Rendered at 20:10:40 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
1saadcodes 3 hours ago [-]
500% in a year is just insane. I knew RAM prices were going up, but $3k+ for 128GB of DDR5 makes me wonder how much of this is actually AI demand, and how much is this just manufacturers taking advantage of it. They have done this in the past after all
cm2187 3 hours ago [-]
I don't understand the distinction you are making. If you have a massive excess of demand ready to pay any price, and a limited supply, of course the sellers will take advantage, that's how any market works. They can do that because of the lack of supply.
Over the long term demand will rationalise and supply will adjust. But in between there is a squeeze, and the right price is the maximum price buyers are willing to bid for the limited supply. Sucks for other buyers, on the other hand it ensures demand destruction, i.e. that the limited supply goes to the buyer who need it the most, other buyers will delay their purchase and do with what they have.
ncallaway 2 hours ago [-]
> If you have a massive excess of demand ready to pay any price, and a limited supply, of course the sellers will take advantage, that's how any market work
The question is how quickly the supply adjusts. In a free market, the suppliers would respond to the price signal by quickly expanding their production to meet the elevated demand.
But a market captured by a cartel will be much slower to expand the supply.
So, the test isn't "how much is price going up" it's "how aggressively are the RAM producers expanding supply production"
lvzw 2 hours ago [-]
Memory fab build out times are years not months. The existing ones already run 24/7. If these companies could pull more supply out of thin air they would, but they cannot.
mschild 1 hours ago [-]
Would they?
Cartels aren't known for massively increasing production to satisfy all demand. Far from it I'd say, they're more likely to expand supply to such a level that they can still reap massive profits. Very few countries/companies have the knowhow and willingness to be able to build more.
OPEC is a perfect example of this behaviour. They set hearly production goals to keep prices high. Or the Quebec Maple Syrup Producers organization that limits the amount of syrup a farmer can produce and sell in a year to keep prices high.
24 minutes ago [-]
AnimalMuppet 3 minutes ago [-]
But are the memory chip producers acting like a cartel? In the past they have not. When there was a shortage, they increased production as rapidly as they could build the new fabs, crashing the price of memory.
tshaddox 10 minutes ago [-]
Large barriers to entry are anathema to competitive markets, so the conclusion here is still that firms are benefitting from the lack of a competitive market.
ncallaway 1 hours ago [-]
I didn't say the build out time was months.
I said:
> the test isn't "how much is price going up" it's "how aggressively are the RAM producers expanding supply production"
duped 16 minutes ago [-]
I'm curious what the limiting factor is for "years not months" when building these fabs. DRAM is a commodity, there are only threeish major manufacturers, all have huge amounts of capital, multiple nations bend over backwards for new semiconductor production projects, and there seems to be unlimited money going into purchasing these things.
Even when it comes to manufacturing the tooling/testing infrastructure, it's just a question of money aiui.
geodel 2 hours ago [-]
> But a market captured by a cartel will be much slower to expand the supply.
Oh yea, governments can fix by putting 100 billion in memory fabs right now, and when demand crater in decade or so, let tax payer eat the cost of those fabs. At least it will benefit poor computer users like me.
HWR_14 34 minutes ago [-]
> In a free market, the suppliers would respond to the price signal by quickly expanding their production to meet the elevated demand.
Why would they?
And you claim to have historic examples where they did?
jcbrand 22 minutes ago [-]
Generally speaking, if demand stays high, and existing suppliers don't increase supply, the high prices create an incentive and opportunity for new market entrants to increase the supply.
HDThoreaun 2 hours ago [-]
Even if the memory market was completely competitive the time it takes to expand supply is measured in years. There was no way for them to serve the AI demand without reducing supply given to everyone else in the short run
ncallaway 1 hours ago [-]
> There was no way for them to serve the AI demand without reducing supply given to everyone else in the short run
I didn't say that there was a way to do it in the short run. I laid out what the test is to determine if there's cartel-like behavior or competitive-market-like behavior.
I will say, in a market with only 3 players and very high cap-ex cost, my prior is that you're likely to see more cartel-like behavior than competitive-market-like behavior, but that's still to be determined.
solarengineer 3 hours ago [-]
"that the limited supply goes to the buyer who need it the most" - I would say that the limited supply goes to the buyer who can afford to pay higher than others. Someone may need the memory more, but may not have the deeper pockets to pay for it like NVidia and Apple might.
lasthemy 1 hours ago [-]
I would have framed it as "buyer who can get the most leverage from it", which equates to being able to spend more. It's an economic argument, not a values argument.
dist-epoch 2 hours ago [-]
Gamers may need the memory more, but AI labs can use the memory more productively
t-writescode 2 hours ago [-]
Profitably-for-the-fabs*
jldugger 2 hours ago [-]
> I don't understand the distinction you are making.
> According to the one-count charge filed in San Francisco's federal court on Thursday, Park conspired with unnamed employees from other memory makers to fix the price of DRAM sold to computer makers from April 1, 2001, to June 15, 2002. The government says the move directly affected sales to U.S. computer makers Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, IBM, Apple Computer, and Gateway.
etc
afavour 1 hours ago [-]
> I don't understand the distinction you are making.
It's pretty simple. In a correctly regulated market the sellers are in competition with each other so there is a limit to how much they can increase prices, since they'll just lose business to their competitor.
In a poorly regulated market that allows competitors to collude with each other to raise prices by the same amount, they'll inflate prices much further.
inquirerGeneral 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
elorant 2 hours ago [-]
The distinction is that on the latter case you have a cartel that decided to fix prices and fuck everyone in the ass.
minraws 3 hours ago [-]
In an absolutely free market? sure. But we don't live in an absolutely free market, the memory manufacturers have refused to budge on creating new fabs until recently out of caution and to be able to create a demand excess.
They have slow rolled rollouts and everything, if there wasn't CXMT they would probably still wouldn't have budged on building new fabs for a while longer.
You can absolutely price fix/manufacture a shortage.
Ever heard of merchants setting fire to crops after hoarding to sell at a higher price?
The issue is the distributer and producer are the very same people this essentially means producers have no incentive to rationalize supply, they can make much more money of the long drawn out shortage.
cm2187 2 hours ago [-]
I think everyone is aware now that you don't build a fab by snapping your fingers, and you need to amortise it over many years. The said manufacturers are just out of a massive slump in demand during covid, when they were selling at a loss, and these cycles happened many times in this industry. It is understandable that they don't jump all-in on the AI bandwagon, which, god knows where it is going and for how long.
If you want evidence that no one predicted this, look at WD. They disinvested from sandisk up to early this year. Now sandisk is worth more than WD. Doesn't seem consistent with a concerted strategy to gauge prices.
> You can absolutely price fix/manufacture a shortage. Ever heard of merchants setting fire to crops after hoarding to sell at a higher price?
Fine. Show me which manufacturer is cutting production to corner the market. I don't see that.
SoftTalker 2 hours ago [-]
Yes when there are large fixed costs to expanding production, that will happen more slowly, after determining that the high demand isn't just a short term spike.
It's not like wheat, where you just can just plant more at marginal cost (I'm sure someone in farming will now explain why that isn't exactly true either).
HWR_14 30 minutes ago [-]
I'm not super familiar with farming, but I'm pretty sure there is an upper bound on how much wheat you can plant dictated by the amount of land you own.
Big manufactures have absolutely cut production of lower margin products and it's not like they can re-purpose all of the equipment used for it for HBM yet. edit They can definitely focus more resource because of it on HBM though.
Things have improved a bit since govts are starting to get angry.
Tldr; no one is cutting the production of high margin stuff, but low margin stuff can go and die, because it's not a free market it's a stock market these companies want to show off better margins in every unit there is no reason to keep inefficient things running when not doing it pays more.
They just don't want 30-40% margins anymore. That is not free market that is quite literally serving their own interests because they know there is a monopoly.
All big memory manufacturers are heavily supported by the govt, that's what has made them the monopolies they are Micron supported by USA (they crushed Japan's memory industry for it), and Korean giants are more tangled up with the govt than well most people in US would realize.
Somehow people think free market means anything goes, which honestly is where we stand today so I don't blame anyone.
But using govts to crush competitions and build yourself up on subsidies and similar isn't really free markets. China hasn't been able to grow a significant memory chip industry yet because of lack of EUV machines and similar technologies blocked by the US, which is also not "free market".
