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Micron Announces Exit from Crucial Consumer Business

763 points by simlevesque 10mo ago

haunter 10mo ago
(Crucial the brand not the adjective) They announced a month ago that their upstate NY fab was delayed by 2-3 years so the painting was on the wall https://archive.md/WSsLm https://archive.md/WSsLm https://www.syracuse.com/micron/2025/11/micron-chip-factories-in-upstate-ny-delayed-by-two-to-three-years-company-says.html https://www.syracuse.com/micron/2025/11/micron-chip-factorie...
- delfinom 10mo ago
  They don't need the fab for Crucial the brand. Anything the fab outputs will feed into Micron selling to datacenters
ZoneZealot 10mo ago
Micron are estimated to have 23% and 21% of global revenue for DRAM and HBM in Q2 2025. Their 'smaller' market, SSDs - has an estimated 13% of global NAND revenue. https://counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/global-dram-and-hbm-market-share https://counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/global-dram-and... https://counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/global-nand-memory-market-share 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.
- consumer451 10mo ago
  Tangent: this is going to happen with SOTA LLMs as well, isn't it. Consumers are so annoying. And by consumers, I mean "anyone can get an API key for the latest model."
palmotea 10mo ago
When richer people than you want things, those things can become unavailable to you (or at least less available). I really hope this bubble pops, all these investors lose their shirts, and prices come down to something reasonable.
- Night_Thastus 10mo ago
  When it eventually does, they'll just come up with something else. Nvidia got a taste of inflated prices from the Crypto and then AI, and they're not going to just let that go. If nothing exists they'll make something and hype it endlessly to try to keep this going.
  - thway15269037 10mo ago
    Then I sure hope Nvidia completely ceases to exist, like SGI, who, ironically, was decimated by Nvidia and cheap consumer hardware.
    - Night_Thastus 10mo ago
      Unlikely. Unless some new technology comes around that completely invalidates existing GPUs and Nvidia cannot pivot to it quickly enough, there's just no way. They're too big, too rich, too powerful. They basically own the dedicated GPU market, with AMD holding maybe a piddly 10% at best.
  - iamnothere 10mo ago
    Better hope it’s not something like potable water. Not even joking.
- mfost 10mo ago
  This mostly means richer people have too much money if they can do that. What's next, a new tech allowing you to turn food into money at a rate nobody can afford to eat anymore?
  - 10mo ago
elzbardico 10mo ago
MBA/Wall Street short term driven decision.
freetime2 10mo ago
Crucial was always a brand that I associated with quality, and I used their memory to upgrade several MacBooks back when it was still possible to upgrade the memory on MacBooks. 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.
- hnuser123456 10mo ago
  I also had a Crucial SSD fail. I believe it was either 256GB or 512GB SATA, around 2013-2014. Right around the same time OCZ released a batch of SSDs that were so bad they went out of business, despite being a leader in performance. It was a fairly large story about defective silicon. Good lesson in not being too loyal to brand names.
- linsomniac 10mo ago
  I've long (very, very long) been a storage snob. Originally via the IBM UltraStar drives, and continued with the Intel SSDs. Even with good backups, a drive failure is often a pain in the ass. Slightly less so with RAID. 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."
- robotresearcher 10mo ago
  My most memorable RAM upgrade was adding 512KB to an Atari ST in 1988. Had to suck the solder out of 16x(16+2) factory flow-soldered through-holes, then solder in the 16 individual RAM chips and their decoupling capacitors. I was a teenager and hadn’t soldered before. I had no one to show me how, so I got a book from the library with pictures. Was a huge relief that the machine come up successfully. But then it would lock up when it got warm, until I found the dodgy joint. Was a very stressful afternoon, but a confidence builder! I bet there are many people whose sole experience inside a computer is popping in some DIMMs. I’ll be kinda sad if those days are also gone. On the other hand, super integrated packages like Apple’s M-series make for really well-performing computers.
jijijijij 10mo ago
> “The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage. Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments,” said Sumit Sadana, EVP and Chief Business Officer at Micron Technology. "AI"-driven collapse will go down as the stupidest crisis in human history. The idiotic waste of gigantic amounts of civilizatory resources, for something that hasn't remotely proven useful yet, while simultaneously neglecting existentially mandated reforms and investments, in an outrageously obvious critical moment in time ... well that's gonna dwarf even historic missteps of organized religion and island cultures. I am calling it now: * Cancelled: Cyberpunk. * New lore timeline: Hypepunk > Crash-Core > Silicon Gothic * Historian epoch title: The Dark Ages.
- Y_Y 10mo ago
  Indeed it was naive of us not to have called that controversial medieval lull in societal progress "The First Dark Ages".
  - jijijijij 10mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) The term is up for grabs again. Also, future historians may not categorize medieval times as we do. By then, libraries may have been converted to data centers and historic artifacts burned to fuel GPUs, or destroyed through hallucinated restoration advice. Remaining digital traces may have been exhaustively overwritten by verbose AI prose, or simply lost when AWS introduced generative DNS. In a 1000 years, the only preserved evidence of medieval times may be an LLM's summary of "A Knight's Tale".
- jhack 10mo ago
  "The idiotic waste of gigantic amounts of civilizatory resources, for something that hasn't remotely proven useful yet" https://ai.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/AI-S2501208 https://ai.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/AI-S2501208
t1234s 10mo ago
I've only ever bought crucial ram for the past 20 years.
Animats 10mo ago
Wow. They're not selling off the business, they're totally exiting it. 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.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- walterbell 10mo ago
  Should countries have a upper limit on the ratio of server:client memory supply chain capacity? If no one can buy client hardware to access the cloud, how would cloud providers survive after driving their customers to extinction? 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.
  - jeffbee 10mo ago
    If you asked me to estimate the weighted fraction of clients accessing cloud services using devices with retail DIMMs, I would say much less than 1%.
    - simlevesque 10mo ago
      It's the same memory wafer capacity. They're not separate.
      - wmf 10mo ago
        Yeah but Micron is only exiting the retail business. They will still sell DIMMs to Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc.
        jeffbee 10mo ago
        They will probably sell Micron-label DIMMs to anyone who offers to buy 1000 of them.
Simulacra 10mo ago
This is very sad. Ive been using Crucial for decades, the most reliable I have ever had.
m4r1k 10mo ago
I have also bought Crucial for decades. Great quality and reliability for a fair price. Anybody doing anything semi-professional will be impacted by this questionable decision.
- lambchoppers 10mo ago
  If you are going to sell shovels for a gold rush its pretty silly to keep rational market compatibility on things like prices, defect rate, packaging, correct contents.. Probably better to spare the brand (for a reboot?) and also not compete as much with all that junk when it shows up again on eBay.
throwaway48476 10mo ago
What a disaster for Micron. Having a consumer facing brand is 'crucial' for brand awareness. Micron is the smallest of the big 3 in DRAM and the only one in America. They're going to be swallowed up and replaced by CXMT.
- httpz 10mo ago
  The brand aware "consumers" are really just DIY PC builders, which is relatively a small number. Enterprise DRAM business is doing so great that Micron just doesn't see the consumer market is worth chasing. This is bad for consumers though since DRAM prices are skyrocketing and now we have one less company making consumer DRAM.
  - theelous3 10mo ago
    The people who occupy the b2b ram buying kind of jobs are not aliens from another planet. Brand awareness in consumer markets, especially ones that are so closely tied to people's jobs (nerds gonna nerd) is going to have a knock on effect. It's not like a clothing brand or something.
