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Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage
- selridge 8mo agoAlso worth noting that Apple recently paid a king’s ransom for Samsung RAM
- paxys 8mo agoKing's ransom or market price?
- selridge 8mo agoI sez what I sez
- dude250711 8mo agoThey redistributed money that fools gave them.
- mlyle 8mo agoThe market price of the ransom for a King is a King's ransom.
- vessenes 8mo agoMeanwhile Apple iPhone sales were up 23% YoY end of last year. It'll likely be a good year for Apple, with a little more room in margin to make some plays, and a lottt of cash.
- inigyou 8mo agoThat was last year when the DRAM price crisis hadn't happened yet...
- nomel 8mo ago8th sentence of TFA: > By contrast, Apple and Samsung are better positioned to navigate this crisis. As smaller and low-end-positioned Android vendors struggle with rising costs, Apple and Samsung could not only weather the storm but potentially expand market share as the competitive landscape tightens.”
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- darthoctopus 8mo agoLest we forget, this memory shortage was deliberately engineered [1]. Thanks, OpenAI. [1]: https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram-deal https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram...
- msy 8mo agoAll the more reason to hope that company crashes and burns.
- lostmsu 8mo agoFrom reading this link it sounds like OpenAI successfully dodged oligopoly bullet.
- ajross 8mo agoThese are Bonkers times we live in. Be honest, who had "Sam Altman kills Apple Computer" on their 2025/6 Bingo card?
- mschuster91 8mo ago> Be honest, who had "Sam Altman kills Apple Computer" on their 2025/6 Bingo card? Not the person Sam Altman specifically, but AI in general. It was obvious even in 2024 that braindead beancounters were jumping on the hype train, so much so that coal power plants were kept alive to satiate the power hunger [1]. The last time that shit happened, it was the coin craze [2], but unlike cryptocurrencies there was and is an actual product being made... [1] https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/14/ai_datacenters_coal/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/14/ai_datacenters_coal/ [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-miners-revive-fossil-fuel-plant-co2-emissions-soared https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m...
- mschuster91 8mo ago> Well, actually, there is one other important reason for this article’s existence I'll tack onto the end – a hope that other people start digging into what’s going on at OpenAI. I mean seriously – do we even have a single reliable audit of their financials to back up them outrageously spending this much money…for this? Heck, I’ve even heard from numerous sources that OpenAI is “buying up the manufacturing equipment as well” – and without mountains of concrete proof, and/or more input from additional sources on what that really means…I don’t feel I can touch that hot potato without getting burned…but I hope someone else will… And I'd say if it ends up being shown there even is the slightest hint of impropriety going on, trial him. Up to and including capital punishment for the entire board and C level - what OpenAI already has done, even if legally on paper, IMHO is the biggest market manipulation in history, and it's not just one competitor that is suffering but society as a whole. I don't have an issue with big companies and their super rich investors engaging in petty bitch fights. By all means, hand me some popcorn and soda. But the RAM situation, with everyone not being super rich and flush with cash from AI crazed investors being screwed royally? That is far beyond acceptable. We need to send a message: you can't mess around with the world economy at that level without feeling serious repercussions. The lives of the billions are not playthings for the select few. And if it turns out to be outright market manipulation, engaging in deals he doesn't even have the money committed for by others, much less actually have it on his balance sheet? Then it's time for the pitchforks, not even Madoff was this ruthless.
- Animats 8mo agoThe DRAM shortage and lack of fab capacity have also caused the Playstation 6 to slip to 2029 or so.[1] Game consoles are vulnerable. They need a lot of RAM and have to sell at a moderate price. The IDC article says that DRAM prices are not expected to come down again. "While memory prices are projected to stabilize by mid-2027, they are unlikely to return to previous level — making the sub-$100 segment (171 million devices) permanently uneconomical." Before, they always came back down in the next RAM glut, when everybody built too much capacity. Why is that not going to happen next time? [1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Storage-crisis-Playstation-6-could-be-postponed-until-2028-or-2029-11179221.html https://www.heise.de/en/news/Storage-crisis-Playstation-6-co...