As for WD, and Sandisk separating I feel like this was more mutual and they new HDDs or SSDs being together was a distraction for both. Which feels more strategic, think of it like this, the shareholders who had the shares how hold shares in both and together they might have likely been worth less so shareholders made money.
Aka good for free market. I don't see how that relates to the actual memory crunch issue more broadly.
cm2187 19 minutes ago [-]
Margins pre-AI were more like 5-15%. Even if the margin was 5%, if prices increased 5 times but product cost didn't move, then margins are now 80%. That's not a 30-40% product, your argument doesn't make any sense.
benlivengood 2 hours ago [-]
Feel free to spin up a fab and undercut the current prices, I'd certainly appreciate it!
I don't know if I would personally fund such a venture though, for roughly the same reason existing manufacturers aren't expanding production.
geodel 1 hours ago [-]
How about I threaten you with mandatory 10 Electron applications / AI agent harness on your computer? Now you must be ready to fund my venture :)
dist-epoch 2 hours ago [-]
> the memory manufacturers have refused to budge on creating new fabs
That's EXACTLY how a free market is supposed to work. The existing memory manufacturers are FREE to not build new factories, and anyone else is FREE to build those factories in their place.
t-writescode 2 hours ago [-]
Then perhaps we’re seeing one of the downsides of that. When 0->1 is prohibitively expensive, existing players can continue to raise prices *very* high because cost-of-entry is extreme, until it’s not sufficiently extreme.
And then we have bubble issues because the introduction of a new, cheaper player, causes the bottom to fall out and for the circumstances that allowed the new manufacturer to exist to completely go away.
leni536 1 hours ago [-]
In addition of being expensive, it's also a gamble. If it wasn't risky then I don't think financing it would be that big of an issue.
dist-epoch 2 hours ago [-]
This is also caused by the FREE market - consolidation, all markets tend to consolidate around a few companies due to economy of scale.
The fix is regulation - we are going to have NOT-FREE-MARKET electricity, NOT-FREE-MARKET water supply, .... for vital services.
I'm not talking about you, it's funny to see anti-regulation HN complain about a FREE MARKET working as such. Suddenly it's not so fun where you are at the losing end of the free market when it turns out some are willing to pay way more for RAM than you are.
carlosjobim 2 hours ago [-]
Everybody needs electricity and water, but nobody needs more RAM except for companies. And they can pay for it.
paunchy 2 minutes ago [-]
You can travel to the ends of the earth, to a village down miles and miles of dirt roads and still see someone bent over their phone. People buy RAM.
Iolaum 1 hours ago [-]
Hello!? Us consumers need it too.
doubled112 18 minutes ago [-]
Really depends how you're defining "need".
Will you die without it?
Will your life as you know it end if your next phone has 8GB instead of 12GB?
carlosjobim 16 minutes ago [-]
You need 8GB at the very most, which isn't out of reach for any consumer. If you need more, then you are a professional and can afford more. Or you are a hobbyist, and your hobby doesn't deserve any subsidies from the hard working tax payer.
veqq 2 hours ago [-]
> But we don't live in an absolutely free market, the memory manufacturers have refused to budge on creating new fabs until recently out of caution
...that's how the market works. This is called capital discipline and is standard across industries. If the increase in demand is temporary, they would be spending 5-10 years of profit on facilities which will only lose money. The same works in non-capitalist economies too, you don't want to waste resources on stranded assets and many still believe this RAM demand is temporary and the house of cards will collapse.
aeturnum 2 hours ago [-]
FWIW I have a friend who makes hardware and it's extremely difficult for him to secure memory at any price. Because AI people have locked up so much of the upcoming supply it's often not a question of how much it will cost but of finding someone who will sell you memory at all. If this were price gouging I would expect he'd have no trouble finding allocations at exorbitant prices but that doesn't seem to be the case.
javier2 1 hours ago [-]
same here, even when we went to larger hardware producers, they were basically we would sell you, but we cant actually get any RAM at all either.
senderista 2 hours ago [-]
There are never shortages in a free market, just higher prices.
kibwen 2 hours ago [-]
You appear to not understand how markets work, free or otherwise. For the purposes of this conversation, consider starting your education here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barriers_to_entry
senderista 37 minutes ago [-]
At a longer timescale than very temporary supply shocks, I believe what I said is correct. The basic point is that if supply contracts, demand must contract as well, which in a free market happens via price increases and in an unfree market happens via shortages (i.e., the inability of buyers to obtain a good at a market-clearing price). If high barriers to entry are relevant in this context (obviously they very much exist in the memory industry!), then please enlighten me how, if you are capable of doing so without unconstructive snark.
chriskanan 14 minutes ago [-]
Same thing happened with eggs in the USA with bird flu used as an excuse.
luma 3 hours ago [-]
There are only 3 manufacturers (about to be 4 soon) total. This is a demand crunch the likes of which the market hasn't seen before, prices are doing the natural thing.
cm2187 3 hours ago [-]
You make it sound like the crunch is caused by manufacturers, my understanding is that it is caused by the abnormal demand. I am not aware that RAM production is at a historically low level.
luma 2 hours ago [-]
Demand crunch comes from the customer. All HBM and DDR5 wafer capacity is sold out through 2027 and all three vendors are booking 2028 capacity.
This was not created by the manufacturers.
throwaw12 2 hours ago [-]
who is the 4th?
happosai 23 minutes ago [-]
Intel is also looking into returning to making RAM, but it's probably the Chinese that will enter the market faster
dygd 1 hours ago [-]
Probaby CXMT
layer8 34 minutes ago [-]
What about YMTC?
georgemcbay 2 hours ago [-]
> There are only 3 manufacturers (about to be 4 soon) total.
...3 manufacturers with a long history of price fixing...
Uhm, your link states that they were price fixing over 20 years ago, and were in court for almost a decade. There was another accusation in 2018, but it was dismissed.
That's not a long history of pricing fixing, just accusations.
georgemcbay 2 hours ago [-]
The difference between 2002 and now is that it is so much easier to follow each other's leads on pricing without explicitly communicating about it and leaving a paper trail. But they never stopped acting indistinguishable from a cartel.
throwaw12 2 hours ago [-]
Micron for example discontinued their consumer business because of the demand from enterprise business.
paulpauper 55 minutes ago [-]
What is also interesting is no one predicted this in 2022-2025 as LLMs were gaining widespread use. It just suddenly happened--"boom!" memory shortage in mid 2025 to early 2026,and it caught everyone by surprise. It was understood that the biggest bottleneck was "compute", not the memory. Even experts, such as popular AI bloggers, industry leaders, and top podcasters failed to anticipate this. No one on twitter either. I spend a lot of time online and I don't recall, afik, anyone before 2026 saying to buy memory stocks.
layer8 29 minutes ago [-]
Sam Altman laying claims on 40% of the world’s RAM wafer production is what took everyone by surprise. The supply shortage likely would have ramped up more slowly otherwise.
magic_hamster 3 hours ago [-]
To take advantage they'd have to do some form of price fixing which in most places is a very big footgun.
I honestly don't think they need to fix their prices, and it's possible that selling to consumers is a secondary market for them compared to datacenters, like Nvidia selling GPUs to gamers. We know that's not where the money is.
Seeing some companies actually exit the consumer market is evidence for this.
wlesieutre 3 hours ago [-]
> To take advantage they'd have to do some form of price fixing which in most places is a very big footgun.
When parent commenter says "They have done this in the past after all" that's exactly what they're talking about. Micron, Samsung, Hyinx (prior to SK Group acquisition), and others all participated in RAM price fixing in the early 2000's.
Just to be clear the big Memory giants are famous for their price fixing historically speaking.
z_rho_one 1 hours ago [-]
After RAM prices climbed 200% between August and November of last year, a store associate at Micro Center encouraged me to buy some RAM sticks if I needed them because "prices might continue to rise for a few years". I told him that was ridiculous and nobody would tolerate it if prices got higher. How wrong I was...
cosmic_cheese 1 days ago [-]
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.
datakan 1 days ago [-]
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.
BeetleB 16 minutes ago [-]
It's wild seeing so many comments about updating every 1-2 years.
When I build a PC, I pay a little extra because I want it to last a long time. I aim for 5 years, and in reality it usually ends up 7 years (life happens, need the money, etc).