    - michaelt 10mo ago
      Sometimes reputation and suchlike in the consumer market can directly boost your B2B business. Consumers and professionals alike will look at backblaze drive reliability figures. 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.
      - lotsofpulp 10mo ago
        Not that it invalidates your point, but Cisco sold Linksys in 2013.
    - 0manrho 10mo ago
      Yes, but the consumer brand has to have a good reputation for that to pan out positively in B2B. Crucial has a decent reputation, but the problem is that there hasn't been any innovation in the consumer DRAM market for 2 decades that wasn't driven by/copied from the enterprise sector. The difference between a Crucial DIMM and a Micron Unbuffered dimm is which brands sticker they put on it, and maybe a heatsink and tighter binning/QA. That's not unique to Micron/Crucial. Aside from "Moar RGB", what innovation has happened in this space in the consumer side of things that isn't just a mirror of the enterprise side (eg DDR4 to DDR5)? XPO/XMP? That's Intel/AMD dictating things to DRAM companies. So what impression really are people meant to carry over from Crucial to Micron in this instance? How is Micron meant to leverage the Crucial brand in this space to stand out above others? Similar story on the SSD side of things regarding reputation/innovation, especially when you consider that Crucial SSD's are no more "micron" in a hardware sense than a Corsair one built using Micron flash (support is a different matter), as the controllers were contracted out to 3rd parties (Phison) and the flash used was entry level/previous gen surplus compared to what's put in enterprise. The demands and usecase for consumers and even prosumers/enthusiasts are very different and in general substantially less than on the enterprise side of things with SSDs, and that gulf is only growing wider. So again, what is meant to carry over? How can Micron leverage Crucial to stand out when the consumer market just doesn't have the demands to support them making strong investment to stand out? Frankly, taking what you say farther, I think if this is what they want to do (having consumer brand recognition that can carry over in some meaningful way to B2B), then sundowning crucial now (given the current supply issues) and then eventually re-entering the market when things return to some sense of "normal" as Micron so that both consumer and enterprise brands are the same brand, "Micron", makes much more sense.
potwinkle 10mo ago
This seems a bit foolish? Even just limiting stock to paper launches and massively raising the price would let you say "oh, it's just the market" but here it makes them look like they're putting all their eggs in one basket.
neilv 10mo ago
Sad. I've been buying Crucial as an attempt to avoid counterfeits, both buying direct and on eBay. Every DIMM and SSD from them has been perfect so far. (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.)
httpz 10mo ago
I'm half joking but if this AI boom continues we're going to see Nvidia exit from consumer GPU business. But Jensen Huang will never do that to us... (I hope)
- goda90 10mo ago
  They are already making moves that might suggest that future. They are going to stop packaging VRAM with their GPUs shipped to third-party graphics card makers, who will have to source their own, probably at higher cost.
- bpye 10mo ago
  I think Nvidia realises that selling GPUs to individuals is useful as it allows them to develop locally with CUDA.
  - pizlonator 10mo ago
    This is a huge reason.
- tomasphan 10mo ago
  There is a couple reasons why Jensen won't take off the gaming leather jacket just yet: 1. Gaming cards are their R&D pipeline for data center cards. Lots of innovation came from gaming cards. 2. Its a market defense to keep other players down and keep them from growing their way into data centers. 3. Its profitable (probably the main reason but boring) 4. Hedge against data center volatility (10 key customers vs millions) 5. Antitrust defense (which they used when they tried to buy ARM)
  - BizarroLand 10mo ago
    6. Techies who use NVidia GPUs in their PCs are more likely to play with AI and ultimately contribute to the space as either a developer or a user
    - darth_avocado 10mo ago
RedShift1 10mo ago
Their MX500 series SSDs were just king of price, performance and reliability. I even installed them in industrial PCs with intense vibrations and large temperature cycles, they're still chugging along like it's nothing.
- tkfoss 10mo ago
  Just bought one last week, sadly not many options left for 2.5" SSDs
  - deltoidmaximus 10mo ago
    I've been reduced to buying samsung 970 evos. The supply of DRAM supporting SATA SSDs has really dried up.
- Felger 10mo ago
  Agreed, the first gen MX500 with M3CR023 fw proved IMHO to be the second most reliable SATA SSD 2.5" form factor with the Samsung 860 range SSDs (860 Evo / Pro). Sadly, the MX500 is now difficult to find in western europe. Only lower grade BX500, still quite reliable but not as fast as the MX500 with cache + DRAM. Had quite a lot of controller issues (become sluggish for periods of time) with the sandisk/WD ones like green/blue and SSD plus.
  - tuetuopay 10mo ago
    Huh, I've had the opposite experience with the BX500. Hit a bit hard on them and the SSD drops off the bus. Or fill them up to 80% and witness them crawl to a stop. Dirt cheap drives, but don't ask too much of them.
    - Felger 10mo ago
      I wrote the BX500 ils easier to find than the MX500, not that it is better. Obviously the BX is worse than the MX, having no SLC cache.
AndroTux 10mo ago
I’m sure that decision will look real smart in 3 years time.
- 20after4 10mo ago
  Can tell if sarcastic.
  - GCUMstlyHarmls 10mo ago
    Ask me again in 3 years.
redbluered 10mo ago
This will surely maximize quarterly profits until the next cloud or AI bust. Diversification is resilience. Putting consumer on hold makes some sense. An exit? This will be written about in business books.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
jakebasile 10mo ago
> This decision reflects Micron’s commitment to its ongoing portfolio transformation and the resulting alignment of its business to secular, profitable growth vectors in memory and storage. By concentrating on core enterprise and commercial segments, Micron aims to improve long-term business performance and create value for strategic customers as well as stakeholders. What the fuck does "secular" even mean in this context? Is there religious DRAM? What a short-sighted, boneheaded move. I'm so tired of the MBA-ificiation of every single part of my life.
- x0x0 10mo ago
  secular is the opposite of cyclical in business. ie a long-term trend. And same. Though blowing significant fractions of a trillion dollars into (imo) investments that are never gonna return anything near to making that a good plan (ex a government bailout) will inevitably redirect huge portions of stuff we care about. The world's gdp is about 90T iirc; that is basically taking 1/90th of the stuff the world does in a year and putting it into ai.
- thewebguyd 10mo ago
  >Is there religious DRAM? RAM optimized for TempleOS and Holy-C
  - jakebasile 10mo ago
    If only this were the case.
- ruralfam 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  - venturecruelty 10mo ago
    I consulted my paper dictionary, which doesn't use as much electricity as Belgium or thousands of gallons of water, and it reads: "of or relating to a long term of indefinite duration: <secular inflation>, <A secular increase in the quantity of money is required in a growing economy... – Milton Friedman>".
alecco 10mo ago
Another Big Tech company getting hollowed out to maximize short term profits.
- listenallyall 10mo ago
  This brand has existed for what, 20+ years? You dont think they can look at long-term trendlines of revenue and expenses? Please explain how this is "short term" thinking.
  - alecco 10mo ago
    Betraying a decades-long loyal customer base for a bunch of AI companies that might get wiped out in a couple of years.
    - listenallyall 10mo ago
      Or maybe, consumer volume is dropping precipitously as more and more people rely on non-upgradable mobile devices, while competition is ramping up, and monopolistic sales channels, (i.e. Amazon), take a larger share of revenue?
mrcwinn 10mo ago
Even less consumer supply means higher prices. What’s fascinating is the very thing that enabled AI — gaming - may be one of the early casualties as it gains in priority.
aeternum 10mo ago
Seems foolish, I've been a long-term shareholder in Micron but this seems aimed at short-term profit maximization. So I guess I'll be a short-term shareholder now.
officeplant 10mo ago
Nearly every pc in my current collection has Crucial ram. My main desktop has a Crucial NVME drive, and I've got 2.5in SATA SSDs from Crucial in family computers. I don't want to have to start buying obscure keysmash chinese brands for normal looking affordable hardware. God dammit Micron.
