The situation is absolutely awful for anybody who needs significant memory or storage (or devices incorporating such).
Even people who think they have enough for the next few years already could end up with an unpleasant surprise if they e.g. have a stick or two of RAM go bad or a GPU fry. I have a few machines with aging sticks that I'm hoping will manage to hold out until when/if things improve.
I'm saving a ton of money by simply not upgrading. I used to do upgrades every 1-2 years just to keep up on things, pass the old box down to my son or otherwise donate it. Now I intend to keep my current setup for 7+ years. Its 2 years old next month. I may even stay with it longer. I just see no reason to upgrade with things how they are.
I considered a Mac Studio a couple months ago. Price was up but might have pulled the trigger if not for the delivery date that was almost 4 months out. Sale lost. I suspect a lot of people are like me right now and we'll start seeing significant drops in consumer spending on electronics the next 2-4 years minimum.
There also seems to have been a major shift in strategy from AMD / Intel / Apple / NVidia due to this, as I was used to CPU / GPU / chipset upgrades coming out more regularly with double-digit percentage improvements each year, but that seems to be basically over for the consumer space now that everyone is just trying to build as much AI hardware as fast as possible for enterprise markets.
I also used to rebuild my desktop every 1-2 years and upgrade laptops every 2-3 years, but I'm currently a bit past that and have no plans to refresh anything in the near future. I'll probably wait another CPU and GPU generation or two to even consider it, especially with prices being this ridiculous.
I'm fully anticipating AI hardware demand to dry up once Anthropic and OpenAI start tanking financially in a few years after missing earnings and investors and banks wanting their loans paid back combined with more folks realizing that LLMs cannot achieve AGI. After that, I would hope that the demand that's driving this pricing spike will fall along with it, but I also fully expect hardware companies to be as greedy as possible, so maybe a 32TB HDD will just cost $1000 going forward and the era of "a decent gaming PC made up of the tier of components one step below TOTL costs ~$2000" we've been in since the 1990s is fully over, and it's just going to be more like $5k going forward.
I have a 2021 M1 pro and see no reason to upgrade it... ever?
I do web & general java work on it and it's plenty fast even using a memory hog like IntelliJ (which is typically disk bound anyway). Claude tells me that a new macbook would feel about 1.8x faster in my CPU-bound cases, which is not common.
If memory prices returned to normal and if local inference gets over the hump, I could see upgrading for local AI agents, but I'm fine waiting for a good long while on that.
I say all this as someone who, five years ago, was a perpetual upgrader: immediately bought new product and got excited for next product. Wonder if the future will see the end of that culture in tech and, looking back, it was a little silly and wasteful anyway.
Anecdotally, RAM failures are more common than they used to be in previous decades, I assume due to increased capacities and smaller process nodes. Looser manufacturing standards may also play a part.
The component category I've never seen fail is CPU.
I've worked in and around datacenters for a few decades now and I've seen pretty much everything fail, but power supplies in particular do so at a higher rate than I expected. I've had one literally start smoking in my home office recently too. Luckily, it didn't damage any components, but it was pretty dramatic and abrupt -- just powered on my desktop and got nothing but a fog machine coming out of the rear fan until I yanked the power cord a few seconds later.
My evga 1000w has been going strong for 11 years now. Cheaper power supplies fail often but if you buy quality and oversized they’ll outlast all your other components as they don’t become outdated.
Most devices never test their memory and don’t have ecc, so you generally never know. Random instability can be fixed by restarting and your program not being in an area with bad bits anymore.
I recently had part of a 32 gig DIMM go bad on a 128 gig system. One of the larger VMs was spontaneously rebooting for no apparent reason. I was able to find the addresses with MemTest86 and map out 512 megs of the affected DIMM with the Linux kernel memmap option.
I've seen some fail. Might have had to do with the fact that the computers were literally flooded (river came up faster than the sandbaggers could keep up) while running.
I've had a few RAM sticks fail, but the ECC usually caught it first. Also had one case that somehow the stick slightly unseated itself; dunno how but it was out of service for months until someone opened it up and reseated the stick.
...granted though I've also seen a backpane on a server fail. I didn't think that was even possible until that point.
I would absolutely love if some startup came up right now to manufacture and sell RAM at normal prices to everyone else and put Crucial et al out of business for price-gouging everyone just because they can.