I am now in year 8 of my current PC. I only had money to replace it this year, and am now stuck with it due to the RAM prices. It's going to really suck for me if my RAM fails in the next few years.
preg_match 4 hours ago [-]
I think it's probably for the best, the hyperconsumerism around electronics was getting out of hand. Computers are fast and have been fast for a while now. An iPhone 12 is probably more than fine to do iPhone things, if Apple didn't sabotage their old phones with poorly-written poor-performance software.
florakel 2 hours ago [-]
Can you provide evidence for your claim? Most people take this statement at face value and I don’t understand why. I do some volunteer work supporting elderly people that have issues adapting to a digital only world and I am always pleasantly surprised by the performance of their old iPhones all the way down to the 8 (old phones they get from their kids)
Every time I upgrade iOS past a few major versions there is significant slow down. I don’t think it’s done on purpose, it’s just that software grows more demanding over time.
mvdtnz 2 hours ago [-]
Apple is known to slow older devices intentionally. They have admitted it.
That’s the literal truth, but the subtlety behind it was that CPU spikes combined with low voltage batteries were causing phones to shut off. Apple’s slowing down the phone down was nominally because customers prefer slightly slower phones to phones that shut off unexpectedly. Should they have announced this as a feature and had a toggle switch to allow users that preferred the option to disable it? Of course. But I don’t necessarily think they did the wrong thing.
Panino 3 hours ago [-]
> Computers are fast and have been fast for a while now.
Absolutely. The only reason I want to upgrade to an iPhone 18 next year is because the 16 doesn't have MIE (Memory Integrity Enforcement) and it feels ridiculous to upgrade so quickly to the 17, which does have MIE. Same thing with a Neo 2. But mostly I buy surplus gear. I've saved a small fortune this way and 8% compounding returns (VT and chill) will help me retire early.
sleight42 4 hours ago [-]
And Apple will continue to because they have to sell more devices to keep customers interested.
amenghra 3 hours ago [-]
Apple could release a new on-device LLM model every year and keep the hyperconsumerism going...
Noaidi 3 hours ago [-]
I have a MacBook M1 and I recently had to downgrade from Tahoe to Sequoia. Why? First of all they force you to download 7 GB of AI training when you’re not even using their AI. And secondly on Tahoe just watching a video with nothing else running off-line my MacBook was asking for 7 W of power. On Sequoia that drops down to 2 W maybe three.
It’s sad to think they think of themselves as an environmental company, I don’t know if they do, but this update to Sequoia literally doubled the amount of M1 max that are running on the planet in terms of power use.
seanp2k2 1 days ago [-]
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.
plqbfbv 22 hours ago [-]
> 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 believe all of them realized nobody really needs more than 16c32t on a desktop, and architectural changes nowadays can only go so far to bump performance. The biggest changes across generations in the last ~5 years were the introduction of specialized instructions for wider vectors (AVX512/AVX2, and even then you need specialized workloads to use them), bigger L3 caches and/or efficiency cores to lower power draw. The double-digits gains recently were in memory bandwidth, frequency and locality, because you can make a 5GHz CPU and make it go 10% faster than the previous generation, but you also need to supply the extra data for the CPU to make useful work so that it's not data-starved.
> 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 built my desktop in 2019 (right before the COVID madness, luckily) and I was also used to 1-3 year cycles. I upgraded the CPU and GPU since then, but the performance is still that of a workstation, even though perhaps a little bit behind in pure single-core benchmarks. I plan to keep this until either CPU, RAM or MB fall out (hopefully another 5y at least), and then I'll make a huge leap, instead of making 4x smaller ones which deliver little uplift anyway.
atiedebee 13 hours ago [-]
The biggest changes across generations in the last ~5 years were the introduction of specialized instructions for wider vectors (AVX512/AVX2, and even then you need specialized workloads to use them), [...]
AVX2 is actually 13 years (!) old already (first appearing in Intel's Haswell architecture).
AVX512 is also nearly 10 years old right now, but not many CPUs actually support it (none of the devices I own support it)
Aditya_Garg 1 days ago [-]
Are you willing to short anthropic and openai on your beliefs? Would love to be on the other side of this trade.
dietr1ch 12 hours ago [-]
People think that shorting is an easy way of getting rich when you think a stock will go down, but even if you know it will, getting the timing wrong on it is catastrophic as you'll get unbounded loses while the market fails to correct the issues you are betting against
Sohcahtoa82 44 minutes ago [-]
As the saying goes...the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
allendoerfer 55 minutes ago [-]
"I may have been early, but I am not wrong!"
"It's the same thing, Michael! It's the same thing!"
Der_Einzige 10 minutes ago [-]
People who talk shit about stocks are talking shit about stocks at a particular time.
"Oh no, when you apply scrutiny to my bullshit I get punished! That means the game is wrong!"
pjc50 3 hours ago [-]
I wouldn't even short Bitcoin, and that's been on the way out since the AI rise.
AngryData 22 hours ago [-]
"Sometime in the next few years" is not anywhere near narrow enough of a window to start putting shorts on stock prices.
ReptileMan 3 hours ago [-]
Somewhat hard to short non public company, don't you think?
nickjj 22 hours ago [-]
I'm running a 12 year old i5 3.2ghz CPU with 16 GB of memory, an SSD and an AMD RX 480 (8 GB) GPU. Currently using a 100% scaled 4k monitor and a 2nd 1440p monitor. I keep the machine on 24 / 7. It's great for software development along with video + image editing and casual gaming. Everything feels fast and snappy.
I will use this until the hardware stops. There's a 0% chance I'd buy hardware at the current prices.
cosmic_cheese 22 hours ago [-]
It really depends on what the task at hand is.
I have a baseline iMac Pro and custom built tower with similar specs (3.2Ghz Xeon W-2140B, 32GB RAM, Vega Pro 56 and i7-6700K, 32GB, 5700XT respectively) and they're both perfectly responsive. For many day to day things the difference between them and newer machines is negligible. For other things, my 5950X tower and M5 Max MBP run circles around them.
Both the 5950X tower and M5 Max MBP are deep into diminishing returns territory regardless, however. Aside from some extreme niche workloads like LLMs I can't imagine needing anything more powerful. They both have a ridiculous amount of headroom for the overwhelming majority of anything most people might want a computer for.
nickjj 21 hours ago [-]
Yep, I have an M4 MBP company issued laptop for work and in my day to day there's not a enough of a performance win to feel like I'm missing out for most tasks.
Sure, the Slack web app might initially load half a second faster since there's a lot of CPU bound JS executing but generally speaking I never feel like "wow this sucks" on my main machine. It's kind of the opposite, for a number of things my desktop machine feels faster than the MBP for overall "using the computer", with development heavy tasks (running Docker based web apps, browser tabs, various tools open, streaming music, etc.). It was like that when I ran Windows 10 Pro with WSL 2 and now native Linux with Arch + niri.
Even CPU bound tasks on my 12 year old box that I do a lot, such as editing a blog post on a static site with Hugo takes ~100ms to get live reloading with over 1,000 posts and drafts. I'm sure if I were constantly doing huge CPU bound tasks I'd have issues but I don't have that use case.
After recording 500+ videos, encoding isn't a problem too. If I record a 30 min video, it takes ~20 minutes to render but it's so easy to fit that into other areas of my life, like I'll record + edit a video and then render it while I walk.
harhargange 3 hours ago [-]
I recently built a pc with 5950x and 7900xt. What do you mean by diminishing returns?
recursivedoubts 1 days ago [-]
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.
I'm also using an iPhone mini 12 and it's fine.
jdswain 1 days ago [-]
I too have an M1 Pro and it does everything I need to do. I bought it in 2023, so it's 'only' 3.5 years old now.
Maybe this is the tipping point where hardware companies can't rely on the upgrade cycle for sales any more. I've always upgraded at least every three years, but with the combination of high RAM prices and good enough performance from an older machine, there is no need to.
revolvingthrow 1 days ago [-]
There isn't much to upgrade to if all you want is a desktop for gaming, a non-workstation work box or just a decent laptop. Much like smartphones, there just hasn't been much innovation of late. A midrange gaming desktop from mid 2023, something like rtx 4070 and ryzen 7800x3d, can still play pretty much any video game on max settings and high framerate at 1440p, and has sufficient performance for most workstation-esque tasks as long as you have enough ram. Similarly, the only thing my spare macbook m2 lacks compared to m5 is hardware av1 decoding - the performance is worse, but I don't really notice it in normal usage, and macOS 27 runs perfectly well on it.
Local AI will crush any machine, of course, and if you need a 512gb ram box you'll probably need to sell both kidneys, but you're well past the average consumer territory with those.