Crontab 10mo ago
That's a shame. I liked buying RAM from them.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
goo 10mo ago
Micron leadership probably just heard about Roko's basilisk.
- shirro 10mo ago
  Like Pascal's wager that absurdity is an appeal to stupidity. I expect the people running these companies are more interested in a different type of wager. One where they risk the future of the company to pump shares and make a quick profit.
MisterTea 10mo ago
I hate everything about this. Nothing good is coming from this AI hype bubble.
shirro 10mo ago
Insane decision. This whole bubble is irrational.
JonChesterfield 10mo ago
Uh shite. That's the goto for ssds with capacitors on, such that when the power dies they're able to leave things in a reasonable state. All the samsung ones I've tried have died within a year. Fast until they died I suppose. Any recommendations for nvme in a post-micron world?
- danparsonson 10mo ago
  Use a UPS?
donatj 10mo ago
This seems like a very short-sighted mistake... The AI memory bubble is going to bust eventually. They have such enormous brand recognition and are known for selling a quality-first product. To just throw that all away is insane. For the last ten plus years I have only bought Crucial RAM. I am well beyond disapointed to hear this.
- kccqzy 10mo ago
  Agreed. The RAM in my current PC is 64GB of DDR4 from Crucial. Now I seriously don’t know which brand I can trust when I build my next PC.
theturtle 10mo ago
[dead]
trashface 10mo ago
Bummer. Crucial had a lifetime warranty on memory. So when my 2012 Macbook pro cooked the aftermarket memory I had put in it, they replaced it for free. A few years later same system cooked the new memory chip. Again they replaced it no charge. Got six years out of it before keyboard failed, would have bricked itself far earlier if not for crucial.
sgnelson 10mo ago
I feel like the "democratization of technology" is on the back slide. For the longest time, we had more and more access to high end technology at very reasonable price points. 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.
- thewebguyd 10mo ago
  I also hope its just a blip, but I don't actually think it is. 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.
  - mschuster91 10mo ago
    > 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 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.
    - futuraperdita 10mo ago
      Is this not just "with freedom comes responsibility" applied to technology? Often the freedom to do something means that, when given that sovereignty and missing the requisite experience, that means you also end up with the freedom to harm yourself (whether through a misunderstanding of a danger or just simple error.) Do we want to accept that as a potential consequence, or have someone else choose for us what consequences we are allowed to accept?
jmward01 10mo ago
I am a huge believer in AI, but the build-out right now, justified or not, will definitely hit a slowdown at some point. Not being diverse in their customer base could really hurt them later on. Sometimes you keep something going for tomorrow's business even if it is costing you something today.
- _cenw 10mo ago
  AI being a useful component in our futures (depending on how much as a society we'll shun slop) and the current scale of AI investment being a line-go-up bubble are complementary, not exclusive. It really is just dotcom all over again.
- zarzavat 10mo ago
  It's just a brand. They can start it up again later if enterprise demand falls.
  - jmward01 10mo ago
    I hear the cries of a thousand people in marketing right now. Building a brand takes time. I could see this if they were thinking they needed to re-invent the brand and to help with that they were strategically taking a break but that seems like a stretch.
    - dastbe 10mo ago
      my expectation is that they would either sell crucial RAM at such a low volume and/or such a high price that it would do more damage to the brand than sunsetting it and returning to it when the slowdown occurs.
    - zarzavat 10mo ago
      It's kind of the opposite. Crucial is a throwaway brand so that the premium brand (Micron) can sell cheaper shit without tarnishing their enterprise branding.
- qalmakka 10mo ago
nix0n 10mo ago
First, AI took all the hype. Now, AI is taking all the RAM. Soon, AI will be taking all the electricity.
- gjvc 10mo ago
  i don't know why you are getting downvoted, as power planning is a real problem right now when planning new data center builds.
  - junon 10mo ago
    Because it's a meme response, which generally don't go over well on HN.
    - pmdr 10mo ago
      It's starting to no longer be just that.
    - gjvc 10mo ago
      never crossed my mind that it is
    - tuetuopay 10mo ago
      Well the best kind of meme, the one that's so entrenched in reality that's it's not a joke.
    - stalfosknight 10mo ago
      It's accurate though.
- neop1x 10mo ago
  Exactly. It is already wasting enormous amounts of energy for silly inefficient AI nonsense. The price of energy will go up due to high demans and at the same time it also produces a lot of heat. I am not seeing a very optimistic future for mankind...
eqvinox 10mo ago
> Enterprise customers pay more and buy in bulk. Uh, isn't that normally a contradiction? bulk is cheaper(???)
- danparsonson 10mo ago
  The products they buy command a premium. Consumers are generally more price-conscious.
rietta 10mo ago
This sucks! I know more about software than hardware. Crucial is the only ram I have bought for decades now. As a practical matter does this mean one needs to buy DDR5 ram now from MicroCenter for a build planned for next year? I just put 128gb into my latest Linux workstation. I had been planning to build a new NAS to replace my aging TrueNas (nee FreeNAS). I was just thinking about possibly building another dev box after being very happy with this AMD 9950x performance.
pwnna 10mo ago
Does this impact the western digital and SanDisk brands too? IIRC those brands got folded into Crucial.
zvolsky 10mo ago
In May this year, the 2x48GB Crucial SODIMM kit sold for £180. Today, the same kit is £275 in the Crucial Amazon store, and sales are limited to one unit per customer. The free market price seems to be over £500. Not a good time to be building a Mini PC or DIY laptop.
thelastgallon 10mo ago
Sounds like an opportunity for Chinese companies to step in and dominate, they have their playbook with solar, batteries, EVs.
- Felger 10mo ago
  Gotta love Phison controllers then... despite noticeable progress with modern NVMe controllers, I still wish you good luck. Or even worse : Maxio
  - tim-- 10mo ago
    Wasn't Micron using Phison controllers in basically every single SSD they made?
Felger 10mo ago
Very sad news. Crucial Micron is (soon "was") an great brand for computer assembly and upgrade. It is sad to see the brand rushing to the "easy money" stream. This won't be forgotten when the current bubble will evenually pop and they might meet the same fate as the now forgotten Elpida (who bought Qimonda wich also failed). The MX500 1st gen (fw M3CR023) was the second best SATA SSD range with the kings the Samsung 860 Evo and Pro. P3 and P3+ were very good drives with great princing for some time, not comparable to the Samsung 970 Evo and Evo+ though. Never had a failure on about 500 units of crucial MX300/500/P1/P3/P3+/P5. Always updated their firmwares, though. Comparatively, had lot of sluggish controllers on Sandisk/WD green/blue SATA SSD, and some BX500. But a lot better than any entry level generic Phison S3111 based SSD. Also very few failures with DDR3/4 DIMMs and SODIMMs. Less than with Kinston and Corsair modules. About the same as Samsung OEM modules from HP/Dell. Now let's just hope Samsung will not follow in their tracks. I don't see WD-Sandisk going corporate only since they do not make DRAMs modules.
iancmceachern 10mo ago
Bummer, growing up we had a Micron computer. There was a time where they made whole computers. Now they don't even make memory.
dzonga 10mo ago
consumers getting told 'get fucked' in 2025 is the motto of the day while companies chase those juicy a.i profits well hopefully we see more proliferation of system of chips / unified architectures such as the one offered by apple being offered by amd, intel etc for consumer stuff.
tonymet 10mo ago
Such a great reputation over the decades . It felt good to have something USA made in the build . What a shame.
linguae 10mo ago