- darthoctopus 8mo ago> Why is that not going to happen next time? Because this shortage isn't natural, it's the result of OpenAI flexing monopsony power to deprive everyone else for its strategic gain. Unlike an organic shortage, there is no compelling reason for otherwise excess capacity to be built, since this artificial shortage can end as arbitrarily as it started.
- MadameMinty 8mo agoThe datacenters are still going to be built, and their usage won't suddenly fall just because the companies behind some of the products on them suddenly lose value. The demand is not tied to their profits, so I find it unlikely for the shortage to just end.
- inigyou 8mo agoThese data center projects are losing hundreds of billions of dollars which they don't have, and some evidence is starring to come out they're just money laundering schemes to get money from the government to contractors. I wouldn't bet on them all being built.
- m4rtink 8mo agoThere far too many railways, amusement parks, housing developments and other bubble ventures that were either never even completed after wasting a lot of money or went bust soon after opening. No reason the same can't happen now - especially for something as expensive and faily easily re-sellable as a datacenter & the hardware insite. Just rip it all out and sell it for parts where they are actually needed.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 8mo agoI recently upgraded from the Pixel 7 to the 10. Nothing but regret - the phone isn't worse, but it's not better either, and I had to reinstall everything. Why did I do this?
- trvz 8mo agoThat’s on Google. iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max are amazing upgrades.
- niek_pas 8mo agoFrom the 16?
- asdff 8mo agoMaybe for fortnite players. If you just call/text/email whats the point in upgrading? At this point I pretty much just ride out whatever iphone se I happen upon on deep discount until Apple finally walls me off from the OS version I need to access my bank account (thanks to very helpful flow of bank website forcing app store redirect to their app for mobile users). Then it's on to the next se. Now that I think on it maybe I ought to just pay attention to jailbreakable OS version numbers again. If I stuck on one of those OS versions I could just spoof my user agent for the bank website with a jailbroken phone.
- ranguna 8mo agoStrange comparison. If you just call, text and check on bank apps, then the market is not for you. Just buy a used phone from 10 years ago. It's like saying why should you get a new gaming laptop to replace your 6 year old current gaming laptop, when all you do is office work. If all you do is office work, why buy a gaming laptop at all? Just use a standard okish smartphone or tablet.
- asdff 8mo agoWho are these phones even for? I see people out in public and all they do with their phone is scroll instagram reels or ticktock. They need all this horsepower for that? I don't think so either. This is why I brought up fortnight because gaming is one example where there probably is a marked difference in frames per second between models. But 99% of people are probably just looking at images and videos and text on their smartphone, pretty low stakes stuff.
- ProfessorLayton 8mo agoSomehow, with 12GB of RAM, I can't get my iPhone 17 Pro to keep more than a few safari tabs open without having them refresh when I come back from an app or two, and it makes me want to throw my phone across the train (Where the internet often cuts out!). A lot of software has been squandering the massive hardware gains that have been made. I hope this changes when it becomes a lot harder to throw hardware at the problem. I also wonder what this means for smartphone-esque devices like the Switch 2. If this goes on long enough I won't be surprised if they release a 'lite' model with less RAM/Storage and bifurcate their console capabilities, worse than what they did with 3DS > 2DS .
- arccy 8mo agobut think of all your battery life gains
- thewebguyd 8mo agoiOS I think has really aggressive background task killing, and it also drives me insane. I know they do it for battery life but I'm about ready to switch to Android, and would have a long time ago if I that didn't also mean replacing my watch, headphones, etc. Is it too much to ask for me to manage my own background processes on my phone? I don't want the OS arbitrarily deciding what to pause & kill. If it actually does OOM, give me a dialog like macOS and ask me what to kill. Then again, if a phone is going OOM with 12GB of RAM there's a serious optimization problem going on with mobile apps.