So, fingers crossed nothing breaks down and that some of the funny money goes into R&D which will eventually trickle down to consumer devices in a few years (16TB gum stick SSDs at sane prices pretty please) instead of endless datacenter GPUs and SSDs that will be tossed into a shredder in x years.
pseudohadamard 10 hours ago [-]
My desktop PC turns 20 next year. I've never seen any need to upgrade it, went out of my way to build it with silent parts and it rarely if ever goes outside a single-digit CPU load (before anyone asks, software development and a bit of CAD work). I'll upgrade it when something in it physically fails, which means I'll need to replace it with new hardware with 5-10x the specs just to get the same performance.
My laptop is currently about two years into a typically 5-year lifespan, limited by when the keys start to fail rather than any need to upgrade it just because. The RAM in it is now worth more than the rest of the laptop.
rwyinuse 1 hours ago [-]
This is one of the rare situations where an out-of-control homelab & PC building hobby is actually useful. With over 250GB of RAM & 90TB of storage I will be fine for a while, especially as long as DDR4 era machines remain relevant.
bigbuppo 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, it really sucks I can't even afford a computer that can have two Chrome tabs open these days.
forinti 1 days ago [-]
I've been using computers for more than 40 years now and the one component I have never seen fail is RAM.
All the other bits in a computer I've seen fail.
Sohcahtoa82 32 minutes ago [-]
I've had a RAM stick fail.
Granted, I've been building my own computer for 30 years and I've only seen it happen ONCE.
But I've seen plenty of other failures:
- Two hard drives -- One got dropped on the floor, so it was no surprise, the other was showing degraded performance and SMART showed some scary numbers and I was able to replace it before I lost data.
- One GPU, replaced under warranty.
- One AIO water cooler, replaced under warranty. Somehow, the water vanished from the loop. I'm guessing a microscopic leak that evaporated as fast as it leaked.
- Two power supplies -- One randomly exploded. Just started making popping noises and shooting sparks out the back. At autopsy, I determined that the fan failed (it was hard to spin manually) and it overheated. The other was just being overloaded. I had just gotten a new GPU and the PSU wasn't big enough for it.
- Several case fans.
Never seen a CPU or motherboard failure, even when my AIO water cooler was failing and my CPU was constantly at thermal limits. Never had an SSD/NVMe failure.
cosmic_cheese 1 days ago [-]
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.
seanp2k2 1 days ago [-]
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.
davkan 1 days ago [-]
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.
sva_ 3 hours ago [-]
Had the EVGA 1000w fail on me. It did not fail dramatically though, rather it refused to output high power. Got a replacement under warranty
milesvp 23 hours ago [-]
It’s the caps that fail. Electrolytic caps have the highest failure rate of any passive component. My team tries to avoid them in our designs as much as possible. But you’re right, caps in a good design can easily last 20 years, making a power supply the longest lasting component of most builds.
davkan 22 hours ago [-]
My go to source for reviews was always jonnyguru.com but he closed up shop. Not sure who’s actually doing in-depth performance and component reviews these days.
copperx 5 hours ago [-]
What brand of power supply?
derf_ 3 hours ago [-]
> The component category I've never seen fail is CPU.
The CPU can fail if the heatsink falls off! That is something that happens (I've had one come off in my hand that was being held on by nothing but hopes and dreams, fortunately not while the CPU was powered on). More likely in a desktop tower form factor.
forinti 1 days ago [-]
You didn't hold on to your Pentium 4 long enough. :-)
cosmic_cheese 1 days ago [-]
My main machines were PowerPC G3s/G4s/G5s back then with the P4 boxes I had taking secondary/tertiary roles, so that lines up.
dijit 1 days ago [-]
Anecdatum, but mine still works :D
drum55 1 days ago [-]
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.
trashface 3 hours ago [-]
I had a 2012 mac book pro that burned out 2 different crucial memory sticks. Would have bricked the machine if it was the soldered-on type, but it was the last model apple sold that have swappable memory. Crucial had a lifetime warranty so they replaced them for free.
I used to game on it and I think the design just couldn't handle the cpu and dgpu being active for long periods, it would get extremely hot in the area close to where the memory was.
icedchai 1 days ago [-]
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.
harhargange 3 hours ago [-]
So you can still use the hardware via software fix?
icedchai 1 hours ago [-]
Correct! Basically, I excluded the bad range so Linux doesn't touch it. It's been stable for weeks now. I should send the DIMM back under warranty.
dontSendItBack 6 minutes ago [-]
Don't send it back. Since they can't easily replace it with new hardware, they will probably refund you the price of purchase. Which is normally a very good deal, but obviously not in these circumstances. I've seen it happen with GPUs as well.
zymhan 45 minutes ago [-]
You may literally be the only one.
dgellow 1 days ago [-]
Well, you’re lucky. I had to change laptop memory sticks a few times. Though not since they are soldered directly to the motherboard
dilyevsky 3 hours ago [-]
on older PC bios would perform a memory test - you may remember those - and that's where it would mark a bunch of pages dead/unusuable and it was not uncommon at all.
deadbunny 1 days ago [-]
Same, it's either bad to begin with or it's basically immortal.
kasabali 1 days ago [-]
This isn’t true anymore beginning with DDR4 speeds.
rwyinuse 1 hours ago [-]
Interesting, I've had two fail already in much shorter time. One was brand new, another quite old.
BenjiWiebe 1 days ago [-]
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.
forinti 1 days ago [-]
I've seen computers brought back to life after flooding by lying in rice for a week, but they weren't turned on when the water hit (and not all survived).
somerandomqaguy 1 days ago [-]
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.
iwontberude 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Foobar8568 1 days ago [-]
I bought a prebuilt with a 5090 a little over than one month ago, whole system was on sales.
The cost of the prebuilt is now lower than today 5090 price.
ls612 3 hours ago [-]
I built my machine in 2022 with 64GB of memory and upgraded to a 4090 at MSRP in 2023 so at this point I'm good but I fear the back end of the bathtub curve. I currently expect to have to hold on until 2029 and at that point the mobo and CPU will be 7 years old, and the GPU almost 6.
layer8 20 minutes ago [-]
I’m running PCs with 13 and 15 year old motherboards/CPUs/RAM. I wouldn’t worry about seven years.
cyanydeez 22 hours ago [-]
before the memory cartel, I was automatically putting in 64 or 128GB for my work flow as the prices just seems absurd not to.
qurren 1 days ago [-]
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.
Analemma_ 1 days ago [-]
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.
hobojojo 1 days ago [-]
China is making central decisions for its RAM makers (and who can complain now that the US isn't a legitimate free trade defender). I think their strategy could go in any direction to either get a small portion of still gouging or a large portion of a market with somewhat stale specs.
matheusmoreira 3 hours ago [-]
Surely the chinese are spinning up fabs as we speak?
fhars 2 hours ago [-]
DDR4, and from some comments I have seen around here of only marginally acceptable reliability. It may still take a few years if until they have all the production processes fully under control.
haunter 2 hours ago [-]
If you want even more bad news: display panel makers also want to raise prices
"Due to the continued rise in the prices of core components globally, the production cost of monitors has increased significantly, and we can no longer absorb this pressure on our own."
It would strange if just when a lot of articles mention computing / social networks are detrimental, governments start passing laws to forbid platforms and/or phones for kids, and now price gouging flares up everywhere, this would entice people to just stop using these devices and maybe enjoy natural taper-off.
aok1425 1 hours ago [-]
I like this idea! Perhaps folks will game less on PCs and consoles. But would they shift to playing on their phones? Or play less video games overall?
Also, when OpenAI's new device comes out, would people shift to talking to these small devices?
sys32768 2 hours ago [-]
My Dell rep quoted me $736 for a single 16GB RDIMM for the newer Dell Pro 16 laptop, which retails at its baseline configuration with 16GB for ~$1000.
bluedino 2 hours ago [-]
Dell wants $4,507 (web price) for each 32GB RDIMM in a PowerEdge 6625 (16GB is showing as unavailable)
tedggh 23 hours ago [-]
I still hope all this will come crashing down, there will be an oversupply of components and RAM will be cheaper than paper.
stuxnet79 23 hours ago [-]
While I share your optimism, I still don't fully understand why a crash will necessarily lead to an oversupply and lower prices for regular consumers. The components / RAM you are referencing are for enterprise use / data centers which in my limited understanding is not a 1:1 swap for the kind of components that your smartphone / car / fridge / gaming rig use. I would love for someone more informed than me to spell out the rationale here.