I'm sad. I'm a software guy, not much of a hardware expert, so please bear with me if I"m too pessimistic. However, I feel that if trends like this continue, it might be the end of enthusiast-level personal computing as we know it. No more being able to head down to the electronics store and purchase RAM, motherboards, processors, GPUs, storage, and other components. We're going to be limited to locked-down terminals connected to cloud services, both of which provided by a small number of multinational corporations. If we're lucky, we might still have USB peripherals. 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.
- axiolite 10mo ago
  I've seen things going the opposite way. It's only recently that an average person could jump on eBay and get assembled low-level electronic module/boards for cheap, and assemble into their project. 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.
blindriver 10mo ago
If this AI bubble bursts and the anticipated demand evaporates, this will be one of the biggest debacles in the history of American business, akin to New Coke.
- IAmGraydon 10mo ago
  Akin to New Coke? Are you being serious? It’s several orders of magnitude worse than that.
retrochameleon 10mo ago
"We're still going to make memory, just not for peasants."
- gjvc 10mo ago
  [flagged]
theoldgreybeard 10mo ago
Every day I hate AI and big tech more and more. Just when I think I couldn’t hate them anymore, they find a way.
- IAmGraydon 10mo ago
  AI and big tech are just the ultimate expression of human greed. What you hate is human nature.
  - ta9000 10mo ago
    [dead]
  - jijijijij 10mo ago
    > What you hate is human nature. Such a defeatist take. Human nature is to come up with culture to check human nature. Human nature is to feel community expulsion as badly as physical pain, because human nature is to punish anti-social behavior. We are equally capable of love, empathy, anger and violence. What isn't human nature, is watching everything taken from you, while you tell yourself that's just the way things are. That's pathology.
  - theoldgreybeard 10mo ago
    No. I refuse to just sit back and accept being abused by the elite just because "well, that's just the way it is", "that's human nature". Holy war is also human nature. Revolution is human nature.
kragen 10mo ago
My understanding of this is Crucial is going out of business because the alternative was raising their prices. Is that accurate?
rzerowan 10mo ago
Probably inevitable since they got banned from their largest market[1] in the fallout of the semi/chip bans , with the addded disadvantage that their only play to recoup profits would be through narrowing market ang hiking prices. And here we are - im pretty certain the other DRAM cartel members are willing to play along , as long as their profits spike. [1] https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20251017180/why-micron-is-pulling-out-of-the-data-center-chip-business-in-china https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20251017180/why...
IAmGraydon 10mo ago
Hard to believe Micron leadership is this stupid, but here we are. They’ll deserve the result.
rietta 10mo ago
It was 2017 that I decided to go all in ensuring that my main work computers were built from parts sourced via the local Micro Center. The real eye-opening situation is even if I have a top line most expensive MacBook Pro or most expensive Dell laptop with full warranty, the truth is anytime there was a hardware issue which happened every 2 to 3 years it would destroy a day or more of work. you cannot have it fixed and returned to you the same day being able to have more redundancy in the ability to source individual parts locally is a gigantic financial benefit when you’re livelihood depends on a working high-performance systems as a high-end consultant. I also ensure that I have two laptops capable of running my work though neither perform as highly as my high-end gaming class workstation.
vdupras 10mo ago
I'm wondering, at what point could we consider that DRAM is in "market failure" state?
tiahura 10mo ago
Bad news for Boise.
- fullstop 10mo ago
  Why? Micron will still fabricate things there... just not for us.
dev1ycan 10mo ago
The US put YMTC in a black list just so that they wouldn't outcompete Micron... and now Micron just gave up by itself, and YMTC was set back so now it can't supply the RAM market either, great job guys!
noipv4 10mo ago
We should have a consumer Coop for computer hardware, so that we can negotiate prices and availability.
darkteflon 10mo ago
Despite not really needing it yet, I took the opportunity to go straight to Amazon and pick up a 2tb 2230 for my Steam Deck. I’m also going to upgrade the homelab to an M4 Mini now, despite having decided earlier this month that the current N100 was fine for a few more years. Genuinely feels like whatever is happening is going to fundamentally change the way these products are marketed and sold in a permanent way.
nottorp 10mo ago
Hey, I got an Akamai banner when I loaded the site. They're one of the 0.1% left that don't use Cloudflare :)
- m4tu4g 10mo ago
  then you'll be surprised when you do `$dig www.{microsoft,apple}.com`
arisAlexis 10mo ago
The way GPUs went. It's not a bubble.
fasteo 10mo ago
$MU, another ticker to short
ErneX 10mo ago
And it seems Supermicro also stopped selling standalone motherboards. https://www.spectrumsourcing.com/spectrum-news-feed/industry-update-supermicro-policy-on-standalone-motherboards-sales-discontinued https://www.spectrumsourcing.com/spectrum-news-feed/industry...
- lazyweb 10mo ago
  Oh snap, that's crazy. In a bad way. > Going forward, customers must order the full server system to obtain the motherboard.
  - ErneX 10mo ago
    I have a home server with one of their X11 boards, it is almost 8 years old. It is a bad time to upgrade but once I do it will have to be one from ASrock Rack I guess.
alliao 10mo ago
they've never done me wrong over the years with crucial whether it's ssd or memory... godspeed and i'm sad to see a good player quit.
uyzstvqs 10mo ago
Lots of demand, limited supply. So who wants to build a DRAM manufacturer? It sounds intimidating, but I'm positive we can figure it out.
ZuLuuuuuu 10mo ago
Looks like Crucial is not so crucial for Micron's business anymore.
pmdr 10mo ago
Time to launch a RAM-renting startup, kind of like Netflix in its DVD era.
ulfw 10mo ago
“The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage. Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments,” said Sumit Sadana, EVP and Chief Business Officer at Micron AI is destroying so much. God knows how bad things will get once the bubble bursts.
maztaim 10mo ago
For me they were always the reasonable choice from a cost, speed, and reliability perspective.
poemxo 10mo ago
Will this impact B2B or just dramatically increase cost to business customers? Some industries require US-based supply chains, in my organization all our RAM and SSDs are Micron.
daft_pink 10mo ago
To be fair, the market has to be impacted by the Shift to non-upgradable devices. At least in my house, most of the computers can't be upgraded with Crucial parts, because they use Apple Silicon.
- 0manrho 10mo ago
  Disagree. has very little to do with it. Though it finally clicked why I keep seeing people repeat this, it's Apple users. (Not a dig btw, I can totally see why it'd feel that way from their POV). For starters, in the past, Crucial RAM wasn't really compatible with the Apple devices that did have socketable/upgradeable RAM. Technically some of their laptops/imacs did, but Apple really didn't want you servicing/upgrading those on your own, Crucial DIMMs weren't QVL approved by Apple (even though it'd generally work), and those were all SO-DIMMs not standard desktop DIMMs. The Mac Pros and what not that had upgradeable ram were all (L)RDIMM, not UDIMM. Crucial didn't make (L)RDIMM, that was Micron's market. Point being, this change in dynamic from Apple had virtually no impact on Crucial, as it was a market they never really served, or at least certainly not in the past decade. The consumer market isn't shifting to non-upgradeable devices. There are more and more of them, but they're largely either not a market Crucial served to begin with (Apple), or supplementing the consumer devices that do have upgradeable RAM (Steam Deck, very compact HTPC's/Thin Clients, things that aren't really desktop replacements).
  - daft_pink 10mo ago
    But the Market has shifted, Mac is increasing in marketshare and that shift is even higher on expensive laptops, where people get expensive upgrades. Two or three years ago, I bought an XPS 15 with minimum memory specs and immediately maxed the RAM to 64gb and threw in a 2tb nvme drive. Last year I purchased a M3 Macbook Pro and made no upgrades. I don’t expect to go back to PC, because the Mac performance is so great and the power managment actually works. When I threw my XPS 15 in my bag, it often comes out of my bag with no battery. The Mac not only gets awesome battery life, but it doesn’t randomly discharge when closed and sleeps properly.
    - 10mo ago
_zagj 10mo ago
Generative AI really is the gift that keeps on giving.
Sheriya 10mo ago
[dead]