- estimator7292 8mo agoI recently started learning how to do iOS apps for work and the short answer is: you don't. Apple seemingly wants all apps to be static jpegs that never need to connect to any data local or remote, and never do any processing. If you want to do something in the background so that your user can multitask, too damn bad. You can run in the background, for a non-deterministic amount of time. If you do that, iOS nags your user to make it stop. If you access radios, iOS nags your user to disable it. It's honestly insane. I don't know why or how anyone develops for this platform. Not to mention the fact that you have to spend $5k minimum just to put hello world on the screen. I can't believe that apple gets away with forcing you to buy a goddamn Mac to complile a program.
- oblio 8mo agoMaybe an upside? These past years it feels like meaningful hardware spec bumps are on the horizon, like in the 90s, 2010s. After all this churn subsides there is a chance entry level Windows laptops will start at 32GB RAM and maybe 8-12GB VRAM? Which could end up being about 5-10-15 years of progress packed into 2-3-4.
- loeg 8mo agoHow do you figure? I'd think scarce and expensive RAM would push entry level models to smaller amounts of RAM.
- oblio 8mo agoInitially, yes. But I'm betting on their shortsightedness, greed and general stupidity which will cause a crash. Leading to oversupply/huge leftover stocks.
- thewebguyd 8mo agoI doubt. Microsoft would much rather sell you a thin client & a Windows 365 subscription, and Nvidia wants you to use GeForce now instead of buying a GPU. The shortage is manufactured, I have my doubts it will "end" in a conventional sense. I'm more skeptical and feel like this is yet another consolidation of wealth and a means of taking away compute power from people, which prevents startup competition. This way the hyperscalers are the only ones that can offer any meaningful compute.
- torben-friis 8mo agoThe latest phone reviews have been eyebrow raising. The just announced pixel is the same phone as last year. I know it sounds like a usual complaint, but look at the actual specs, it literally is the same phone with differences so small that hey might have passed as regional variance. As for the Samsung, the screen can darken when looked from the side for privacy. That’s pretty much it. Price increased though. Coupled with the current iOS situation it seems like things are… rotting. Everything in decline.
- walterbell 8mo agoUpcoming Apple display mounted to wall or robot arm is rumored to have audio interface and new OS without 3rd-party apps, only "AI". Jony Ive at OpenAI is rumored to have smart speaker, pendant, pen and bone-conducting headset in the launch pipeline. Audio interfaces, no screens, Meta is selling millions of smart glasses, with Apple and others following. If the memory market was not distorted, home AI + agents + open models could have a bigger role via AMD Strix Halo. Instead, they will be reserved for those who can afford to spend five figures on 512GB or 1TB unified memory on Mac Studio Ultra devices.
- vessenes 8mo agoI'd love a working bone conduction headset. Also a subvocalization to agent thingy that worked.
- walterbell 8mo agoApple recently spent $2B to bring subvocalization inference to iPhones, from the inventor of FaceID and Kinect, https://www.newsweek.com/apples-2b-ai-acquisition-could-have-siri-read-facial-cues-and-silent-speech-11472667 https://www.newsweek.com/apples-2b-ai-acquisition-could-have... > users [could] interact with Siri and future Apple devices without speaking out loud.. AI systems capable of interpreting facial expressions and subtle muscle movements to understand so-called “silent speech.”
- torben-friis 8mo ago
- meerita 8mo agoIf the memory shortage is real and sustained, I wonder whether we’ll see a secondary effect in the resale market.
- WarOnPrivacy 8mo ago> I wonder whether we’ll see a secondary effect in the resale market. I'm paying more on ebay for thinkcentre tiny and thinkpads - 12th gen intel and newer. Refurbished spinny drives have been steadily climbing - up 50% since late last year. That's on top of the 20% mystery jump that happened in the last week of 2024.
- zozbot234 8mo ago50% is nothing when RAM is up 500% or so.
- ajross 8mo agoWe already are. Check eBay at the component level, which is showing it quite clearly. Look for secondary/reclaimed/refurbished components to backfill the gaps too. Also be aware that this stuff whipsaws, if OpenAI actually takes posession of that memory and decides they can't use it and dumps, we're going to see a crash. Likewise if they back out of the deals with the memory fabs (or fail and default). There's some scary volatility on the horizon.