It seems the chokehold started from the very beginning of the supply chain (wafers), so if a crash were to occur I don't see how we wouldn't be doubly screwed. Lots of worthless enterprise gear being shopped on eBay + a scarcity of consumer grade components leading to sustained high prices.
tedggh 28 minutes ago [-]
The way I understand it is, these fabs have massive overheads so not selling is not an option. It is also relatively easy to pivot production from enterprise to consumer. Now if they all start doing that at the same time to stay in business during the down cycle, an oversupply in consumer chips is possible.
wmf 1 hours ago [-]
Memory fabs make a mix of DDR/LPDDR/GDDR/HBM and they continuously adjust the mix to market demand. If demand for HBM drops they will start making more consumer RAM.
auc 3 hours ago [-]
"I've seen gluts not followed by shortages, but I've never seen a shortage not followed by a glut." - NNTaleb
greggoB 23 hours ago [-]
My understanding is that it's fundamentally a fab capacity limit. At a given node size/technology (think 7nm, etc) they can only output so many wafers. If AI data centers are generating enormous demand for memory, then that's what those wafers are going to be used to for, unless they can be outcompeted, hence higher prices.
I'm not actually sure if enterprise designated memory is equivalent or not to consumer designated. Could be they are the same just packaged differently and/or with better binning. Either way, it's the same supply/demand dynamic at work.
matt-p 22 hours ago [-]
Typically (not always!) server memory is 'registered' so won't work with consumer CPUs which run on un-registered.
greggoB 11 hours ago [-]
Does 'registration' introduce anything physically different? Or could they be completely interoperable?
matt-p 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah a RCD on the memory stick, it's PCB is designed around it. The actual DRAM chips themselves are not different though, which is why I mention it would be super easy to produce more consumer unregistered and less server registered at assembly time :)
greggoB 27 seconds ago [-]
Thanks for the clarification, that makes a lot of sense!
matt-p 22 hours ago [-]
Datacentre NVMe disk is still usable in a standard desktop. Sever memory less so, but essentially if there were no 'new' server market whatsoever then you could redirect 100% of memory production to consumer chips without enormous upheaval.
By the way I personally think this scenario is very unlikely to happen.
stuxnet79 22 hours ago [-]
> If there were no 'new' server market whatsoever then you could redirect 100% of memory production to consumer chips without enormous upheaval.
> By the way I personally think this scenario is very unlikely to happen.
Can you explain why? I imagine pivoting to a much less lucrative consumer market when the time comes would lead to financial ruin?
matt-p 20 hours ago [-]
We are starting from a frankly completely unimaginable hypothetical that there's 0 new "datacentre demand".
In that scenario producing consumer chips is still profitable, much less profitable but still much better than giving up and going home.
You will also unlock latent demand by the mere fact that consumer prices are reasonable again. Those who may have postponed a new MacBook or gaming PC will likely buy as soon as lower prices return.
jijijijij 3 hours ago [-]
> you could redirect 100% of memory production to consumer chips without enormous upheaval
They would never do that. By then the market has changed and they would produce at the limit of expected demand, certainly not intentionally causing oversupply.
jrflo 3 hours ago [-]
The net effect of a crash would be far worse than the benefit of getting a bit of a discount on RAM and storage.
Paianni 2 hours ago [-]
This is why the companies should be aiming for a soft landing to this fad (if they know that they can't make the ROI that makes the industry worthwhile).
n3ll1x93 2 hours ago [-]
It's crazy if you think that some years ago were the cheaper part of a personal computer compared to motherboard, cpu, gpu and so on.
jnpnj 2 hours ago [-]
last year i mis-bought a ssd on amazon (wrong size or model i can't recall) so I asked for a return, surprisingly amazon wanted to save on transport that they offered to pay me to keep it (i don't want to spread stupid claim but maybe the full item price), i was confused and worried it would create issues down the road so i sent it back thinking i'd buy the proper item the month after.. and now i'm running duplicate search programs to save space on drives.
acd 2 hours ago [-]
I have written a llm compression quantization library called glq because of the high ram prices. Glq uses qtip Trellis quantization which are efficient at low bpw 2-4 bits. As a gamer and ai developer I want to squeeze more out of the same hardware. Glq runs with vLLM.
I almost upgraded my computer a year or two ago, but decided to hold off for a bit longer.
I've always been fine with being "behind" on the latest and greatest. I don't mind watching a movie, playing a game, buying a cell phone, etc, that was released a few years prior. If it was really all that great when it came out it should still be good later on.
Buying slow usually saves a.good bit of money when prices go down over time... but this time they went way up and now I'm kicking myself on it. Not upgrading the computer for now, but it is a bit overdue since I had already put it off for many years.
david422 19 minutes ago [-]
I upgraded a year ago and I bought a bunch of extra RAM because it was "so cheap", why not. Man did I get lucky, I got it right before the price hikes started.
sfn42 11 minutes ago [-]
I ordered a new CPU on sale a while back, right when the memory prices started spiking. I didn't even know RAM was going up in price. Realized the CPU needed a new motherboard and ram so I ordered the motherboard, started looking at ram and realized it would cost almost as much as the Mobo and CPU put together. Cancelled the orders because I wasn't intending a big expensive upgrade.
What I have is still fine, though I do regret cancelling now.
SoftTalker 2 hours ago [-]
100% what I do. I buy a few years behind the leading edge, and keep the device until it either dies or will no longer do what I need it to do.
My main desktop computer is Haswell era. Still does fine, for what I do.
mordae 2 hours ago [-]
Except staying on the edge costs exactly the same as not, when you take the resell value of the components on the second hand market into account. The problem is that some can afford to lock their capital in the hardware (via one-time investment) and some do not.
R9700 will lose less than 30% of value in the upcoming 3 years. Give or take. Yet people buy ancient cards for way more than 30% of R9700's cost.
geodel 53 minutes ago [-]
No hope in US but I hope EU regulators are taking note of this working on fix as we talk.
jayd16 1 days ago [-]
Any new fabs on the horizon or do the powers that be expect the music to stop sooner than that?
layer8 16 minutes ago [-]
They are building fabs on track to get online towards the end of 2027, full capacity production expected for 2028. These are serious pieces of very complex technology that take years, not months, to build.
nullbyte 3 hours ago [-]
CXMT is a memory fab that just opened in China. They achieved a 90% yield on DDR5. Hopefully that could ease up the supply squeeze.
greggoB 23 hours ago [-]
I believe they've been building them like crazy since covid, but it takes a looong time for them to come online (like 5-10 years?)
tadasv 2 hours ago [-]
Ram, hdd, ssd, even blu-ray writers are expensive. I purchased mdisc blu-ray writer for $70 in 2021, I see people are trying to sell the same device for $500+ wtf
varispeed 42 minutes ago [-]
With such profit margins, any new players entering the market will want those. This means prices are unlikely going to go down unless demand for memory vanishes, even if new suppliers come to the table.
Sharlin 3 hours ago [-]
I'm really happy that I bought 32G of RAM and a 2T M.2 SSD for my desktop two years ago. In retrospect, of course, I should've bought 64G and 4T.
nazgulsenpai 1 days ago [-]
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.
greggoB 22 hours ago [-]
I got a 3060 ti for like $900 at that time <melting-face-emoji>
paulpauper 52 minutes ago [-]
This is "the memory shortage that no one saw coming." To the best of my knowledge, no podcasters, bloggers, or experts in AI predicted this or were sounding the alarm of a memory shortage. No one was saying pre-2025 to buy memory/data storage stocks. This goes to show how hard it is to predict. Everyone was saying to buy NVDA, which had done well from 2022-2024, and then stalled out, only to be surpassed by memory stocks like SanDisk, Western Digital, and Micron, which took many by surprise.
poulpy123 10 hours ago [-]
I cross my fingers that my 10 years old laptop and desktop will hold until the crazyness ends
rocketvole 3 hours ago [-]
same. still rockin a 2016 era dell xps 13. I was about to pull the trigger on a few laptops but I always psych myself out because I assume prices will drop and I can pick them up secondhand. big mistake...
master_crab 1 days ago [-]
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?
phonon 1 days ago [-]
OpenAI (Stargate) kicked off the price increases a year ago by locking up 40% of the global supply of RAM output.
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
Legend2440 24 hours ago [-]
>even if there was enough power there’s no use case for this much spend
According to them, demand for tokens already exceeds supply. Coding agents are very popular but burn through millions of tokens per hour.