763 points by simlevesque 10mo ago

(Crucial the brand not the adjective) They announced a month ago that their upstate NY fab was delayed by 2-3 years so the painting was on the wall https://archive.md/WSsLm https://archive.md/WSsLm https://www.syracuse.com/micron/2025/11/micron-chip-factories-in-upstate-ny-delayed-by-two-to-three-years-company-says.html https://www.syracuse.com/micron/2025/11/micron-chip-factorie...

delfinom 10mo ago
They don't need the fab for Crucial the brand. Anything the fab outputs will feed into Micron selling to datacenters

ZoneZealot 10mo ago

Micron are estimated to have 23% and 21% of global revenue for DRAM and HBM in Q2 2025. Their 'smaller' market, SSDs - has an estimated 13% of global NAND revenue. https://counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/global-dram-and-hbm-market-share https://counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/global-dram-and... https://counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/global-nand-memory-market-share 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.

consumer451 10mo ago
Tangent: this is going to happen with SOTA LLMs as well, isn't it. Consumers are so annoying. And by consumers, I mean "anyone can get an API key for the latest model."

palmotea 10mo ago

When richer people than you want things, those things can become unavailable to you (or at least less available). I really hope this bubble pops, all these investors lose their shirts, and prices come down to something reasonable.

Night_Thastus 10mo ago
When it eventually does, they'll just come up with something else. Nvidia got a taste of inflated prices from the Crypto and then AI, and they're not going to just let that go. If nothing exists they'll make something and hype it endlessly to try to keep this going.
- thway15269037 10mo ago
  Then I sure hope Nvidia completely ceases to exist, like SGI, who, ironically, was decimated by Nvidia and cheap consumer hardware.
  - Night_Thastus 10mo ago
    Unlikely. Unless some new technology comes around that completely invalidates existing GPUs and Nvidia cannot pivot to it quickly enough, there's just no way. They're too big, too rich, too powerful. They basically own the dedicated GPU market, with AMD holding maybe a piddly 10% at best.
- iamnothere 10mo ago
  Better hope it’s not something like potable water. Not even joking.
mfost 10mo ago
This mostly means richer people have too much money if they can do that. What's next, a new tech allowing you to turn food into money at a rate nobody can afford to eat anymore?
- 10mo ago

elzbardico 10mo ago

MBA/Wall Street short term driven decision.

freetime2 10mo ago

Crucial was always a brand that I associated with quality, and I used their memory to upgrade several MacBooks back when it was still possible to upgrade the memory on MacBooks. 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.

hnuser123456 10mo ago
I also had a Crucial SSD fail. I believe it was either 256GB or 512GB SATA, around 2013-2014. Right around the same time OCZ released a batch of SSDs that were so bad they went out of business, despite being a leader in performance. It was a fairly large story about defective silicon. Good lesson in not being too loyal to brand names.
linsomniac 10mo ago
I've long (very, very long) been a storage snob. Originally via the IBM UltraStar drives, and continued with the Intel SSDs. Even with good backups, a drive failure is often a pain in the ass. Slightly less so with RAID. 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."
robotresearcher 10mo ago
My most memorable RAM upgrade was adding 512KB to an Atari ST in 1988. Had to suck the solder out of 16x(16+2) factory flow-soldered through-holes, then solder in the 16 individual RAM chips and their decoupling capacitors. I was a teenager and hadn’t soldered before. I had no one to show me how, so I got a book from the library with pictures. Was a huge relief that the machine come up successfully. But then it would lock up when it got warm, until I found the dodgy joint. Was a very stressful afternoon, but a confidence builder! I bet there are many people whose sole experience inside a computer is popping in some DIMMs. I’ll be kinda sad if those days are also gone. On the other hand, super integrated packages like Apple’s M-series make for really well-performing computers.

jijijijij 10mo ago

> “The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage. Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments,” said Sumit Sadana, EVP and Chief Business Officer at Micron Technology. "AI"-driven collapse will go down as the stupidest crisis in human history. The idiotic waste of gigantic amounts of civilizatory resources, for something that hasn't remotely proven useful yet, while simultaneously neglecting existentially mandated reforms and investments, in an outrageously obvious critical moment in time ... well that's gonna dwarf even historic missteps of organized religion and island cultures. I am calling it now: * Cancelled: Cyberpunk. * New lore timeline: Hypepunk > Crash-Core > Silicon Gothic * Historian epoch title: The Dark Ages.

Y_Y 10mo ago
Indeed it was naive of us not to have called that controversial medieval lull in societal progress "The First Dark Ages".
- jijijijij 10mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Ages_(historiography) The term is up for grabs again. Also, future historians may not categorize medieval times as we do. By then, libraries may have been converted to data centers and historic artifacts burned to fuel GPUs, or destroyed through hallucinated restoration advice. Remaining digital traces may have been exhaustively overwritten by verbose AI prose, or simply lost when AWS introduced generative DNS. In a 1000 years, the only preserved evidence of medieval times may be an LLM's summary of "A Knight's Tale".
jhack 10mo ago
"The idiotic waste of gigantic amounts of civilizatory resources, for something that hasn't remotely proven useful yet" https://ai.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/AI-S2501208 https://ai.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/AI-S2501208

t1234s 10mo ago

I've only ever bought crucial ram for the past 20 years.

Animats 10mo ago

Wow. They're not selling off the business, they're totally exiting it. 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.

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
walterbell 10mo ago
Should countries have a upper limit on the ratio of server:client memory supply chain capacity? If no one can buy client hardware to access the cloud, how would cloud providers survive after driving their customers to extinction? 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.
- jeffbee 10mo ago
  If you asked me to estimate the weighted fraction of clients accessing cloud services using devices with retail DIMMs, I would say much less than 1%.
  - simlevesque 10mo ago
    It's the same memory wafer capacity. They're not separate.
    - wmf 10mo ago
      Yeah but Micron is only exiting the retail business. They will still sell DIMMs to Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc.
      - jeffbee 10mo ago
        They will probably sell Micron-label DIMMs to anyone who offers to buy 1000 of them.

Simulacra 10mo ago

This is very sad. Ive been using Crucial for decades, the most reliable I have ever had.

m4r1k 10mo ago

I have also bought Crucial for decades. Great quality and reliability for a fair price. Anybody doing anything semi-professional will be impacted by this questionable decision.

lambchoppers 10mo ago
If you are going to sell shovels for a gold rush its pretty silly to keep rational market compatibility on things like prices, defect rate, packaging, correct contents.. Probably better to spare the brand (for a reboot?) and also not compete as much with all that junk when it shows up again on eBay.

throwaway48476 10mo ago

What a disaster for Micron. Having a consumer facing brand is 'crucial' for brand awareness. Micron is the smallest of the big 3 in DRAM and the only one in America. They're going to be swallowed up and replaced by CXMT.

