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Japanese electronics store pleads for old PCs amid ongoing hardware shortage
- wrxd 10mo agoI'm all for re-using old but still perfectly usable hardware. Hopefully this will also lead to some optimisations on the software side
- kasane_teto 10mo agoit probably wont
- nehal3m 10mo agoOpenAI buys all the RAM driving up the price so their models can shit out poorly optimized software so I have to buy more RAM. Awesome.
- embedding-shape 10mo agoSure, except this time also add on US pressuring Korean companies to not sell their old equipment to Chinese manufacturers, so the supply could actually keep up. But no no, it's all OpenAI's fault for behaving like the capitalistic swines they are. Both suck, but one has a long-lasting impact, the other is just what capitalists always done, and will continue in the future.
- georgefrowny 10mo agoAnd then when China eventually produce not only RAM but the equipment to make it, it'll be shocked Pikachu all round.
- lysace 10mo agoAgreed - it's more likely to lead to poor user experience than anything else. Most end-user facing software/service companies will probably bet on the DRAM price peak being temporary. Software takes a lot of time to build. Codebases live for decades. There's often an impossibly large cost in starting over with a less wasteful architecture/language/etc. Think going from an Electron/Chromium app to something built using some compiled language and native OS GUI constructs that uses 10x less resources.
- Workaccount2 10mo agoThe impossibly large cost is the difference between hardware and software returns. Hardware by nature forces redesigns whereas software it's always possible to just keep building on top of old bad designs, and so much cheaper and faster to do so. That's why hardware is 10,000x faster than 30 years ago, and even simple word processors are debatabely faster than 30 years ago. Maybe even slower.
- immibis 10mo agoHardware isn't much better actually. There isn't a good way I can show you this, but every x64 CPU contains an entire ARM CPU whose job is to initialize the x64 CPU. And of course it runs two operating systems - TrustZone and Minix.
- Krutonium 10mo agoIt's even worse than that. The ARM Core starts up, does crypto, Loads the SecureOS and the BIOS, then it starts the x86 CPU - In 16 bit mode! Which then boostraps itself through 32 then 64 bit mode. So in the first couple sends of power on, your CPU is at various points ARM, i386, x86, and x86_64.
- lysace 10mo agoHow much overhead (in terms of e.g. transistor count or silicon space) does this add? Surely at most it's a single digit percentage?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 10mo agoSo much software optimization, like rolling out new codecs that aren't accelerated on old but usable hardware.
- Hamuko 10mo agoHas anyone noticed their employer actually cutting back on employee hardware purchases? Because if new laptops are still being handed over to developers on a 2–4 year cycle, then probably not. Game developers might have to do something though if high-end GPUs are going to end up being $5000.
- wincy 10mo agoAt least so far the RTX 5090 seems to be available and at the same price it’s been at for the past six months (around $3000). I’m not sure when you’d see GPUs affected by the RAM price increases.
- Hamuko 10mo agoThere's been rumblings. https://www.techpowerup.com/344578/leaks-predict-usd-5000-rtx-5090-gpus-in-2026-thanks-to-ai-industry-demand https://www.techpowerup.com/344578/leaks-predict-usd-5000-rt...
- isk517 10mo agoI'm pretty sure GPUs have their own RAM installed that is usually higher spec than the motherboard RAM.
- mananaysiempre 10mo agoHigher in some respects (bandwidth), lower in others (latency, even though ordinary DDR5 is already no speed demon there and LPDDR5 is worse). At least from the spec sheet, these kinds of RAM are so different that I don’t really understand how demand for one can cause a shortage of the other, unless they are competing for the same manufacturing lines.
- tverbeure 10mo agoFWIW: GDDR is not higher latency than DDR. It just seems that way because the GDDR interface clock is much higher, so the number of clocks are higher too. But in terms of wall clock time, the latency is very similar. Which makes sense: the latency is determined by the underlying storage technology and the way to access that storage, which the same for both.
- UltraSane 10mo agoSore, every single app will be a separate instance of Chrome.
- xnx 10mo agoThe upside of high prices (GPU, RAM, disk, etc.) is existing resources get better utilized.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 10mo agoHot take: it would be better for humanity if computers didn't get faster every year.
- rilindo 10mo agoAnother hot take: maybe we will see a spike of compiles languages like Go, Rust and WASM, over Python, Ruby, and Node.
- memoriuaysj 10mo agowe can use AI to rewrite everything in Rust this way all the RAM that AI data centers scoop up will be used to lessen demand for RAM that those same datacenters created net-zero RAM!
- shellwizard 10mo agoYou've got to [download more ram](https://downloadmoreram.com/ https://downloadmoreram.com/)
- supertrope 10mo agoAre you selling renewable memory offset credits? My company is seeking to burnish our ESG reputation.
- baxtr 10mo agoYet another hot take: we won’t see any of that. Instead users will simply get used to waiting.
- kitsune1 10mo ago
- left-struck 10mo agoI was in a Hard Off (Japanese used electronics store) just a week ago and found 10s of 8GB DDR4 ram sticks for around 1600 yen each (something like $10 USD). Some were ecc but others looked like ram modules from office pcs or something. It was in a rural area but still I would have thought they knew about the price hike. I guess not. Anyway I didn’t buy any so idk if they were working.
- walthamstow 10mo agoInteresting name, assume it's related to the bookstore Book Off?
- kitsune1 10mo ago[dead]
- testplzignore 10mo agoYeah, same company. "Off" likely meaning discounted.
- Brian_K_White 10mo agoOr like a bake-off?
- shen 10mo agoThey are part of the same brand.