The reasoning models that have powered breakthroughs in AI for math, coding, etc require substantially more compute than base LLMs.
3848488484 2 hours ago [-]
Let's see Paul Allens IPO filling
Arwill 3 hours ago [-]
Also imagine people having their own cheap 2TB rigs at home for their own usage/inference, or a multitude of small providers serving/sharing capacity thanks to cheap available hardware.
But we cant have that, as the big guys are hoarding everything for themselves, so that you have to pay them instead.
nzrf 22 hours ago [-]
I’ve been wondering this if you buy up all the memory you can ensure the competition cannot compete with huge investment raising the bar for competition. Of course this all sounds all conspiracy theory. Though without a place to power this or put it makes me wonder this.
llama052 1 hours ago [-]
It also would be a huge win for the memory companies to agree to this, considering they will make more money with less supply. Seems interesting to me.
andriy_koval 1 days ago [-]
next they will become successful business by reselling RAM
dgellow 1 days ago [-]
There is a reason NVIDIA and the hyperscalers are injecting so much money into them
giantrobot 1 days ago [-]
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.
iLoveOncall 1 days ago [-]
Storage has more than doubled as well. The same SSD (4TB M.2) I bought in September 2025 for £229 is now £500.
I also had another order where I paid £30 for a 1TB SSD (sata though) and it is now more than £100...
bpye 1 days ago [-]
Not just SSDs, HDDs are also way more expensive. End of 2024 I bought 4 14TB drives for ~$250 CAD each, $400+ for even a refurb drive now.
The possibility that these fail does concern me.
z2 3 hours ago [-]
And that's the really fun part of all this, that weak substitutes will also become more expensive. But on the bright side, I've got dozens of sticks of DDR3 RAM that I'm hoarding like Pokémon cards. Any day now, we'll get desperate enough to start using them again!
platevoltage 1 hours ago [-]
AI Datacenter proponents do not get to complain about this.
3 hours ago [-]
mk_stjames 24 hours ago [-]
I noticed that resellers on ebay of used server equipment that I keep an eye on in Germany pulled all their DDR4 from surplus and used server racks and now list it separately for sale, at jacked up prices. Where you used to be able to see a used Gigabyte server listed with "128GB" "256GB" etc listed in the title, they now all say "0GB". They took extra effort, to pull used ram from older servers, and list it separate, just out of the greed of potentially capitalizing on this market.
The problem is... now for anyone looking to pickup a slightly older used/surplus server rack - you have the go and buy the (now marked up) RAM separate.
So... did they list the "0GB" racks with removed ram cheaper you ask?
Nope. Many of them seem to be basically the same price as they were or even higher than they were, except now you're paying for RAM separate.
I bought a surplus Gigabyte server about 2 years ago off ebay for a home project, and I just went and the same seller still has some for sale, even older now than they were when I grabbed one, but they are 2x the price, and they don't come with any RAM, whereas I got one already populated as they were from the factory. Once you add that back in literally looking at 150-200% markup in the last 2 years on what was just surplus computer equipment that is 5+ years old.
aliasxneo 3 hours ago [-]
Why would I voluntarily choose to sell the hardware I have for less than the going price? The odds of it getting picked up by a scalper and resold are extremely high. If I was sitting on a goldmine of old server hardware, I would absolutely be ripping out the RAM and selling it per stick in this market.
toenail 3 hours ago [-]
Greed? Resellers aren't charities, good for them if the value of their stock goes up. Besides, people buying server equipment aren't exactly starving, I bet most of them can either simply not buy the server, or cut some other expense.
greggoB 22 hours ago [-]
> So... did they list the "0GB" racks with removed ram cheaper you ask?
Could this be an indication that there's a supply shortage/price increase of the remaining components in the rack? Or do you interpret it as people just trying their luck out of sheer greed?
OutOfHere 1 days ago [-]
I guess it's high time to stop using memory inefficient programming languages for any serious work.
datakan 1 days ago [-]
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.
dofm 1 days ago [-]
I hate that I am no longer certain I don’t need to buy a new machine just in case.
josefritzishere 1 days ago [-]
The fake economics of the AI sector are damaging the real economy. This is madness.
__MatrixMan__ 38 minutes ago [-]
Deep down it's all just people telling stories. If the AI sector's story is setting the price, and yours is not, then theirs is the real real one, not yours.
It's a totally broken way to practice economics, but alas, it's ours until we change it.
surcap526 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
nullsmack 1 days ago [-]
Even with AI pressure I'm willing to bet there's no need for prices to be this high. There has to be some price gouging/fixing going on. Same thing for nand and GPUs. Or else they're doing it to try to pressure people not to use local compute instead of the "cloud"
Tadpole9181 9 hours ago [-]
Memory manufacturers have gone through several cycles of lawsuits for market collusion at this point. It's gone from an open secret to just outright flaunting in our face.
Until the penalties involve actual jail time or a fine 10x larger than the profit they made from doing it, they couldn't care less.
palmotea 1 days ago [-]
Good. The more expensive memory is, the more everyone will be pushed into using cloud AI from hyperscalars.
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.
unsui 1 days ago [-]
No, this is not good, in any way, except for AI shareholders (of which I assume you are one, else not rational to support this position).
Paperclipping here, greedily optimizing for shareholder value above all else. Please stop.
deadbunny 1 days ago [-]
Some people really so need the /s huh
dgellow 1 days ago [-]
To be fair, the AI boosters are saying the exact same thing but mean it seriously. There is no way to distinguish without a tone indicator
bhaney 1 days ago [-]
> There is no way to distinguish without a tone indicator
And yet many of us aren't having any trouble distinguishing.
unsui 2 minutes ago [-]
"sarcasm" is a cop-out.
The writer can simply say "it was a joke!", cuz we all know someone who uses this pattern regularly when they are trying to squeeze in a non-popular but highly lucrative (to the messenger) position to test the waters.
Either it lands (in which case, it was always meant to be taken literally), or it doesn't land (and can always be walked back as "it was meant sarcastically" or "can't you take a joke?"
The cost proposition to sending this message payload is low, since the messenger can always wiggle their way out (therefore, a "cop-out").
Therefore the need to be more explicit (i.e., /s) in a medium with little nuance affordances for tone and the significantly-increasing risk of such non-popular messages being taken literally (particularly by the also significantly-increasing audience of robots, who themselves may not have the capacity for nuance or irony detection).
Tl;Dr
It's a cop-out, and should be stopped.
dgellow 6 hours ago [-]
Given the number of upvotes my comment got and the other comments where people missed the sarcasm, I wouldn’t be too sure that many people have no trouble distinguishing
unsui 1 days ago [-]
sadly, Poe's law scales exponentially on HN
__MatrixMan__ 2 hours ago [-]
If the shareholders are backing outcomes that make life worse for the rest of us, they deserve to lose money.
23 hours ago [-]
whateveracct 1 days ago [-]
what the heck
did you drop a '/s'?
OutOfHere 1 days ago [-]
> and the shareholders.
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.
dijit 1 days ago [-]
I'm quite sure he's being sarcastic.
"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.
yoyohello13 3 hours ago [-]
I’ve been on HN long enough to know that a disturbing number of people do actually believe that line and act accordingly.
unsui 1 days ago [-]
The fact that, on HN, you can't be sure of that, tells you all you need to know.
OutOfHere 1 days ago [-]
I have the innate right to take what is said literally. Moreover, his preceding statements attempt to legitimize his concluding statement.
palmotea 19 hours ago [-]
You also have the innate right to be off base, btw.
It's sarcasm, and the main tell is I'm not even bothering with pretense; just serving up the dystopia straight and acting like that's good.
But one of the "fun" things about HN is SV is so fucked up you can't even be sure someone doesn't actually sincerely believe that shit. And most of them are probably dumbasses with nothing to gain.
OutOfHere 17 hours ago [-]
I appreciate sarcasm when it's clear. Marking it as "/s" prevents this whole line of discussion. As you noted in your last paragraph, it's hard to be sure without a marking.
techteach00 19 minutes ago [-]
There is no law that states memory must be a consumer product. I truly believe the era of personal computing was a beautiful blip that our masters are beginning to take away from the general public. It could be terminals and time sharing for the foreseeable future through "smart" phones.
techteach00 16 minutes ago [-]
Just so I make it clear. I'm deeply opposed to this change.