- coatmatter 8mo agoOne of my trend-following and easily-influenced sisters was quite locked into the Apple ecosystem (iPhones, MacBooks) with her young family, but just over Christmas last year, I spotted them with a refurbished ThinkPad (T490 or thereabouts), with a plan to buy another refurbished ThinkPad. I /hope/ to see the slowdown in the new phones market affecting the pumped-up chatbot market. To reference Agent Smith, what good is a chatbot if you can't speak?
- Matumio 8mo agoAGENT SMITH: And tell me, Mr. Anderson, what good is DRAM if you are unable to boot? The question unnerves Neo and suddenly he feels his phone vibrate as it unexpectedly reboots. The standing Agents snicker.
- throwback_dev 8mo ago[flagged]
- vessenes 8mo agoslop. also stupid. bad llm. phone values drop 60%+ per year. if you re-parse this without spending all your time on em-dashes you will note that it slows diffusion of next-gen chips, it does not cut off those users.
- pullthatupjamie 8mo ago[dead]
- jl6 8mo agoWait until we find out that all of tech (ever) has been subsidized by the true-so-far assumption of continued growth, allowing today’s costs to be paid for by tomorrow’s larger market.
- throwaway613746 8mo ago[dead]
- jeffbee 8mo agoProgrammers who know how to pack a struct: your moment has come!
- Qem 8mo agoAlso Python generators for the lulz. They help one to write extremely memory-efficient programs. Perhaps the memory shortage further helps cement Python in the language popularity charts, vis-à-vis languages that tend to load whole data in memory by default, like R.
- kccqzy 8mo agoIf we are talking about R, a lot of people who converted from R continued to operate in the same manner, by loading entire datasets into memory with pandas and numpy.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- 1718627440 8mo agoAnd if the dataset fits into RAM and you don't want the computer to do anything else, then this is the fastest and best approach.
- pinkmuffinere 8mo ago> Smartphone ASP is projected to rise 14% to a record $523 this year I know I'm not speaking to all the people that need to hear it, but used phones are very affordable, and reduce waste. A used iphone 13 is about $200 in the US: https://swappa.com/listings/apple-iphone-13?sort=price_low https://swappa.com/listings/apple-iphone-13?sort=price_low
- shirro 8mo agoOver investment in AI data centers is having a huge negative impact all over the economy. Other sectors are missing out on investment limiting their growth and stalling the economy. Companies have reduced staff prematurely on the promise of productivity improvements that have not occurred and lost customers to terrible customer service and declining product quality. Many hardware launches are going to be delayed or not meet expectations which really is the tip of the iceberg. The US/SK memory cartel understandably sold out for a massive short term windfall but they their long term decisions to limit supply have created a huge opportunity for China. I wouldn't be surprised if this will go down in the history books as the start of the exit for US/SK from the industry and the start of Chinese dominance. The smart phone industry is likely to respond with an increasingly hostile anti-consumer approach as they try and lock customers into the cabins of the sinking ship. I expect cheap and cheerful Chinese budget phones aren't going anywhere. I am happy for ram, cpu and storage to stall. I want a more robust and open phone which can take a fall and be updated long after the vendor loses interest. I expect to uninstall most of my apps rather than install new ones as I increasingly disconnect from an ever more distracting and worthless medium. I have cancelled nearly every subscription service in the last 12 months. And I have been deleting a lot of free accounts and apps. Its like doing a big cleanup. Surprisingly rewarding. HN has felt like more than 50% AI industry promoting blog spam of little interest to me as a reader for some time. I am setting a budget of ten, no make it five, more posts here. Then I am out for good. Account deletion and no looking back.
- crowcroft 8mo ago> Other sectors are missing out on investment limiting their growth and stalling the economy. Would love to know what sectors you would say are obviously under invested. Sounds like an opportunity.
