The RAM I bought in 2019 for $100 is now over $500. at this rate I'll sell it in a few years to put my daughter through college.
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I've come to terms with the fact I'm not going to be buying any new computer-type devices until the bubble pops.
I'm just terrified what happens if one of my existing devices breaks. If a RAM stick goes bad, I might have to mortgage my non-existent house.
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At this rate I'll be able to sell my ddr3 from over a decade ago and make a profit compared to what I paid originally
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I see this as an opportunity to get invested in non-tech hobbies because there’s nothing else I can do
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it will be ironic when consumers cant afford the end user devices needed to interact with the AI servers. House of cards??
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Thought I could wait to build a new PC, but at this point, it'll be another 5-10 years before things start getting better. After the price of the steam machine, I ordered parts to build my own. Such a bad time to build, but it's just gonna get worse the longer I wait.
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The ‘AI’ angle is purely cover for the manufacturers actively choosing to now behave like the pharmaceutical industry. They’ve identified a window to pull this shit, and coordinated this opportunistic collusion.
The only meaningful response is to create a diverse production base to remove the choke point the current incumbents are leveraging, but that would require a concerted, collaborative effort by parties who can’t see and/or don’t understand the problem.
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These price gouging assholes should probably be prosecuted along with the "AI" fraudsters.
Things are probably going to get worse in the short term, but the AI bubble is going to burst. Magnitude? We'll see, but when investors realize that these companies cannot make a profit, and open source frontier models that allow you to run AI in house are removing vendor lock in, things are going to change. Also, LLMs are a dead end, and have little room to improve.
Newer paradigms are appearing, such as Yann LeCun's JASP, which actually learns, and other approaches, which will make LLMs obsolete, and are way less hardware intensive.
Another factor is the Chinese closing in in consumer grade RAM. If it can be proven that no backdoor or other shenanigans are there, they will balance things somewhat.
While current reality is what it is, there may be a massive social and traditional media manipulation by the big three and other interested parties to fuel fear of rising prices forever, to push people to buy as much as they can at these prices. I have no proof of this, but I don't think it's far fetched.
And let's not forget that for media outlets, fear and tragedy sells. (I think Hearst or some other news mogul said that last century.)
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I'm really glad I got my steam deck last year when I had the chance.
No reference to CXMT’s memory that’s just starting to be sold in western markets now, I’m very curious if/how that’ll affect things. If corsair’s cxmt kit can hold pricing steady, let alone drop it, for a 2x16 6000MHz CL36 kit then it could be huge
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Recent leaks suggest that Sony will either have to sell its upcoming PlayStation 6 console at a minimum of $960 or push the launch date back into 2028 or even beyond that.
I seriously think that they should push it back to 2028.
I think that Valve's making a mistake by not pushing back the Steam Machine to 2028 too, though at least for Valve, a hardware platform flopping isn't a big deal, since they don't rely on it alone to make sales.
Or maybe I'll be wrong, and gamers will be significantly less price sensitive than they have been in the past. But my guess is that they aren't gonna be jumping on consoles with a pricetag that's that high. As I said before, the only console to be successful in the past that cost nearly that much in inflation-adjusted terms was the Atari 2600. Everything else failed.
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Type shit that happens to me when I earn my own money
8Gb of ddr4 is $25 usd and 16Gb ddr4 sticks are going for about $75 usd goes up from there depending on speed.
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It'll be ok. Just stop buying shit. They haven't needed new computers for years now they just act like they do. See windows 11 required hardware roll out. You think that is a new tactic? That is just them being overt about a practice that has existed forever.
You may hate AI, but it’s not the reason we are seeing RAM costs skyrocket.
Looking at the manufacturing data and the historical strong-arm tactics used by Samsung, Micron, and SK hynix, who collectively control about 96% of the global DRAM market, AI just gives manufacturers the perfect public justification to stop chasing cheap bit growth, starve low-margin consumer channels (our RAM products), reprioritize wafers toward premium products (data center RAM), and force customers into multi-year contracts at shortage-era prices.
Sure it lets them make more money off us, but they really love locking in these rates with their data center-based customers.
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