Over the long term demand will rationalise and supply will adjust. But in between there is a squeeze, and the right price is the maximum price buyers are willing to bid for the limited supply. Sucks for other buyers, on the other hand it ensures demand destruction, i.e. that the limited supply goes to the buyer who need it the most, other buyers will delay their purchase and do with what they have.
The question is how quickly the supply adjusts. In a free market, the suppliers would respond to the price signal by quickly expanding their production to meet the elevated demand.
But a market captured by a cartel will be much slower to expand the supply.
So, the test isn't "how much is price going up" it's "how aggressively are the RAM producers expanding supply production"
Cartels aren't known for massively increasing production to satisfy all demand. Far from it I'd say, they're more likely to expand supply to such a level that they can still reap massive profits. Very few countries/companies have the knowhow and willingness to be able to build more.
OPEC is a perfect example of this behaviour. They set hearly production goals to keep prices high. Or the Quebec Maple Syrup Producers organization that limits the amount of syrup a farmer can produce and sell in a year to keep prices high.
I said:
> the test isn't "how much is price going up" it's "how aggressively are the RAM producers expanding supply production"
Even when it comes to manufacturing the tooling/testing infrastructure, it's just a question of money aiui.
Oh yea, governments can fix by putting 100 billion in memory fabs right now, and when demand crater in decade or so, let tax payer eat the cost of those fabs. At least it will benefit poor computer users like me.
Why would they?
And you claim to have historic examples where they did?
I didn't say that there was a way to do it in the short run. I laid out what the test is to determine if there's cartel-like behavior or competitive-market-like behavior.
I will say, in a market with only 3 players and very high cap-ex cost, my prior is that you're likely to see more cartel-like behavior than competitive-market-like behavior, but that's still to be determined.
20 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing
> According to the one-count charge filed in San Francisco's federal court on Thursday, Park conspired with unnamed employees from other memory makers to fix the price of DRAM sold to computer makers from April 1, 2001, to June 15, 2002. The government says the move directly affected sales to U.S. computer makers Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, IBM, Apple Computer, and Gateway.
etc
It's pretty simple. In a correctly regulated market the sellers are in competition with each other so there is a limit to how much they can increase prices, since they'll just lose business to their competitor.
In a poorly regulated market that allows competitors to collude with each other to raise prices by the same amount, they'll inflate prices much further.
They have slow rolled rollouts and everything, if there wasn't CXMT they would probably still wouldn't have budged on building new fabs for a while longer.
You can absolutely price fix/manufacture a shortage. Ever heard of merchants setting fire to crops after hoarding to sell at a higher price?
The issue is the distributer and producer are the very same people this essentially means producers have no incentive to rationalize supply, they can make much more money of the long drawn out shortage.
If you want evidence that no one predicted this, look at WD. They disinvested from sandisk up to early this year. Now sandisk is worth more than WD. Doesn't seem consistent with a concerted strategy to gauge prices.
> You can absolutely price fix/manufacture a shortage. Ever heard of merchants setting fire to crops after hoarding to sell at a higher price?
Fine. Show me which manufacturer is cutting production to corner the market. I don't see that.
It's not like wheat, where you just can just plant more at marginal cost (I'm sure someone in farming will now explain why that isn't exactly true either).
https://www.blocksandfiles.com/ai-ml/2026/01/20/samsung-sk-h...
Big manufactures have absolutely cut production of lower margin products and it's not like they can re-purpose all of the equipment used for it for HBM yet. edit They can definitely focus more resource because of it on HBM though.
Things have improved a bit since govts are starting to get angry.
Tldr; no one is cutting the production of high margin stuff, but low margin stuff can go and die, because it's not a free market it's a stock market these companies want to show off better margins in every unit there is no reason to keep inefficient things running when not doing it pays more.
They just don't want 30-40% margins anymore. That is not free market that is quite literally serving their own interests because they know there is a monopoly.
All big memory manufacturers are heavily supported by the govt, that's what has made them the monopolies they are Micron supported by USA (they crushed Japan's memory industry for it), and Korean giants are more tangled up with the govt than well most people in US would realize.
Somehow people think free market means anything goes, which honestly is where we stand today so I don't blame anyone.
But using govts to crush competitions and build yourself up on subsidies and similar isn't really free markets. China hasn't been able to grow a significant memory chip industry yet because of lack of EUV machines and similar technologies blocked by the US, which is also not "free market".
As for WD, and Sandisk separating I feel like this was more mutual and they new HDDs or SSDs being together was a distraction for both. Which feels more strategic, think of it like this, the shareholders who had the shares how hold shares in both and together they might have likely been worth less so shareholders made money.
Aka good for free market. I don't see how that relates to the actual memory crunch issue more broadly.
I don't know if I would personally fund such a venture though, for roughly the same reason existing manufacturers aren't expanding production.
That's EXACTLY how a free market is supposed to work. The existing memory manufacturers are FREE to not build new factories, and anyone else is FREE to build those factories in their place.
And then we have bubble issues because the introduction of a new, cheaper player, causes the bottom to fall out and for the circumstances that allowed the new manufacturer to exist to completely go away.
The fix is regulation - we are going to have NOT-FREE-MARKET electricity, NOT-FREE-MARKET water supply, .... for vital services.
I'm not talking about you, it's funny to see anti-regulation HN complain about a FREE MARKET working as such. Suddenly it's not so fun where you are at the losing end of the free market when it turns out some are willing to pay way more for RAM than you are.
Will you die without it?
Will your life as you know it end if your next phone has 8GB instead of 12GB?
...that's how the market works. This is called capital discipline and is standard across industries. If the increase in demand is temporary, they would be spending 5-10 years of profit on facilities which will only lose money. The same works in non-capitalist economies too, you don't want to waste resources on stranded assets and many still believe this RAM demand is temporary and the house of cards will collapse.
This was not created by the manufacturers.
...3 manufacturers with a long history of price fixing...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing
That's not a long history of pricing fixing, just accusations.
I honestly don't think they need to fix their prices, and it's possible that selling to consumers is a secondary market for them compared to datacenters, like Nvidia selling GPUs to gamers. We know that's not where the money is.
Seeing some companies actually exit the consumer market is evidence for this.
When parent commenter says "They have done this in the past after all" that's exactly what they're talking about. Micron, Samsung, Hyinx (prior to SK Group acquisition), and others all participated in RAM price fixing in the early 2000's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing#202...
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.
When I build a PC, I pay a little extra because I want it to last a long time. I aim for 5 years, and in reality it usually ends up 7 years (life happens, need the money, etc).
I am now in year 8 of my current PC. I only had money to replace it this year, and am now stuck with it due to the RAM prices. It's going to really suck for me if my RAM fails in the next few years.
Also the coming iOS 27 release supposedly has some big performance improvements for all supported models that people have verified in the beta releases even with the iPhone 11: https://www.macworld.com/article/3160623/apple-finally-figur...
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67911517
Absolutely. The only reason I want to upgrade to an iPhone 18 next year is because the 16 doesn't have MIE (Memory Integrity Enforcement) and it feels ridiculous to upgrade so quickly to the 17, which does have MIE. Same thing with a Neo 2. But mostly I buy surplus gear. I've saved a small fortune this way and 8% compounding returns (VT and chill) will help me retire early.
It’s sad to think they think of themselves as an environmental company, I don’t know if they do, but this update to Sequoia literally doubled the amount of M1 max that are running on the planet in terms of power use.
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 believe all of them realized nobody really needs more than 16c32t on a desktop, and architectural changes nowadays can only go so far to bump performance. The biggest changes across generations in the last ~5 years were the introduction of specialized instructions for wider vectors (AVX512/AVX2, and even then you need specialized workloads to use them), bigger L3 caches and/or efficiency cores to lower power draw. The double-digits gains recently were in memory bandwidth, frequency and locality, because you can make a 5GHz CPU and make it go 10% faster than the previous generation, but you also need to supply the extra data for the CPU to make useful work so that it's not data-starved.
> 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 built my desktop in 2019 (right before the COVID madness, luckily) and I was also used to 1-3 year cycles. I upgraded the CPU and GPU since then, but the performance is still that of a workstation, even though perhaps a little bit behind in pure single-core benchmarks. I plan to keep this until either CPU, RAM or MB fall out (hopefully another 5y at least), and then I'll make a huge leap, instead of making 4x smaller ones which deliver little uplift anyway.
AVX2 is actually 13 years (!) old already (first appearing in Intel's Haswell architecture).
AVX512 is also nearly 10 years old right now, but not many CPUs actually support it (none of the devices I own support it)
"It's the same thing, Michael! It's the same thing!"
