RE: https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/117412472741486889
RAM and SSD prices have shot straight through the ceiling and meanwhile the OSs they come with are bloated with memory-and-storage guzzling AI garbage nobody asked for—not to mention that for actual productivity or gaming purposes, today's PCs are barely ahead of ones from 2020.
Who'd want a new PC right now?
@cstross @arstechnica nailed it; the whole industry has massively shot itself in the foot.
Meanwhile, those of us who are still trying to get on with “normal” IT are struggling replace kit that is genuinely outdated and knackered.
@cstross @arstechnica we are *so* lucky that MS foisted the Win11/TPM forced upgrade, and Apple moved away from Intel, before this shit. Many big orgs were forced to spend big because of those two last year, but it would have been 10x worse this year or next.
(I work for a large UK university’s IT team, and the cost of upgrading all our lab machines last year was eye-watering 😳)
@cstross @arstechnica It’s funny: RAM and SSD prices have shot up due to advance purchases for equipment to fill AI datacenters.
But AI datacenters mostly aren’t being built. The forecast pipeline still looks massive, but most of the actual construction is delayed, cancelled, abandoned, walked-back. Whether it’s Microsoft, coreweave, Meta, Oracle — projects cancelled all over the place.
If the datacenters aren’t being built, the machines containing all the RAM and SSD aren’t being deployed.
So where did all the RAM and SSD go? Why have the prices skyrocketed? Why is there a shortage?
I figure we’ll find out when the bubble pops, and documents will come out showing collusion between GPU manufacturers and the storage industry or whatever. It doesn’t feel like a natural price movement at the moment, but there’s no confirmed alternative explanation for it?
@NewtonMark @arstechnica The RAM and FLASH is still coming off the fabs—I've heard rumours that there's going to be a huge glut of DDR5 originally optioned for data centres hitting the wholesale market in a few months.
(I'm sitting on my hands, saving for a couple of 8Tb sticks of M.2 FLASH when prices fall back to where they should have been all along.)
@cstross *Makes hardware 30% more expensive and OS almost usable*
*People stop buying*
Tech companies:
@cstross moar capitalism produces scarcity the way more highways produce more traffic.