- tecleandor 10mo agoYep, it's a chain with a bunch of different brands. Biggest ones are Book Off (books, comics...), Hard Off (electronics, computers, musical instruments...) and Hobby Off (toys, collectibles, video games...). They even have a Liquor Off ! (not second hand, just discount/overstock)
- nereye 10mo ago
- ktallett 10mo agoI have never found Japan the home of gaming pc's anyway. It isn't quite like Seoul in that respect. I have shopped in Akibahara frequently in the last decade and noticed some PC gaming exclusive shops pop up and also go, including range of stock varying.
- crims0n 10mo agoI am not sure what is driving it, but PC gaming has had some explosive growth in Japan recently. I think in 2024 they were up to 15% of marketshare.
- numpad0 10mo agoVTubers. Console games are more complicated in terms of streaming forgiveness.
- jama211 10mo agoIn my experience akihabara was never great for PC hardware but other places are in Tokyo are. Also Osaka had some good spots for pc hardware even in the stereotypical spots like den den town.
- ktallett 10mo agoOh I always preferred den den on the few occasions I have visited Osaka. I find it better value and less glossy. Saying this I did used to love a used Thinkpad shop around the back of Sofmap in Akiba. Very good value. Captain PC or something if I remember rightly. It shut I think in 2021 which was sad.
- jama211 10mo agoah fair enough, yeah probably disappeared along with many of the charming shops that used to be there
- numpad0 10mo agoAkihabara was where runoffs and spillovers from cutting edge electronics accumulated until ~2010s. There used to be tons of failed experiments and EOL'd enterprise gears washing up. After that, supplies shifted to Taiwan and then to Shenzhen in China. As far as gaming is concerned, the "gaming" parts of Akihabara mainly concerned locally produced pastel toned 2D slideshow pornographic games("visual novels"), the genre that lead to gacha games like FGO. Local populace is horrible at handling 3D first-person content in general and that never helped. Non-console gaming in Japan is growing somewhat but a lot is also going into phones, namely Genshin. So where the trend is headed is still pastel toned soft-porn games without much PvP.
- nobodyandproud 10mo agoI hung on to my 15 (?) year-old Intel motherboard, CPU, and 16 GBs of RAM; mostly because of e-waste guilt. I cannot believe this has value but here we are. I also wish I built a new gaming rig during the summer last year.
- yurishimo 10mo agoPrices will come back down. That’s the beauty of pc gaming.
- nirav72 10mo agoPC gaming is a small single digit percentage of the total volatile memory market. Neither Samsung or micron or Hynix currently have any incentives to increase production to address the shortage and lowering prices for that segment of the market. It’s just not a money maker for them.
- yurishimo 10mo agoThat doesn't mean that the price will never return to "normal". All three companies have new fabs being built in America and Europe right now, but they won't be online for a couple of years. Also, if demand for AI chips continues to be sky high for years and year, the memory that is being developed now will eventually be phased out for new standards (DDR6/7/8???) and the DDR5 from existing products will be stripped and resold by other companies. Also, if demand continues to stay high, then new companies will enter the market to cut off a slice of that monopoly pie and drive down prices. Supply and demand dictate that prices must go down if supply increases. Personally, I think the demand will drop off a cliff if/when the AI bubble pops, but we don't know when that will happen. Until then, everyone can enjoy their Steam backlog and wait it out :)
- rwyinuse 10mo agoAlmost any working PC has some value. I've sold nearly 20 year old Intel Core2Duo systems, old 1TB hard drives and lots of other old components for about 10 - 20 dollars each. My primary gaming PC is from 2011.
- ekianjo 10mo agoThey want to buy it from you for peanuts, is what is missing from the article. Softmap buy your stuff at 1/10 of the actual original value and then sells it back to people at 5-6x what they bought it for.
- freetime2 10mo agoI have an old PC that I built that I’ve been meaning to take to Hard Off. I wonder if it would if it would be better to sell the parts individually, or as a single unit. For reference, it has a Ryzen 9 3900x, 64 GB DDR4, an RX 5700 XT graphics card, and 512 GB NVME. Probably not worth much anymore, and I’ll probably just sell it as-is to save myself the effort of taking it apart. But Hard Off occasionally surprises me with how much they pay for a piece of old gear.
- Aurornis 10mo agoWhen you said you had an old PC I didn't expect you to list parts that were built in 2019. That's a perfectly fine modern PC. Similar to or faster than what some of my casual gaming friends use. The RAM alone would probably sell for $350 or more.
- freetime2 10mo agoYeah it’s still totally usable, but I just haven’t booted it up more than a handful of times in the past couple years. I built it for software development on Linux (with a little extra graphics capability for occasional gaming) in the era when Apple was making those terrible “touchbar” keyboards. But have since switched back to a MacBook (and a Switch 2 for gaming), and now it’s just taking up space. Wow RAM prices have gotten absolutely insane.
- khedoros1 10mo agoWow. Your old PC is more powerful than any computer I own. Faster version of my CPU, double the RAM, newer generation GPU. A fraction of the storage, though. I built it in 2020 to replace the desktop that I built in 2008.
- freetime2 10mo agoThat's part of the reason I want to sell it - and hopefully get it into the hands of someone who can give it a second life before it becomes e-waste. I feel a bit guilty every time I think about it sitting and collecting dust. The specs are still more than enough for any of the development I do. My main issue is just the form factor - a laptop is so much better for my current situation. The power consumption also kind of bugs me - things have improved a LOT in that regard since 2019 - although it's kind of nice for heating my office in winter. It also doesn't help that I built it with a full ATX motherboard and a giant case (Fractal Design Define R6), which is kind of ugly and takes up a ton of space.
- m3kw9 10mo agoa mac/macbook would be good in this environment
- lazylizard 10mo agowhy do they want old ram or hard disks or vga cards? lets say i got ddr2..what use is that unless u have a core2duo?