- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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Scalpers ruin everything…
Scalpers should be scalped, in the original sense of the word
That would be scalpees.
I remember when it wasn’t uncommon to buy a prebuilt system and then immediately upgrade its memory with third party DIMMs to avoid paying the PC manufacturer’s premium on memory. Seeing that price relationship becoming inverted is a little bonkers. Though IIRC Framework’s memory-on-prebuilt-systems didn’t have much of a premium.
I also wonder if it will push the market further towards systems with soldered memory or on-core memory.
Yeah I miss the days of buying a mid spec MacBook and then immediately doubling or quadrupling the ram with Corsair or similar 3rd party ram.
Getting swap memory off those old HDDs was such a performance boost. Then later adding SSDs was another huge boost.
I remember when OEMs just didn’t rape you on RAM and storage.
Except for Alienware
The Framework desktop already has soldered ram. That’s because AMD only sells that CPU like that.
I’ll never forget buying my first MacBook in '07 and asking the guy how much it would cost to bump the RAM from 1Gb to 2Gb. He told me in no uncertain terms that I’d be better off looking online for a cheaper price.
Well, in the intervening years they certainly have closed that loophole.
I worked at a knock-off Apple Store in the PNW from 2009 to 2013 and I told this same line to MANY people. The thing about being an “Apple Specialist” is that we sold more than Apple did, including “aftermarket” RAM modules to do that upgrade on-site for customers, saving those customer money AND netting us more profit than if we had sold them the Apple SKU with more RAM. When Apple closed this loophole it was not just at the expense of end-users, but their channel partners too.
I don’t see how it would push manufacturers to do that. I can see how it would make consumers more open to soldered RAM if RAM is so expensive there is no way you are going to upgrade it later. But, I would be interested to get your thoughts as I miss stuff that feels obvious I’m hindsight all the time.
If consumers aren’t going to or are much less likely to upgrade, then that affects demand from them, and one would expect manufacturers to follow what consumers demand.
RAM prices will come down sometime after the AI bubble bursts and they start making more DDR5 again.
- Prices rarely, if ever, go down in a meaningful degree. Stuff like this is partially necessity and partially a REALLY good excuse to see what the price ceiling actually is… and then turn that into the floor moving forward. Just look at gas prices
- The “AI Bubble” is likely to be on the same level as the Dotcom Bubble and the like. It is going to be brutal and a LOT of people are going to lose their jobs… and then much of the same tech will still dominate just with more realistic expectations. And that will still need large amounts of memory
- If the “AI Bubble” really is as bad as people seem to want it to be: A LOT of the vendors who make the parts you are buying RAM to use are going to be gutted. And then RAM production will drop drastically. Which will decrease supply and…
The whole injecting AI into everything has been quite annoying really. There are still many workplaces that prefer deterministic results like accounting and finance and Xero injecting AI into reconciliation or improperly trained individuals ruining the whole datasets on excel has been an absolute nightmare.
Which is why people who actually look at trends tend to compare it more to the Dot-com bubble.
The short version? A few early internet adopting sites (like Amazon…) set up online retail presences. People were ecstatic because you could now do most of the monthly shopping online and even re-buy pants that you know will fit and so forth.
Seeing money, EVERYBODY made an online retailer or service website and EVERYONE wanted to invest in that.
Then the market was oversaturated and companies with no right to exist went bankrupt and it was a bloodbath.
Except… not really. Because while the massively overinflated stock market did indeed “downturn” and a LOT of those scam companies went away, the actual fundamental premise of online first companies was a very sound one. I mean… just look at “Cyber Monday” and so forth.
And “AI” will almost definitely go the same route. Because, yeah, LLMs are HORRIBLE for accounting and finance. But they are actually really good for replacing the early career folk who translate earnings into reports. And ML in general is excellent at detecting patterns which can mean potentially billions of dollars in investing. But, like all things, it is about verification and caution. You actually need a human to read that earnings report before you send it to the investors. And you only give your “AI” a small portion of your portfolio. Same as with any team.