- tty456 8mo agoThe U.S. gov't is now committing a sizeable chunk of GDP to investments and subsidies to AI companies and data centers and has reduced overall investment in wind and solar.
- 8mo ago
- barbazoo 8mo agoDropped my iPhone couple of days ago so I had to go back to an old phone. Pixel 3a. Opens Signal and HomeAssistant faster than my 2022 iPhone ever did so why would I even buy a new phone and go back at this point. The best phones (prive/value) have already been built and sold.
- pier25 8mo agoThe price for whatever we're getting out of AI is way too high.
- donkeybeer 8mo agoIf ai causes the price fixing in ram then it will have been worth it several times over.
- dheera 8mo agoI don't think it's about memory shortage. It's that everything has become 20% more expensive in the past year, I'm being taxed to death, fighting with companies trying to money grab me, my electric bill is now $800, and I'm now too broke to buy a new phone every 2 years when most of my income gets eaten by the "system". I'll wait until either SPY does another 50% run or BTC does another 100% run and then I'll buy a new phone. Google, you want me to buy your new phone? Do something to make SPY or BTC go up and then we'll talk. Until then my current phone works, and the new features aren't a must-have.
- inigyou 8mo agoSPY has been flat when measured in other currencies btw. Everything's 20% more expensive and SPY is up 20% because US money is worth 20% less.
- dheera 8mo agoYeah, so I'm not buying unnecessary crap this year. If the "system" wants to drive more consumption, it's on the "system" to put more buying power into my hands. Double my salary, reduce my taxes, make BTC do a big run up, something. Otherwise I'm happy staying put.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- whackernews 8mo agoOh that’s weird, I didn’t notice.
- anymouse123456 8mo agoMight also be due in part to the latest iOS and iPhone 17 Pros being some of the shittiest, laggiest, lowest quality smart phones ever made.
- tachalorah 8mo agoI'm looking forward to purchasing a Redmi K90. Better than anything on Western markets this year.
- pm90 8mo ago13%!!! This should be a code red level event for … the world? I … don’t understand how world leaders are just standing by? Smartphone growth/adoption has been the bedrock of a LOT of economic growth. I would have expected massive Government intervention to avoid this. Where are the China hawks? The argument for protecting Taiwan was that without their chips the smartphone market would contract, right? Thats whats happening now?!
- fdefitte 8mo ago[dead]
- hansmayer 8mo agoPotentially the only mildly positive consequence of the AI bubble?
- throwaway270925 8mo agoI wonder if we will ever get an aproximate percentage of GDP or some other hard numbers for how much Sam/OpenAI (and the manufacturers ofc) hurt the global economy with all of this? Less phones,computers,consoles,servers,etc sold (and everything that follows this) seems a way larger impact on the economy than a few thousand new ChatGPT Pro memberships...
- donkeybeer 8mo agoWhy not blame the price fixers? Why are you blaming buyers, small or huge?
- badgersnake 8mo agoSeems like we’re at the point where the big players are cornering the market in compute so that there is no alternative to giving them your money. This feels like an antitrust kind of situation.
- paradox_hash 8mo ago[dead]
- hrpnk 8mo agoLet's hope the component shortages will drive performance improvements in Apps as it will be unfeasible to expect higher specs to fix performance bottlenecks. Constraints can drive good behavior.
- ValentinPearce 8mo agoI remember a few years back when Jon Blow (Braid, The Witness) did a few talks about the fact that the biggest progress in recent years had been in hardware performance, making lazy software development standard since the hardware made it so easy to ignore any limitations. I'm not as much of a fan these days but I do hope these limitations have the effect of improving best practices.
- piokoch 8mo agoWell, maybe people stop changing their smartphone every two years. Or every year. Imagine the positive impact on the environment! I am always surprised that when the planet caring, liberal Apple boss shows up on the Big Apple Event stage, he encourages people to ruin the planet by needles purchase of the new hardware, even though the old one can do the same job easily, as now the improvements are barely incremental, if any.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 8mo agoSo AI will crash the whole tech industry before it's own bubble pops.