It’s hard to believe that it’s just a RAM issue.
Valve is going full Apple with the SSD upgrade. They’re making a healthy profit from each system they sell.
It’s both RAM and storage price. A 2TB NVMe cost upward of 300$ CAD.
I think legacy american market ram companies need to be blacklisted.
Once China floods the market, we need to put these fuckers out of business.
I hope China floods the market with cheap RAM and absolutely destroys these scumbag memory companies.
Fingers crossed for the next 5 years.
Keep in mind, many of these same DRAM makers were once caught up in one of the largest illegal business cartels ever discovered by the U.S. government over 25 years ago. Just a fun fact to store in your brain.
😡
coupled with the fact that the cartels refuse to expand production; this tells me they’re realistic about the moment - it’s not going to be a decade of future humongous peak RAM consumption, because otherwise they’d be blisteringly stupid (to lose out on those potential increased sales)… https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/memory-makers-have-no-plans-to-increase-production-despite-crushing-ram-shortages-modest-2026-increase-predicted-as-dram-makers-hedge-their-ai-bets
Micron has been building a new fab in Boise which is set to output RAM starting 2027, no?
Apparently another fab is planned already.
Infineon is also looking to expand production, if I understand correctly, though RAM may not be their main thing.
None of the fines for these things are enough. It should be, like, the company is nationalized. The leadership is sentenced to years of community service and barred from working in the industry for life.
Fucking corporate America. I was fired for having a disability, specifically and intentionally by my boss and her manager. Neither has any direct accountability - both were terminated as a result of the findings of a federal and state investigation, but the company will pay for the damages. They both failed upward, getting higher positions at other companies, while I’ve struggled to find employment, something already difficult due to the stigma of my age, disability, and gender, but now with word of my termination having spread through the quite small pool of people who work in my field.
Probably only gotta do that once for things to really change
You gotta give a booster shot every once in a while to remind them.
Oh wow, reading the wiki you linked, looks like that one exec really learned their lesson \s
On 5 April 2006, Sun Woo Lee, Senior Manager of DRAM at Samsung Electronics, entered into a plea bargain with the US Government for his involvement in the price fixing conspiracy.[5] Following the plea agreement he was sentenced to 8 months in prison and fined US$250,000.[6] Lee was subsequently promoted to President of Samsung Germany in 2009, and then President of Samsung Europe in 2014
edit/update: Oh, wow so Sun Woo Lee actually really lucked out as Korea focused more on making an example of the Samsung heir apparent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Jae-yong
8 months in prison sucks, I totally concede that. Yet literally the deal they made looks like they were asked “Would you take the fall and go to prison for 8 months and then get paid millions per year afterward?”
Going to jail as a poor person means you lose your job
Going to jail as a rich person apparently gets you a promotion
Interesting
Not just lose your job, but your entire career as the prison record will come up in your background check and the news will also be on the internet forever, the prison / slavery industry is a well oiled machine
That means that he managed to keep the fine small enough that Samsung made significantly more money off the price fixing than they ever lost from the fine. Hasn’t changed
https://www.axios.com/google-facebook-fines-profits--134d3567-1052-4d9d-aa70-dc7c25ed4ebf.html
Cost of doing business really
Doesn’t the mob and other syndicates do something like that as well? Gotta do some time and not snitch to move up in the ranks.
“They gave their freedom for this company!” - Some corrupt executive somewhere
It’s related to the AI bubble. The AI companies are trying to make it as difficult as possible to get a good PC, because they know they’re cooked if the general public has access to systems that can run AI models locally, so they’re buying everything up as fast as they can in the name of data centers that will never be built.
As soon as the first one fails, it’s all over. Prices will tumble and memory makers will come crawling back to Valve (and other hardware makers) begging them to buy.
Let’s not forget that almost all memory is made by a cartel of 3 companies known for price fixing. They’re all being as slow as possible about increasing production capacity.
Is that not for good reason though? Only for them really, but if they did ramp up production and then the bubble pops… I wish they would ramp up production, it’s just easy to understand why they won’t.
If there is a demand for ram, which there is in the consumer market, then it shouldn’t be a risk. If DCs get cancelled, then they should have contracts in place for at least a minimum buy, which should offset cost risk. If they don’t have that, then that’s just shitty business. Even still, they can just as easily slow down production if needed. If the bubble pops, either they’ll have inventory that the world will buy and they can throttle back prod, or they don’t have inventory and they will have to throttle prod anyway since demand for DCs as a whole has to be more than just the consumer market.
Idk, it’s probably just the cynic in me, but I think it’s likely this is just manipulation of the prices, especially given the history of these companies doing just that.
They definitely have contracts that ensure the ai companies buy the ordered amount.
However building new production factories is expensive as fuck. They know they need to do that. But why buy a factory for billions and sell RAM at a lower price when you just don’t spend billions and earn even more with less RAM
Yep. Just like how nobody uses Windows since Linux is easily accessible.
Wait
It’s not the average consumer spending thousands on tokens. Even my work just had a meeting about how “the free lunch is over” now that AI costs are expanding, and they bought their own hardware to investigate hosting local models.
Linux is widely used in the enterprise world. It’s the home consumer world that doesn’t use it as much and even that is rapidly changing as things enshitify.
What are you talking about?
The general public adopting open tech themselves instead of using corporate options
Was that not clear?
Having an option vs not having an option
Also Linux and Windows are pretty different in use cases and capabilities. Meanwhile, local AI models have a very similar user experience. If hardware was cheaper and people could run better LLMs locally, they wouldn’t pay monthly for it.
You’re right, the general public doesn’t use Linux due to the lack of ability to browse the web and file their taxes—Windows exclusive functionality.
In the workplace, there are still a lot of domain specific programs that don’t have Linux support. Companies don’t have much of an incentive to port that stuff over. As for the people who just need a web browser, they probably would use Linux just fine if they could buy a computer at BestBuy that comes with Linux preinstalled
Compare that to LLM programs, where it’s a matter of “download this app instead of that one, because this one is free and that one costs $25 a month”
So maybe try to remember that after the AI bubble burst, and there is more RAM than customers, and it’s the customer that sets the price.
RE: Memory Procurement Quote
Did I stutter?
RAM Don (he/him)
Memory Racket LLCNo Gabe, you fucked up with these price hikes. Don’t blame the supplier.
The ram in the system went from 200 dollars to 600 dollars. Not increasing the price of the console by 400 dollars would have meant scrapping it instead.
There is literally no choice, the ram would have been sold either way, just to someone else instead.
Are you…stupid?
Yes.
No Gabe, you fucked up with these price hikes
…in the universe you live in, is there cheap ram?
can I send you money for some please?
The component price changed, what was Gabe supposed to do, start manufacturing its own RAM?
That would be amazing timeline
Dreaming about Pipe RAM by Valve.
He really shouldn’t have dumped trillions of private and public money into AI. Thanks Gabe /s
I’m sorry, do you have any awareness of the world past your nose?
Yep. You are owed everything, after all. You deserve it.
