Posted by simlevesque 7 hours ago
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 However, many on-premise servers have been replaced by cloud services, the workstation market has been subsumed by the broader PC market, and PC gaming has faced challenges, from a push toward locked-down consoles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.
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.
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.
They are rerouting RAMs for consumers to enterprise for server build up
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.
You can't exactly break up a chip manufacturer when they have just 1 or 2 plants tooled for the latest memory.
IMO, recognizing chip fabrication as a national security asset and turning it into a public corporation would be the better way to go. Let the likes of intel/amd/or micron continue developing chips. But also, take control of the most expensive and risky part of chip manufacturing to make sure we don't fall behind due to corporate budget cuts. You also keep and continue to build expertise in a vital part of modern society.
There's a reason why basically only Intel does inhouse fabrication and even they have had to rely out outsourcing it.
Antitrust laws can/should be applied to, eg., Google for search and web monopolization.
If someone is willing to pay more than you for a limited supply of some resource, that isn't a market monopoly.
The simpler solution is a tax on scale -- a graduated corporate revenue tax, aggregated across any group of entities which meet the common control [1] criteria. Then it's just a tax, and you simply have to collect it. Very little wiggle room.
If splitting your company in half wouldn't impair any of its lines of business, the CEO has a powerful financial incentive (lower tax rates on the two halves) to do so.
What??
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).
It’s these pesky pc things that people do bad things like piracy with/s
And they're effectively saying they've had enough of running call centers, tracing lost parcels, weirdo customers who show up at the factory, running marketing campaigns etc.
A consumer facing business is a lot of overhead, and since more and more hardware now has soldered ram, it is a shrinking business too.
Shrinking businesses are super hard to run - it's far easier to grow a business than shrink it whilst maintaining the same margins.
When this is a company's core complaint, then the usual strategy for getting out of the D2C business (without losing D2C revenue) is finding a channel partner willing to absorb the dealflow. I.e. turning your B2C channel into a single B2B(2C) enterprise customer.
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...)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
It really is just dotcom all over again.
This is bad for consumers though since DRAM prices are skyrocketing and now we have one less company making consumer DRAM.
Other times professionals will sneer at a consumer product, or a consumer product can diminish your brand. Nobody's wiring a data centre with Monster Cables, and nobody's buying Cisco because they were impressed by Linksys.
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.
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.
Sounds to me like they are using the tried and true method of selling equipment to the people rushing for gold
Diversification is resilience.
Putting consumer on hold makes some sense. An exit? This will be written about in business books.
(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.)
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.
Consumers are so annoying. And by consumers, I mean "anyone can get an API key for the latest model."