sold in stores.

aceazzameen• 8 months ago

I really wanted to build a new PC this year, which is obviously not happening anymore. But I do have 2x16GB DDR5 SODIMMs from my laptop that I'm not using, after I upgraded to 64GB a while back. Now I wonder if I can build a tiny PC around those? Does anyone make motherboards that support DDR5 laptop memory?

ineedasername• 8 months ago

A bunch of the NUC models use laptop RAM, and often have barebones kits. Looks like ASUS has a decent range of kits and prebuilt, but you may be able to find boards. If you want something expandable, look for the "Pro" and "Extreme" range. I had one of the first gaming-oriented NUC's a while back, Hades Canyon, highly capable.

bakugo• 8 months ago

https://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/X600TM-ITX/index.asp

Can't find it for sale, though. There's also a barebones mini-PC:

https://www.asrock.com/nettop/AMD/DeskMini%20X600%20Series/i...

max-leo• 8 months ago

Minisforum offer a Mini-ITX board with a 16-core Zen4 AMD CPU soldered on for under $400. The AM5 socket version of that same CPU alone is over 500. It uses SO-DIMM DDR5 so might be an interesting option in your case. (Yes, it is a mobile CPU but it has the same amounts of L2/L3 Cache as the AM5 chip, just clocked 300MHz slower)

https://store.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-motherboard

ThatPlayer• 8 months ago

There are adapters that convert the laptop memory for desktop motherboards. So that's an option too.

blindriver• 8 months ago

I bought 64 GB DDR4 RAM for $189 in 2022. The exact same memory is now almost $600 on Amazon. How can this not impact PC sales and the sale of other electronics?

layer8• 8 months ago

It will. Manufacturers who didn’t get good supply contracts in time might be forced to leave the market.

dreamcompiler• 8 months ago

Once the AI bubble pops there will be smoking deals on RAM (and everything else).

Shank• 8 months ago

This is going to be a serious problem. We’ve had smart devices percolate through all consumer electronics, from washing machines to fridges. That’s all fine and dandy but they all need RAM. At what point does this become a national security issue? People need these things and they all require RAM and now assumably will cost more as the raw chip cost increases significantly or the supply chains dry up for lower quantities all together.

tippa123• 8 months ago

This is to be expected from any large corporation. In my experience, this sort of infighting leads to low morale and wastes a significant amount of energy that could be directed somewhere far more productive.

venturecruelty5• 8 months ago

It's unfortunate that we will soon not have computers because it is not profitable enough. Alas. Too bad the market is so efficient.

dmix2• 8 months ago

I'd much rather be in a country where the odd temporary shortage happens due to a massive new market appearing than one where supply/demand is always fixed and static because nothing new gets built without extreme careful planning.

AI is not going away, but there will be a correction and things will plateau to a new higher level of demand for chips and go back to normal as always. There's too much money involved for this not to scale up.

Markets can't adapt overnight to tons of data centers being built all of a sudden but it will adapt.

venturecruelty5• 8 months ago

AI is not going away, but there will be a correction and things will plateau to a new higher level of demand for chips and go back to normal as always. There's too much money involved for this not to scale up.

What will they do when people continue to not pay for this crap and investors demand their pound of flesh? Because uh, nobody's paying for this, and when people are gambling with trillions of dollars...

Markets can't adapt overnight to tons of data centers being built all of a sudden but it will adapt.

Which data centers?

fennecbutt2• 8 months ago

Well well well. From an anti monopoly standpoint isn't it interesting that each business is doing what it should for its own best interests rather than special deals because they're under the same umbrella?

venturecruelty5• 8 months ago

I love how I've seen a bunch of responses that amount to "do you really need that much RAM anyway?" Unreal.

Night_Thastus• 8 months ago

I am sooooooooooooooooooooooo glad I bought a 6000Mhz 2x16 kit before all this nonsense started.

I'll be honest, I have 0 confidence that this is a transient event. Once the AI hype cools off, Nvidia will just come up with something else that suddenly needs all their highest end products. Tech companies will all hype it up, and suddenly hardware will be expensive again.

The hardware manufacturers and chip designers have gotten a taste of inflated prices and they are NOT going to let it go. Do not expect a 'return to normal'

Even if demand goes back to exactly what it what, expect prices to for some reason be >30% higher than before for no reason - or as they would call it 'market conditions'.

rwyinuse• 8 months ago

I'm now glad I bought 128GB of DDR4 when building a new dual purpose server-gaming PC two years ago. The RAM is now worth way more than the rest of the parts combined.