httpz 10mo ago
The brand aware "consumers" are really just DIY PC builders, which is relatively a small number. Enterprise DRAM business is doing so great that Micron just doesn't see the consumer market is worth chasing. This is bad for consumers though since DRAM prices are skyrocketing and now we have one less company making consumer DRAM.
- theelous3 10mo ago
  The people who occupy the b2b ram buying kind of jobs are not aliens from another planet. Brand awareness in consumer markets, especially ones that are so closely tied to people's jobs (nerds gonna nerd) is going to have a knock on effect. It's not like a clothing brand or something.
  - michaelt 10mo ago
    Sometimes reputation and suchlike in the consumer market can directly boost your B2B business. Consumers and professionals alike will look at backblaze drive reliability figures. 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.
    - lotsofpulp 10mo ago
      Not that it invalidates your point, but Cisco sold Linksys in 2013.
  - 0manrho 10mo ago
    Yes, but the consumer brand has to have a good reputation for that to pan out positively in B2B. Crucial has a decent reputation, but the problem is that there hasn't been any innovation in the consumer DRAM market for 2 decades that wasn't driven by/copied from the enterprise sector. The difference between a Crucial DIMM and a Micron Unbuffered dimm is which brands sticker they put on it, and maybe a heatsink and tighter binning/QA. That's not unique to Micron/Crucial. Aside from "Moar RGB", what innovation has happened in this space in the consumer side of things that isn't just a mirror of the enterprise side (eg DDR4 to DDR5)? XPO/XMP? That's Intel/AMD dictating things to DRAM companies. So what impression really are people meant to carry over from Crucial to Micron in this instance? How is Micron meant to leverage the Crucial brand in this space to stand out above others? Similar story on the SSD side of things regarding reputation/innovation, especially when you consider that Crucial SSD's are no more "micron" in a hardware sense than a Corsair one built using Micron flash (support is a different matter), as the controllers were contracted out to 3rd parties (Phison) and the flash used was entry level/previous gen surplus compared to what's put in enterprise. The demands and usecase for consumers and even prosumers/enthusiasts are very different and in general substantially less than on the enterprise side of things with SSDs, and that gulf is only growing wider. So again, what is meant to carry over? How can Micron leverage Crucial to stand out when the consumer market just doesn't have the demands to support them making strong investment to stand out? Frankly, taking what you say farther, I think if this is what they want to do (having consumer brand recognition that can carry over in some meaningful way to B2B), then sundowning crucial now (given the current supply issues) and then eventually re-entering the market when things return to some sense of "normal" as Micron so that both consumer and enterprise brands are the same brand, "Micron", makes much more sense.

potwinkle 10mo ago

This seems a bit foolish? Even just limiting stock to paper launches and massively raising the price would let you say "oh, it's just the market" but here it makes them look like they're putting all their eggs in one basket.

neilv 10mo ago

Sad. I've been buying Crucial as an attempt to avoid counterfeits, both buying direct and on eBay. Every DIMM and SSD from them has been perfect so far. (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.)

httpz 10mo ago

I'm half joking but if this AI boom continues we're going to see Nvidia exit from consumer GPU business. But Jensen Huang will never do that to us... (I hope)

goda90 10mo ago
They are already making moves that might suggest that future. They are going to stop packaging VRAM with their GPUs shipped to third-party graphics card makers, who will have to source their own, probably at higher cost.
bpye 10mo ago
I think Nvidia realises that selling GPUs to individuals is useful as it allows them to develop locally with CUDA.
- pizlonator 10mo ago
  This is a huge reason.
tomasphan 10mo ago
There is a couple reasons why Jensen won't take off the gaming leather jacket just yet: 1. Gaming cards are their R&D pipeline for data center cards. Lots of innovation came from gaming cards. 2. Its a market defense to keep other players down and keep them from growing their way into data centers. 3. Its profitable (probably the main reason but boring) 4. Hedge against data center volatility (10 key customers vs millions) 5. Antitrust defense (which they used when they tried to buy ARM)
- BizarroLand 10mo ago
  6. Techies who use NVidia GPUs in their PCs are more likely to play with AI and ultimately contribute to the space as either a developer or a user
  - darth_avocado 10mo ago

RedShift1 10mo ago

Their MX500 series SSDs were just king of price, performance and reliability. I even installed them in industrial PCs with intense vibrations and large temperature cycles, they're still chugging along like it's nothing.

tkfoss 10mo ago
Just bought one last week, sadly not many options left for 2.5" SSDs
- deltoidmaximus 10mo ago
  I've been reduced to buying samsung 970 evos. The supply of DRAM supporting SATA SSDs has really dried up.
Felger 10mo ago
Agreed, the first gen MX500 with M3CR023 fw proved IMHO to be the second most reliable SATA SSD 2.5" form factor with the Samsung 860 range SSDs (860 Evo / Pro). Sadly, the MX500 is now difficult to find in western europe. Only lower grade BX500, still quite reliable but not as fast as the MX500 with cache + DRAM. Had quite a lot of controller issues (become sluggish for periods of time) with the sandisk/WD ones like green/blue and SSD plus.
- tuetuopay 10mo ago
  Huh, I've had the opposite experience with the BX500. Hit a bit hard on them and the SSD drops off the bus. Or fill them up to 80% and witness them crawl to a stop. Dirt cheap drives, but don't ask too much of them.
  - Felger 10mo ago
    I wrote the BX500 ils easier to find than the MX500, not that it is better. Obviously the BX is worse than the MX, having no SLC cache.

AndroTux 10mo ago

I’m sure that decision will look real smart in 3 years time.

20after4 10mo ago
Can tell if sarcastic.
- GCUMstlyHarmls 10mo ago
  Ask me again in 3 years.

redbluered 10mo ago

This will surely maximize quarterly profits until the next cloud or AI bust. Diversification is resilience. Putting consumer on hold makes some sense. An exit? This will be written about in business books.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

jakebasile 10mo ago

> This decision reflects Micron’s commitment to its ongoing portfolio transformation and the resulting alignment of its business to secular, profitable growth vectors in memory and storage. By concentrating on core enterprise and commercial segments, Micron aims to improve long-term business performance and create value for strategic customers as well as stakeholders. What the fuck does "secular" even mean in this context? Is there religious DRAM? What a short-sighted, boneheaded move. I'm so tired of the MBA-ificiation of every single part of my life.

x0x0 10mo ago
secular is the opposite of cyclical in business. ie a long-term trend. And same. Though blowing significant fractions of a trillion dollars into (imo) investments that are never gonna return anything near to making that a good plan (ex a government bailout) will inevitably redirect huge portions of stuff we care about. The world's gdp is about 90T iirc; that is basically taking 1/90th of the stuff the world does in a year and putting it into ai.
thewebguyd 10mo ago
>Is there religious DRAM? RAM optimized for TempleOS and Holy-C
- jakebasile 10mo ago
  If only this were the case.
ruralfam 10mo ago
[flagged]
- venturecruelty 10mo ago
  I consulted my paper dictionary, which doesn't use as much electricity as Belgium or thousands of gallons of water, and it reads: "of or relating to a long term of indefinite duration: <secular inflation>, <A secular increase in the quantity of money is required in a growing economy... – Milton Friedman>".

alecco 10mo ago

Another Big Tech company getting hollowed out to maximize short term profits.

listenallyall 10mo ago
This brand has existed for what, 20+ years? You dont think they can look at long-term trendlines of revenue and expenses? Please explain how this is "short term" thinking.
- alecco 10mo ago
  Betraying a decades-long loyal customer base for a bunch of AI companies that might get wiped out in a couple of years.
  - listenallyall 10mo ago
    Or maybe, consumer volume is dropping precipitously as more and more people rely on non-upgradable mobile devices, while competition is ramping up, and monopolistic sales channels, (i.e. Amazon), take a larger share of revenue?

mrcwinn 10mo ago

Even less consumer supply means higher prices. What’s fascinating is the very thing that enabled AI — gaming - may be one of the early casualties as it gains in priority.

aeternum 10mo ago

Seems foolish, I've been a long-term shareholder in Micron but this seems aimed at short-term profit maximization. So I guess I'll be a short-term shareholder now.

officeplant 10mo ago

Nearly every pc in my current collection has Crucial ram. My main desktop has a Crucial NVME drive, and I've got 2.5in SATA SSDs from Crucial in family computers. I don't want to have to start buying obscure keysmash chinese brands for normal looking affordable hardware. God dammit Micron.