"Oh no, when you apply scrutiny to my bullshit I get punished! That means the game is wrong!"
I will use this until the hardware stops. There's a 0% chance I'd buy hardware at the current prices.
I have a baseline iMac Pro and custom built tower with similar specs (3.2Ghz Xeon W-2140B, 32GB RAM, Vega Pro 56 and i7-6700K, 32GB, 5700XT respectively) and they're both perfectly responsive. For many day to day things the difference between them and newer machines is negligible. For other things, my 5950X tower and M5 Max MBP run circles around them.
Both the 5950X tower and M5 Max MBP are deep into diminishing returns territory regardless, however. Aside from some extreme niche workloads like LLMs I can't imagine needing anything more powerful. They both have a ridiculous amount of headroom for the overwhelming majority of anything most people might want a computer for.
Sure, the Slack web app might initially load half a second faster since there's a lot of CPU bound JS executing but generally speaking I never feel like "wow this sucks" on my main machine. It's kind of the opposite, for a number of things my desktop machine feels faster than the MBP for overall "using the computer", with development heavy tasks (running Docker based web apps, browser tabs, various tools open, streaming music, etc.). It was like that when I ran Windows 10 Pro with WSL 2 and now native Linux with Arch + niri.
Even CPU bound tasks on my 12 year old box that I do a lot, such as editing a blog post on a static site with Hugo takes ~100ms to get live reloading with over 1,000 posts and drafts. I'm sure if I were constantly doing huge CPU bound tasks I'd have issues but I don't have that use case.
After recording 500+ videos, encoding isn't a problem too. If I record a 30 min video, it takes ~20 minutes to render but it's so easy to fit that into other areas of my life, like I'll record + edit a video and then render it while I walk.
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.
Maybe this is the tipping point where hardware companies can't rely on the upgrade cycle for sales any more. I've always upgraded at least every three years, but with the combination of high RAM prices and good enough performance from an older machine, there is no need to.
Local AI will crush any machine, of course, and if you need a 512gb ram box you'll probably need to sell both kidneys, but you're well past the average consumer territory with those.
So, fingers crossed nothing breaks down and that some of the funny money goes into R&D which will eventually trickle down to consumer devices in a few years (16TB gum stick SSDs at sane prices pretty please) instead of endless datacenter GPUs and SSDs that will be tossed into a shredder in x years.
My laptop is currently about two years into a typically 5-year lifespan, limited by when the keys start to fail rather than any need to upgrade it just because. The RAM in it is now worth more than the rest of the laptop.
All the other bits in a computer I've seen fail.
Granted, I've been building my own computer for 30 years and I've only seen it happen ONCE.
But I've seen plenty of other failures:
- Two hard drives -- One got dropped on the floor, so it was no surprise, the other was showing degraded performance and SMART showed some scary numbers and I was able to replace it before I lost data.
- One GPU, replaced under warranty.
- One AIO water cooler, replaced under warranty. Somehow, the water vanished from the loop. I'm guessing a microscopic leak that evaporated as fast as it leaked.
- Two power supplies -- One randomly exploded. Just started making popping noises and shooting sparks out the back. At autopsy, I determined that the fan failed (it was hard to spin manually) and it overheated. The other was just being overloaded. I had just gotten a new GPU and the PSU wasn't big enough for it.
- Several case fans.
Never seen a CPU or motherboard failure, even when my AIO water cooler was failing and my CPU was constantly at thermal limits. Never had an SSD/NVMe failure.
The component category I've never seen fail is CPU.
The CPU can fail if the heatsink falls off! That is something that happens (I've had one come off in my hand that was being held on by nothing but hopes and dreams, fortunately not while the CPU was powered on). More likely in a desktop tower form factor.
I used to game on it and I think the design just couldn't handle the cpu and dgpu being active for long periods, it would get extremely hot in the area close to where the memory was.
...granted though I've also seen a backpane on a server fail. I didn't think that was even possible until that point.
The cost of the prebuilt is now lower than today 5090 price.
"Due to the continued rise in the prices of core components globally, the production cost of monitors has increased significantly, and we can no longer absorb this pressure on our own."
https://respawnfirst.com/we-can-no-longer-absorb-this-ktc-wa...
Also, when OpenAI's new device comes out, would people shift to talking to these small devices?
It seems the chokehold started from the very beginning of the supply chain (wafers), so if a crash were to occur I don't see how we wouldn't be doubly screwed. Lots of worthless enterprise gear being shopped on eBay + a scarcity of consumer grade components leading to sustained high prices.
I'm not actually sure if enterprise designated memory is equivalent or not to consumer designated. Could be they are the same just packaged differently and/or with better binning. Either way, it's the same supply/demand dynamic at work.
By the way I personally think this scenario is very unlikely to happen.
> By the way I personally think this scenario is very unlikely to happen.
Can you explain why? I imagine pivoting to a much less lucrative consumer market when the time comes would lead to financial ruin?
In that scenario producing consumer chips is still profitable, much less profitable but still much better than giving up and going home.
You will also unlock latent demand by the mere fact that consumer prices are reasonable again. Those who may have postponed a new MacBook or gaming PC will likely buy as soon as lower prices return.
They would never do that. By then the market has changed and they would produce at the limit of expected demand, certainly not intentionally causing oversupply.
Open source https://github.com/cnygaard/glq
Pypi glq https://pypi.org/project/glq/
I've always been fine with being "behind" on the latest and greatest. I don't mind watching a movie, playing a game, buying a cell phone, etc, that was released a few years prior. If it was really all that great when it came out it should still be good later on.
Buying slow usually saves a.good bit of money when prices go down over time... but this time they went way up and now I'm kicking myself on it. Not upgrading the computer for now, but it is a bit overdue since I had already put it off for many years.
What I have is still fine, though I do regret cancelling now.
My main desktop computer is Haswell era. Still does fine, for what I do.
R9700 will lose less than 30% of value in the upcoming 3 years. Give or take. Yet people buy ancient cards for way more than 30% of R9700's cost.
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
According to them, demand for tokens already exceeds supply. Coding agents are very popular but burn through millions of tokens per hour.
The reasoning models that have powered breakthroughs in AI for math, coding, etc require substantially more compute than base LLMs.
But we cant have that, as the big guys are hoarding everything for themselves, so that you have to pay them instead.
I also had another order where I paid £30 for a 1TB SSD (sata though) and it is now more than £100...
The possibility that these fail does concern me.
The problem is... now for anyone looking to pickup a slightly older used/surplus server rack - you have the go and buy the (now marked up) RAM separate.
So... did they list the "0GB" racks with removed ram cheaper you ask? Nope. Many of them seem to be basically the same price as they were or even higher than they were, except now you're paying for RAM separate.
I bought a surplus Gigabyte server about 2 years ago off ebay for a home project, and I just went and the same seller still has some for sale, even older now than they were when I grabbed one, but they are 2x the price, and they don't come with any RAM, whereas I got one already populated as they were from the factory. Once you add that back in literally looking at 150-200% markup in the last 2 years on what was just surplus computer equipment that is 5+ years old.
Could this be an indication that there's a supply shortage/price increase of the remaining components in the rack? Or do you interpret it as people just trying their luck out of sheer greed?
It's a totally broken way to practice economics, but alas, it's ours until we change it.
Until the penalties involve actual jail time or a fine 10x larger than the profit they made from doing it, they couldn't care less.
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.
The writer can simply say "it was a joke!", cuz we all know someone who uses this pattern regularly when they are trying to squeeze in a non-popular but highly lucrative (to the messenger) position to test the waters.
Either it lands (in which case, it was always meant to be taken literally), or it doesn't land (and can always be walked back as "it was meant sarcastically" or "can't you take a joke?"
The cost proposition to sending this message payload is low, since the messenger can always wiggle their way out (therefore, a "cop-out").
Therefore the need to be more explicit (i.e., /s) in a medium with little nuance affordances for tone and the significantly-increasing risk of such non-popular messages being taken literally (particularly by the also significantly-increasing audience of robots, who themselves may not have the capacity for nuance or irony detection).
Tl;Dr
It's a cop-out, and should be stopped.
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.
It's sarcasm, and the main tell is I'm not even bothering with pretense; just serving up the dystopia straight and acting like that's good.
But one of the "fun" things about HN is SV is so fucked up you can't even be sure someone doesn't actually sincerely believe that shit. And most of them are probably dumbasses with nothing to gain.