Prices rarely, if ever, go down in a meaningful degree.
In 2011, there was a large flood in Thailand that impacted ~40% of hard drive manufacturing. As a result, hard drives significantly increased in price. This was back when SSDs weren’t mainstream yet.
A year or two later, when manufacturing capacity was restored, prices were essentially back to what they were before the disruption.
Apart from disruptions like that, HDDs, SSDs, and RAM have always been going down in price.
Prices rarely, if ever, go down in a meaningful degree.
Prices on memory have virtually always gone down, and at a rapid pace.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-computer-memory-and-storage
What you are describing is something different… that is “close enough” to Moore’s Law for all but the most pedantic.
The (I forget the proper economics term so) base price of RAM/Storage does indeed go down as new processes and economies of scale are developed. But the cost of a “laptop hard drive” remains pretty steady in the sense that a couple hundred MB was enough back in the day but you REALLY want at least 500 gigs now. The price per byte does indeed drop rapidly but the price per “drive” is far more stable (not fully stable due to inflation and how many people are buying them, but within spitting distance).
Its why a good rule of thumb was to always just spend roughly the same on storage during an upgrade and that would result in faster technologies and larger capacity drives and so forth.
That isn’t what is happening with RAM in 2025. A much better comparison is GPUs because… it is the same problem. It is ridiculously high demand from businesses (often startups pouring dump trucks of VC money into their only hope… well, VC money or drug money in the case of miners but they matter a lot less these days) driving this. A quick search didn’t yield an easy graph and I can’t be bothered to go dig through Gamers Nexus’s twelve videos on it, but the price of an “entry level” GPU has drastically changed in the past decade.
But just for two-ish data points?
- The GTX 980 and 970 had an MSRP (probably) of 550 and 330 USD, respectively, back in 2014
- While there is some other bullshit involved, the RTX 5080 and 5070 have MSRPs of 1000 USD and 550 USD in 2025
- Adjusting for inflation, the 980 and 970 would still only be about 753 and 451 USD in 2025 dollars
- And let’s not forget that basically no cards were sold at MSRP back in early 2025…
The last point being what is, by all accounts, going to be the new normal. Barring outside impacts like… RAM going through the roof. Vendors will sell the cards for the ACTUAL MSRP rather than the inflated demand prices. And they will still be considerably more expensive as a result.
All of which is to say… my current card is definitely good enough but having a hard time deciding if I do one “final” upgrade for the decade. But I am an AMD boi so those are at least “reasonable” in terms of price per performance.
people say go back in time to pick the correct lotto number
I say go back in time and sell my 8TB disk for 80 billion
Well, no. Computers until recently (2000s or so) were incompatible with modern protocols required for that much memory.
In 1995 I bought 4 MB of RAM for DM 200, which, adjusted for inflation probably works out to about €200 in today’s money. I’d say, prices have come down quite a bit, since.
It’s kinda crazy. Got myself a new thinkpad and the 2nd 32GB stick would cost another 150 bucks. Didn’t knew that retail they are now at above 200 xD
Framework still have their “big tent” Nazi problem?
Their what now
They want everyone to buy their products, and have no problem with those who want us all dead
https://community.frame.work/t/framework-supporting-far-right-racists/75986
Really?!? The company that LTT has invested in might also support some problematic people?
Yo wtf
Holy Fuck didn’t know that DHH is a straight up Nazi. I always thought he was nothing more than a dumb autistic libertarian, guess that black and white thinking some people on the spectrum have pushes them far right.
Tuxedo computers and slimbook ship great Linux laptops btw
Yeeeeeaaaaaah I don’t think I can do business with folk who aren’t clear about that sort of thing either. Not when there are other Linux centric builders you can support.
I missed all of this, but mostly caught up now. Hopefully Feamework starts making some better decisions on who they align with.
Someone else will continue selling RAM and making money.