Crontab 10mo ago

That's a shame. I liked buying RAM from them.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

goo 10mo ago

Micron leadership probably just heard about Roko's basilisk.

shirro 10mo ago
Like Pascal's wager that absurdity is an appeal to stupidity. I expect the people running these companies are more interested in a different type of wager. One where they risk the future of the company to pump shares and make a quick profit.

MisterTea 10mo ago

I hate everything about this. Nothing good is coming from this AI hype bubble.

shirro 10mo ago

Insane decision. This whole bubble is irrational.

JonChesterfield 10mo ago

Uh shite. That's the goto for ssds with capacitors on, such that when the power dies they're able to leave things in a reasonable state. All the samsung ones I've tried have died within a year. Fast until they died I suppose. Any recommendations for nvme in a post-micron world?

danparsonson 10mo ago
Use a UPS?

donatj 10mo ago

This seems like a very short-sighted mistake... The AI memory bubble is going to bust eventually. They have such enormous brand recognition and are known for selling a quality-first product. To just throw that all away is insane. For the last ten plus years I have only bought Crucial RAM. I am well beyond disapointed to hear this.

kccqzy 10mo ago
Agreed. The RAM in my current PC is 64GB of DDR4 from Crucial. Now I seriously don’t know which brand I can trust when I build my next PC.

theturtle 10mo ago

[dead]

trashface 10mo ago

Bummer. Crucial had a lifetime warranty on memory. So when my 2012 Macbook pro cooked the aftermarket memory I had put in it, they replaced it for free. A few years later same system cooked the new memory chip. Again they replaced it no charge. Got six years out of it before keyboard failed, would have bricked itself far earlier if not for crucial.

sgnelson 10mo ago

I feel like the "democratization of technology" is on the back slide. For the longest time, we had more and more access to high end technology at very reasonable price points. 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.

thewebguyd 10mo ago
I also hope its just a blip, but I don't actually think it is. 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.
- mschuster91 10mo ago
  > 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 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.
  - futuraperdita 10mo ago
    Is this not just "with freedom comes responsibility" applied to technology? Often the freedom to do something means that, when given that sovereignty and missing the requisite experience, that means you also end up with the freedom to harm yourself (whether through a misunderstanding of a danger or just simple error.) Do we want to accept that as a potential consequence, or have someone else choose for us what consequences we are allowed to accept?

jmward01 10mo ago

I am a huge believer in AI, but the build-out right now, justified or not, will definitely hit a slowdown at some point. Not being diverse in their customer base could really hurt them later on. Sometimes you keep something going for tomorrow's business even if it is costing you something today.

_cenw 10mo ago
AI being a useful component in our futures (depending on how much as a society we'll shun slop) and the current scale of AI investment being a line-go-up bubble are complementary, not exclusive. It really is just dotcom all over again.
zarzavat 10mo ago
It's just a brand. They can start it up again later if enterprise demand falls.
- jmward01 10mo ago
  I hear the cries of a thousand people in marketing right now. Building a brand takes time. I could see this if they were thinking they needed to re-invent the brand and to help with that they were strategically taking a break but that seems like a stretch.
  - dastbe 10mo ago
    my expectation is that they would either sell crucial RAM at such a low volume and/or such a high price that it would do more damage to the brand than sunsetting it and returning to it when the slowdown occurs.
  - zarzavat 10mo ago
    It's kind of the opposite. Crucial is a throwaway brand so that the premium brand (Micron) can sell cheaper shit without tarnishing their enterprise branding.
qalmakka 10mo ago

nix0n 10mo ago

First, AI took all the hype. Now, AI is taking all the RAM. Soon, AI will be taking all the electricity.

gjvc 10mo ago
i don't know why you are getting downvoted, as power planning is a real problem right now when planning new data center builds.
- junon 10mo ago
  Because it's a meme response, which generally don't go over well on HN.
  - pmdr 10mo ago
    It's starting to no longer be just that.
  - gjvc 10mo ago
    never crossed my mind that it is
  - tuetuopay 10mo ago
    Well the best kind of meme, the one that's so entrenched in reality that's it's not a joke.
  - stalfosknight 10mo ago
    It's accurate though.
neop1x 10mo ago
Exactly. It is already wasting enormous amounts of energy for silly inefficient AI nonsense. The price of energy will go up due to high demans and at the same time it also produces a lot of heat. I am not seeing a very optimistic future for mankind...

eqvinox 10mo ago

> Enterprise customers pay more and buy in bulk. Uh, isn't that normally a contradiction? bulk is cheaper(???)

danparsonson 10mo ago
The products they buy command a premium. Consumers are generally more price-conscious.

rietta 10mo ago

This sucks! I know more about software than hardware. Crucial is the only ram I have bought for decades now. As a practical matter does this mean one needs to buy DDR5 ram now from MicroCenter for a build planned for next year? I just put 128gb into my latest Linux workstation. I had been planning to build a new NAS to replace my aging TrueNas (nee FreeNAS). I was just thinking about possibly building another dev box after being very happy with this AMD 9950x performance.

pwnna 10mo ago

Does this impact the western digital and SanDisk brands too? IIRC those brands got folded into Crucial.

zvolsky 10mo ago

In May this year, the 2x48GB Crucial SODIMM kit sold for £180. Today, the same kit is £275 in the Crucial Amazon store, and sales are limited to one unit per customer. The free market price seems to be over £500. Not a good time to be building a Mini PC or DIY laptop.

thelastgallon 10mo ago

Sounds like an opportunity for Chinese companies to step in and dominate, they have their playbook with solar, batteries, EVs.

Felger 10mo ago
Gotta love Phison controllers then... despite noticeable progress with modern NVMe controllers, I still wish you good luck. Or even worse : Maxio
- tim-- 10mo ago
  Wasn't Micron using Phison controllers in basically every single SSD they made?

Felger 10mo ago

Very sad news. Crucial Micron is (soon "was") an great brand for computer assembly and upgrade. It is sad to see the brand rushing to the "easy money" stream. This won't be forgotten when the current bubble will evenually pop and they might meet the same fate as the now forgotten Elpida (who bought Qimonda wich also failed). The MX500 1st gen (fw M3CR023) was the second best SATA SSD range with the kings the Samsung 860 Evo and Pro. P3 and P3+ were very good drives with great princing for some time, not comparable to the Samsung 970 Evo and Evo+ though. Never had a failure on about 500 units of crucial MX300/500/P1/P3/P3+/P5. Always updated their firmwares, though. Comparatively, had lot of sluggish controllers on Sandisk/WD green/blue SATA SSD, and some BX500. But a lot better than any entry level generic Phison S3111 based SSD. Also very few failures with DDR3/4 DIMMs and SODIMMs. Less than with Kinston and Corsair modules. About the same as Samsung OEM modules from HP/Dell. Now let's just hope Samsung will not follow in their tracks. I don't see WD-Sandisk going corporate only since they do not make DRAMs modules.

iancmceachern 10mo ago

Bummer, growing up we had a Micron computer. There was a time where they made whole computers. Now they don't even make memory.

dzonga 10mo ago

consumers getting told 'get fucked' in 2025 is the motto of the day while companies chase those juicy a.i profits well hopefully we see more proliferation of system of chips / unified architectures such as the one offered by apple being offered by amd, intel etc for consumer stuff.

tonymet 10mo ago

Such a great reputation over the decades . It felt good to have something USA made in the build . What a shame.

linguae 10mo ago

I'm sad. I'm a software guy, not much of a hardware expert, so please bear with me if I"m too pessimistic. However, I feel that if trends like this continue, it might be the end of enthusiast-level personal computing as we know it. No more being able to head down to the electronics store and purchase RAM, motherboards, processors, GPUs, storage, and other components. We're going to be limited to locked-down terminals connected to cloud services, both of which provided by a small number of multinational corporations. If we're lucky, we might still have USB peripherals. 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.

axiolite 10mo ago
I've seen things going the opposite way. It's only recently that an average person could jump on eBay and get assembled low-level electronic module/boards for cheap, and assemble into their project. 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.

blindriver 10mo ago

If this AI bubble bursts and the anticipated demand evaporates, this will be one of the biggest debacles in the history of American business, akin to New Coke.