DRAM fabs are multi-billion dollar investments which take years to come online. That's the whole reason we're in this situation, there is no quick fix available.
I bought an RX 6600 for $450 during the GPU shortage a few years ago. I know the AI boom is different than the crypto/COVID boom, but still. Don't be me.
I’m even more confused by the economics of the frontier model businesses. Even if they got preferential prices, they are still paying an inordinate amount for their infrastructure.
If it wasn’t economically feasible without VC/Nvidia money 3 years ago, how is it possibly economically feasible now at 10x prices for things like memory?
And watch … $5 says they have nothing to do with the ram because even if there was enough power there’s no use case for this much spend
If I had to guess they’re just buying up ram to keep others from having it same way meta, Google, etc hired up engineers to keep others from having them
It's pulling the ladder up behind them. OpenAI bought up more co tracts for wafers than they could even use. But now that means everyone else has to fight over what's left. This makes it too expensive to compete with OpenAI. No upstart can really afford to build infrastructure.
"The best good ever is to maximise shareholder profits" is a tired and cliched caricature that some people unfortunately take seriously. But this is too on the nose.
Been long past that time, probably 15-20 years past. It's not even the languages its the 500 different layers of abstraction and abominations like Electron.
Even people who think they have enough for the next few years already could end up with an unpleasant surprise if they e.g. have a stick or two of RAM go bad or a GPU fry. I have a few machines with aging sticks that I'm hoping will manage to hold out until when/if things improve.
I considered a Mac Studio a couple months ago. Price was up but might have pulled the trigger if not for the delivery date that was almost 4 months out. Sale lost. I suspect a lot of people are like me right now and we'll start seeing significant drops in consumer spending on electronics the next 2-4 years minimum.
I also used to rebuild my desktop every 1-2 years and upgrade laptops every 2-3 years, but I'm currently a bit past that and have no plans to refresh anything in the near future. I'll probably wait another CPU and GPU generation or two to even consider it, especially with prices being this ridiculous.
I'm fully anticipating AI hardware demand to dry up once Anthropic and OpenAI start tanking financially in a few years after missing earnings and investors and banks wanting their loans paid back combined with more folks realizing that LLMs cannot achieve AGI. After that, I would hope that the demand that's driving this pricing spike will fall along with it, but I also fully expect hardware companies to be as greedy as possible, so maybe a 32TB HDD will just cost $1000 going forward and the era of "a decent gaming PC made up of the tier of components one step below TOTL costs ~$2000" we've been in since the 1990s is fully over, and it's just going to be more like $5k going forward.
I do web & general java work on it and it's plenty fast even using a memory hog like IntelliJ (which is typically disk bound anyway). Claude tells me that a new macbook would feel about 1.8x faster in my CPU-bound cases, which is not common.
If memory prices returned to normal and if local inference gets over the hump, I could see upgrading for local AI agents, but I'm fine waiting for a good long while on that.
I say all this as someone who, five years ago, was a perpetual upgrader: immediately bought new product and got excited for next product. Wonder if the future will see the end of that culture in tech and, looking back, it was a little silly and wasteful anyway.
I'm also using an iPhone mini 12 and it's fine.
The cost of the prebuilt is now lower than today 5090 price.
All the other bits in a computer I've seen fail.
The component category I've never seen fail is CPU.
...granted though I've also seen a backpane on a server fail. I didn't think that was even possible until that point.
If it wasn’t economically feasible without VC/Nvidia money 3 years ago, how is it possibly economically feasible now at 10x prices for things like memory?
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/openais-star...
If I had to guess they’re just buying up ram to keep others from having it same way meta, Google, etc hired up engineers to keep others from having them
They should each buy out a RAM manufacture, and make this the new normal.
It really is the best thing for AI adoption and the shareholders.
Paperclipping here, greedily optimizing for shareholder value above all else. Please stop.
And yet many of us aren't having any trouble distinguishing.
did you drop a '/s'?
Your comment is an illustration of exactly what is wrong with this website. Given his preceding statements, I sincerely do not believe it is sarcasm.
"The best good ever is to maximise shareholder profits" is a tired and cliched caricature that some people unfortunately take seriously. But this is too on the nose.
I also had another order where I paid £30 for a 1TB SSD (sata though) and it is now more than £100...