Memory Companies Have Destroyed the Consumer Market

annoyingnoob

Same for small business or any small buyer.

glimshe

Should we blame this on memory companies or the AI companies bidding for memory? How should the memory companies have acted differently?

Apreche

Yes, but zoom out more. Wealth inequality and the k-shaped economy are the real culprit. When a few people have so much wealth that they are no longer price-sensitive, they bid up the price of everything and anything of value be it stocks, real estate, computer hardware, fine arts, sports teams, etc. The result is that a business which tries to make quality products at reasonable prices will fail. They aren’t luxurious enough for the people with money. They aren’t cheap enough for the people without. Customers in the middle hardly exist. Any valuable good that is genuinely scarce will inevitably become a luxury.

eagerpace

People have the option of just not buying stuff. I sold my Tesla in 2021 for a stupid price, drove a beater for two years, and bought another new car a couple years later. Now, certainly not everyone has that luxury, but this is computers, not real estate. Prices will crash.

dist-epoch

> The DRAM and NAND flash manufacturers at fault for the ongoing RAM, SSD, and GPU price increases Yes, it's the manufacturers fault, not the unbelievable market demand. We are all Capitalists, until the Market comes after the stuff we love.

pessimizer

This comes at a perfect time. The public doesn't need computers, they can just use their phones. If the consumer had access to this RAM, they might all just run local or semi-local AI. It's important to outbid them so you can rent AI to them, and extract money from them in a million other ways while they use it.

throwaway81523

> Memory companies Someone misspelled "Altman", https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram...

Seattle3503

Could this be the opening China needs to get their foot in the door? This feels short sighted.

mrtksn

In the past people just starved to death when someone needed all the resources for their thing. Sounds like improvement.

fhn

just stop buying. you people buy way too much crap anyway

jck86

The AI companies must be regulated. They are already destroying the world and the economy before they can even make an attempt at destroying humanity. Either AI will get cheap enough and blow up and destroy the economy by eating everyone's lunch and killing off sectors left and right. Or it will become an uncontrolable weapon destroying the internet and killing off people on the battlefield. Or it will tank the economy because there may not be a way to monopolize it making the billions of investments moot leading them to their only leverage of hoarding up all the resources pricing out the competition but also destroying the industry. And maybe all of those at once.

1shooner

An aside, this is a poorly-structured article. It's mostly screenshots of citations from other articles with no alt or any other way to actually search through what they're citing.

pitchlatte

nvidia investing in every aspect of the hype cycle is terrifying. as an ai skeptic i almost don’t want the bubble to burst anymore, i don’t know if the economy can recover at all. perhaps a new economic paradigm will emerge, but if so, the transition is going to be rough.

KevinMS

Building a gaming PC in the spring of 2025 was probably one of the luckiest things I've ever had happen. 32G DDR5 for 90 bucks, 4TB drive for about 200 bucks. Funny thing is I held off upgrading my GPU to wait for the price to come down from the crypto rush :)