IAmGraydon 10mo ago
Akin to New Coke? Are you being serious? It’s several orders of magnitude worse than that.

retrochameleon 10mo ago

"We're still going to make memory, just not for peasants."

gjvc 10mo ago
[flagged]

theoldgreybeard 10mo ago

Every day I hate AI and big tech more and more. Just when I think I couldn’t hate them anymore, they find a way.

IAmGraydon 10mo ago
AI and big tech are just the ultimate expression of human greed. What you hate is human nature.
- ta9000 10mo ago
  [dead]
- jijijijij 10mo ago
  > What you hate is human nature. Such a defeatist take. Human nature is to come up with culture to check human nature. Human nature is to feel community expulsion as badly as physical pain, because human nature is to punish anti-social behavior. We are equally capable of love, empathy, anger and violence. What isn't human nature, is watching everything taken from you, while you tell yourself that's just the way things are. That's pathology.
- theoldgreybeard 10mo ago
  No. I refuse to just sit back and accept being abused by the elite just because "well, that's just the way it is", "that's human nature". Holy war is also human nature. Revolution is human nature.

kragen 10mo ago

My understanding of this is Crucial is going out of business because the alternative was raising their prices. Is that accurate?

rzerowan 10mo ago

Probably inevitable since they got banned from their largest market[1] in the fallout of the semi/chip bans , with the addded disadvantage that their only play to recoup profits would be through narrowing market ang hiking prices. And here we are - im pretty certain the other DRAM cartel members are willing to play along , as long as their profits spike. [1] https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20251017180/why-micron-is-pulling-out-of-the-data-center-chip-business-in-china https://www.morningstar.com/news/marketwatch/20251017180/why...

IAmGraydon 10mo ago

Hard to believe Micron leadership is this stupid, but here we are. They’ll deserve the result.

rietta 10mo ago

It was 2017 that I decided to go all in ensuring that my main work computers were built from parts sourced via the local Micro Center. The real eye-opening situation is even if I have a top line most expensive MacBook Pro or most expensive Dell laptop with full warranty, the truth is anytime there was a hardware issue which happened every 2 to 3 years it would destroy a day or more of work. you cannot have it fixed and returned to you the same day being able to have more redundancy in the ability to source individual parts locally is a gigantic financial benefit when you’re livelihood depends on a working high-performance systems as a high-end consultant. I also ensure that I have two laptops capable of running my work though neither perform as highly as my high-end gaming class workstation.

vdupras 10mo ago

I'm wondering, at what point could we consider that DRAM is in "market failure" state?

tiahura 10mo ago

Bad news for Boise.

fullstop 10mo ago
Why? Micron will still fabricate things there... just not for us.

dev1ycan 10mo ago

The US put YMTC in a black list just so that they wouldn't outcompete Micron... and now Micron just gave up by itself, and YMTC was set back so now it can't supply the RAM market either, great job guys!

noipv4 10mo ago

We should have a consumer Coop for computer hardware, so that we can negotiate prices and availability.

darkteflon 10mo ago

Despite not really needing it yet, I took the opportunity to go straight to Amazon and pick up a 2tb 2230 for my Steam Deck. I’m also going to upgrade the homelab to an M4 Mini now, despite having decided earlier this month that the current N100 was fine for a few more years. Genuinely feels like whatever is happening is going to fundamentally change the way these products are marketed and sold in a permanent way.

nottorp 10mo ago

Hey, I got an Akamai banner when I loaded the site. They're one of the 0.1% left that don't use Cloudflare :)

m4tu4g 10mo ago
then you'll be surprised when you do `$dig www.{microsoft,apple}.com`

arisAlexis 10mo ago

The way GPUs went. It's not a bubble.

fasteo 10mo ago

$MU, another ticker to short

ErneX 10mo ago

And it seems Supermicro also stopped selling standalone motherboards. https://www.spectrumsourcing.com/spectrum-news-feed/industry-update-supermicro-policy-on-standalone-motherboards-sales-discontinued https://www.spectrumsourcing.com/spectrum-news-feed/industry...

lazyweb 10mo ago
Oh snap, that's crazy. In a bad way. > Going forward, customers must order the full server system to obtain the motherboard.
- ErneX 10mo ago
  I have a home server with one of their X11 boards, it is almost 8 years old. It is a bad time to upgrade but once I do it will have to be one from ASrock Rack I guess.

alliao 10mo ago

they've never done me wrong over the years with crucial whether it's ssd or memory... godspeed and i'm sad to see a good player quit.

uyzstvqs 10mo ago

Lots of demand, limited supply. So who wants to build a DRAM manufacturer? It sounds intimidating, but I'm positive we can figure it out.

ZuLuuuuuu 10mo ago

Looks like Crucial is not so crucial for Micron's business anymore.

pmdr 10mo ago

Time to launch a RAM-renting startup, kind of like Netflix in its DVD era.

ulfw 10mo ago

“The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage. Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments,” said Sumit Sadana, EVP and Chief Business Officer at Micron AI is destroying so much. God knows how bad things will get once the bubble bursts.

maztaim 10mo ago

For me they were always the reasonable choice from a cost, speed, and reliability perspective.

poemxo 10mo ago

Will this impact B2B or just dramatically increase cost to business customers? Some industries require US-based supply chains, in my organization all our RAM and SSDs are Micron.

daft_pink 10mo ago

To be fair, the market has to be impacted by the Shift to non-upgradable devices. At least in my house, most of the computers can't be upgraded with Crucial parts, because they use Apple Silicon.

0manrho 10mo ago
Disagree. has very little to do with it. Though it finally clicked why I keep seeing people repeat this, it's Apple users. (Not a dig btw, I can totally see why it'd feel that way from their POV). For starters, in the past, Crucial RAM wasn't really compatible with the Apple devices that did have socketable/upgradeable RAM. Technically some of their laptops/imacs did, but Apple really didn't want you servicing/upgrading those on your own, Crucial DIMMs weren't QVL approved by Apple (even though it'd generally work), and those were all SO-DIMMs not standard desktop DIMMs. The Mac Pros and what not that had upgradeable ram were all (L)RDIMM, not UDIMM. Crucial didn't make (L)RDIMM, that was Micron's market. Point being, this change in dynamic from Apple had virtually no impact on Crucial, as it was a market they never really served, or at least certainly not in the past decade. The consumer market isn't shifting to non-upgradeable devices. There are more and more of them, but they're largely either not a market Crucial served to begin with (Apple), or supplementing the consumer devices that do have upgradeable RAM (Steam Deck, very compact HTPC's/Thin Clients, things that aren't really desktop replacements).
- daft_pink 10mo ago
  But the Market has shifted, Mac is increasing in marketshare and that shift is even higher on expensive laptops, where people get expensive upgrades. Two or three years ago, I bought an XPS 15 with minimum memory specs and immediately maxed the RAM to 64gb and threw in a 2tb nvme drive. Last year I purchased a M3 Macbook Pro and made no upgrades. I don’t expect to go back to PC, because the Mac performance is so great and the power managment actually works. When I threw my XPS 15 in my bag, it often comes out of my bag with no battery. The Mac not only gets awesome battery life, but it doesn’t randomly discharge when closed and sleeps properly.
  - 10mo ago

_zagj 10mo ago

Generative AI really is the gift that keeps on giving.

Sheriya 10mo ago

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