3 ms·
Never thought I'd be living in a world where my tech hardware purchases INCREASE in value over the years.
by PacificSpecific 4mo ago
Never thought I'd be living in a world where my tech hardware purchases INCREASE in value over the years.
- stuxnet79 4mo agoDon't forget that this is all intentional and by design. If the tech oligarchs have their way we will all have no choice but to rent compute by the token within the next 3-5 years. The era of the personal computer is over. Current supply chains & production capacity can't accomodate both the AI hyperscalers and regular consumers.
- malfist 4mo agoThats one hell of a leap you got there. Things have gotten more expensive before. It won't be the last
- jauntywundrkind 4mo ago8x more expensive? I doubt things have ever gotten anywhere remotely near this crazy this bought out this not for sale this fast.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- t-writescode 4mo agoTulips?
- WithinReason 4mo agoBitcoin?
- jauntywundrkind 4mo agoTulips just look pretty. That's a mania. I think we recognize the mental agility that having compute fan give people, that we acknowledge this bicycle of the mind as potentially freeing liberating and virtually travelling.
- malfist 4mo agoMemory used to be worth more than gold by weight, and still every stick was sold. GPUs, flight controllers, etc went sky high during the pandemic and we still buy them today. Hard drives got way more expensive during flooding, and we still have local storage.
- xienze 4mo ago> Memory used to be worth more than gold by weight, and still every stick was sold. And right before that, was it dirt cheap? No? Slightly different scenario then. > GPUs, flight controllers, etc went sky high during the pandemic and we still buy them today. They're even more now... > Hard drives got way more expensive during flooding, and we still have local storage. Nowhere near as expensive as they are now, nowhere near as high a jump in price in a short period of time as now. Plus, there was a defined end point of "flood over, back to normal." There is no "AI data center build out over, back to normal" in sight.
- jauntywundrkind 4mo agoI'm so unsure why someone was working so hard to wedge such doubt amid such clearness. Yes, well said, very core clear differences you raise, my thanks.
- xerox13ster 4mo agoHave things gotten this much more expensive at the same time that massive datacenters are harmonically distorting power delivery [0] to the point that it degrades the lifetime of your existing devices? The AI datacenters are making things more expensive and at the same time destroying existing electronics. All this is happening at the same time that the major OS vendors are locking down their operating systems and creating device attestation frameworks. Whether it is a coordinated effort behind the scenes is irrelevant, the real outcome of all of this is that the average home tech prosumer will not be able to afford to maintain personal hardware that remains compatible with mainstream services. In light of the consumer market RAM shortages, all the consumer devices will transition to thin client architectures that offload all their real compute to the centralized cloud. You will not be allowed to modify these devices, and there will be nothing you can modify them to do. They will have no ports, using wireless charging and wireless connectivity, and likely even any UART will be left off the board, if you can get them open at all. Like the Apple Watch or Airpods, they will not be built to be openable, and opening them will be an irreversibly destructive act. You will not be able to buy these devices, they will only be available on a subscription basis. You will own nothing and be told you should be happy. Online major digital services will only be compatible with these devices, offering no endpoints for third party devices to connect. [0]: https://archive.ph/f707o https://archive.ph/f707o
- tjohns 4mo agoIt's always been a good idea to have a UPS in front of any digital electronics anyway. Brown-outs are arguably more dangerous to your electronics, and those are more common now with more frequent heat waves during the summer, stressing the electric grid and triggering public safety shutoffs on the US west coast. I also think the concerns in the article are overblown. I grew up in the mountains where the electric grid was notoriously poor quality, especially when buildings would fail over to (often poor-quality) generators. It would make computer monitors misbehave, but rarely did it actually damage anything.
- xerox13ster 4mo agoAgain, good luck affording a UPS when price hikes really kick off. If there is no workstation market, even for small businesses, what happens to the UPS market?
- dankben 4mo agoYou're acting like companies like Apple would simply let "the tech oligarchs" make 20% of their revenue disappear
- kys11 4mo ago[dead]
- tavavex 4mo agoTrillion dollar companies like Apple will still be able to get their hands on whatever they need, albeit at worse prices. Individual consumers trying to buy those components directly probably won't.
- sheepdestroyer 4mo agoI don't want an apple blob I want to pick specific components and run linux
- xerox13ster 4mo agoYou're acting like Apple wouldn't simply make hay in a world of thin client device subscriptions, where they can charge a subscription for the thin client device and the services that make it usable.
- pjmlp 4mo agoThey wouldn't blink twice pushing everyone into iPhone, iPad and watches. The death of Mac was already a discussion topic a few years ago, they only need do XCode on iPadOS or iCloud, Android Studio style.
- protoster 4mo agoThis feels like a sign of something very bad happening soon
- bsimpson 4mo agoIs soon now?
- goldenarm 4mo agoWhat kind of thing ? Shortages ?
- bigfishrunning 4mo agoWe're already in a shortage (of RAM). Price increases should be a motivator to increase production. This is the system working.
- phatfish 4mo agoWill there be increase in production if the 3 companies that make the RAM decide they can profit more by keeping production mostly the same and flogging it for 10x the price of a couple of years ago to a few AI companies happy to burn cash? The only hope is China spoils the party.
- bigfishrunning 4mo agoChina spoiling the party is still the system working though. The price of ram is so high that it makes sense for new producers to start to exist. The fact that all the ram in the world comes from 3 suppliers is a big problem, and the high prices are a forcing function for solving that problem
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- e40 4mo agoNow imagine TSMC being controlled by China. While I think it's fairly low probability, the imagination does create some pretty dystopian scenarios.
- consp 4mo agoIn that case my retro hardware collection will be worth even more. (Note: that my current hardware will likely be retro faster than I assume it would have been) I also found out recently my matched, working 3d hardware from the '90s was worth more than my actual year-old medium-high end video card, so who knows! /s for obvious reasons, except the rise in prices of 3dfx cards ffs (wtaf).
- joecot 4mo agoChina, who keeps undercutting ai prices and producing things efficiently? I don't have to imagine what it would be like under communism in order to see what it's already like under capitalism.
- bigfishrunning 4mo ago> China, who keeps undercutting ai prices (by training on model output) and producing things efficiently (with slave labor)? Yeah, things are going great over there
- sdenton4 4mo agoDystopian scenarios... Like even more expensive steam decks.
- utopiah 4mo agoHow would that work? They can't take the fabs (single door opened and dust makes it all useless) and even if they could they can't run ASML machines with their support. So... labor camp fabs on unmaintained STOA hardware from a single company everybody relies on? I can't imagine that scenario. Either they manage to redeploy the whole value chain (not saying it's impossible but doesn't seem to be the case at scale for now) or taking Taiwan by force is mostly a political show, not a technological one.
- ryanmcbride 4mo agoI'm used to this happening with retro collecting but not with things being actively produced
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- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]