I wonder how this will impact phone prices.

dcchambers• 8 months ago

Seriously concerned for the future of consumer electronics right now.

Next up: Nvidia exits the consumer hardware space and shifts fully to datacenter chips.

browningstreet• 8 months ago

Apple has the opportunity to do something really funny and radically increase the base RAM configurations of all their unified memory/CPU/GPU chips. Intel/AMD builders would struggle to meet the price/capacity points.

koolala• 8 months ago

Don't they have to pay the same crazy prices? What gives them the opportunity?

dontlaugh2• 8 months ago

They already overprice their memory, so they have a lot more headroom.

OhMeadhbh4• 8 months ago

Or we could go back to using software that didn't require 1 Gb to run the OS / Browser combo powerful enough to run a browser that can load "too much" javascript to enable a webmail interface.

In the 80s I ran an early SMTP / POP email client that functioned as a DOS TSR with code and data less than 64k. Granted, it was pretty crappy and was text-only (non MIME.) But there's got to be a middle ground between 64k for a craptastic text-only email client and a 1Gb OS / Browser / Webmail combo that could probably run that DOS TSR in an emulator as an attachment to a short email.

knallfrosch• 8 months ago

You have to ship software that behaves exactly the same across three desktop operating systems and two mobile operating systems. Be glad we leave out tablets for this. You're able to hire 4 vibecoding juniors and your deadline is in 6 months.

You know what you choose for a frontend? It's Electron + React and React Native.

And none of your customers will complain because the people with money to spend are rocking 12GB of RAM on their phone.

OhMeadhbh4• 8 months ago

Yeah. That's not the world I live in. I live in the terminal.

jbverschoor• 8 months ago

The election apps are the same size as a complete VM of windows 2000.

cyanydeez7• 8 months ago

Yo, your comment makes it seem like AI deserves this memory and chrome does not...

estimator7292• 8 months ago

They're saying the amount of bloat in modern software is so ridiculous that it requires multiple gigabytes of memory to run a single application that, in a sane universe, shouldn't occupy more than a hundred MB.

AI doesn't deserve it more than we do, but also we shouldn't be required to have $300 in RAM for basic functionality. We shouldn't have to deal with RAM scalpers because businesses don't want to develop good software.

Instead, we the users are forced to pay for more and more memory and CPU and disk because some rich asshole doesn't want to spend the money on developing good software. The costs are pushed to us. And since resources are now unimaginably expensive, it's still our problem and we still have to foot the bill a million times over.

OhMeadhbh4• 8 months ago

And I for one welcome our new AI overlords!

Seriously though... I think most uses of LLMs are pretty stupid, but it seems like we're in the bubble and the only way people can continue to make money is by doubling down on AI spending. Or at least that's the only way they think they can make money.

So... sorry for leaving you with that impression. Maybe the only way to get to the post AI hype world is to give AI companies everything they want so they fail faster.

"Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders!" ( see https://economicsociology.org/2014/10/07/yes-the-planet-got-... )

Does anyone deserve RAM though?

Aloisius• 8 months ago

As long as javascript developers don't care about memory usage, I'm not sure what anyone can do.

I mean, for goodness sake, an empty YouTube page with no videos eats up a shocking amount of memory - 90 MB just for the js heap. I used to run Windows 3.1 on a machine with 8 MB of RAM.

Admittedly, a good amount of memory used with browsers is because of larger graphics buffers that go along with higher resolution monitors, but much is just... waste.

benced• 8 months ago

People optimize to what is scarce. Previously, developer time was much more scare than memory. Seems like that might change so folks might start to optimize to memory. It's not a moral judgement, it's a technical decision about where to allocate resources.

ralferoo• 8 months ago

I'm not surprised this is happening in a massive group of companies. I once worked for a smallish company with 400 staff, with basically one product, but different teams - backend, frontend, database, QA, sales, etc... If you were ever speaking to someone from a different team for more than 15 minutes, it had to be put into your weekly timesheet so your time could be cross-billed to the other department.

Obviously the net effect was to silo all the different departments so that nobody really knew how the entire product worked, except the few smokers who'd regularly go outside and smoke for 15+ minutes and chat to whoever else was around.

rigrassm• 8 months ago

I am so glad when I decided to upgrade my AM4 system a few years back to a 5800X (3D model at the time I believe was just released and was questionable at the time if it was worth it outside of gaming) I wanted to build a PC from my hand me downs for my kid so I went ahead and upgraded my storage and RAM to a decent 64GB DDR4 set that ended up with a decent stable overclock.

Prices weren't great when I bought it at the time but compared to now, I'm glad I bit the bullet when I did.

RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

Related Stories