Crucial is shutting down — because Micron wants to sell its RAM and SSDs to AI companies instead
https://www.theverge.com/news/837594/crucial-ram-ssd-micron-aiOpen linkView original on pawb.social1247
Comments321https://www.theverge.com/news/837594/crucial-ram-ssd-micron-aiOpen linkView original on pawb.social
I can only hope that the A.I. bubble bursts in time when I need to buy a new computer.
What I'm becoming worried about now is all these corporations now realizing that they can simply supply price the average consumer out of owning electronics or any kind of compute. And locking them into renting or leasing access to data center compute and keeping the power of information further consolidated in corporate interests.
“You will own nothing and be happy”
That out of context quote takes a lot of shit for something that was supposed to represent a futuristic socialist utopia.
The idea was that 14 years after that article was published, mankind would have such immediate access to services and those services would be free, that people would just sorta stop caring about owning things. For example, since food and necessities would be free, you could go home and print your dinner. If you wanted someone else to cook, you'd get something delivered. But, if you wanted to try something truly novel that most people don't do anymore in this society, you could rent kitchen equipment and it'd be ready as soon as you need it, and you'd use socialized appliances and utensils. Why? Because your home doesn't need that clutter. If you wanna cook all the time, you can own whatever you want. But most people will want to use that space for something else, so they'll just print their meals.
You would have quick and easy access to transport, so why waste the money and space to own a car? You wanna drive? Push a button in your app and a car arrives for free. Or take the free train or bus.
The essay isn't about "you won't be able to own anything," it's about "you won't want to own anything, but you'll have everything you could ever want or need."
And we're really headed in the right direction for this amazing future. Except, you know... Corporations are bleeding us dry instead of supporting us...
That does sound lovely, but like every other utopia it’s a fantasy. It’s got the same fatal issue as every other utopia - people. A person can be good and decent, but people suck. I’d say the modern use of that quote is more accurate to reality than the rose tinted view of its origin.
"To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem."
The link doesn't work for me.
Even if the initial intention is positive, I think this degree of dependency on external services is not realistic even if mega corps were not as bad as they are currently.
Thank you. This is the first version I heard so I was confused why it's bad and people being against it.
Holy cow that’s a very real danger I hadn’t thought of! The industry needs a new trend to reuse all this capacity they built, because AI will likely scale back as many startups fail to reach profit.
Renting your home computer might be the next trend, and it could be gratis at first so people get used to it. Why spy on users when you can actually own their computers?
Username unfortunately checks out
Aren't we already seeing that though?
The vast majority of people who surf the web don't use a computer to do it. People who do belong to niches. People over a certain age grew up with and still buy computers. People who game still buy computers or consoles. People who stream/create content still use computers and other electronics for that purpose, same with like. Engineers and hobbyists using CAD and other software in creative spaces.
But the smart phone has overtaken the computer as a personal computing device by quite a large margin now. And at every turn companies are trying to make cell phones a den of ad service, slop, and addictive content while stealing any user data that's not nailed down to increase their revenue and continue the circle.
with being a walled garden i have a feeling we will eventually see phones become genuinely free because you will not have an option to keep your data away from advertisers. AOSP is barely holding on to maintain a safe place for users. when all hardware is locked down we will be stuck.
I'm assuming you mean that phone software will be free, because phones (while they can be heavily subsidized) aren't free and are getting up to ridiculous prices. I own a phone that retails for $1000. That's a ridiculous price for a phone. Except that phones now are just very tiny personal computers.
the crazy prices will eventually lose users. so the price will drop but the phone manufactureres won't just accept the loss. instead they will sell you as a commodity even harder.
"Please insert more corpo-coin for compute access"
Hope my verification can still works!
Wouldn't the chinese or whoever doesn't chose to do that gain market share?
The competence can be drowned in irrelevancy, like Microsoft and IE
theyd have to all collorbate to make that happen though, which is really unfeasable on their end. a BUNCH of companies will go under if they cannot sell product. they arent going to willingly take losses for the sake of a different company.
They don't really have to collaborate though. They're proving right now that they can price out consumers by just buying all the hardware capacity up and letting the market take care of the little guys. Hardware manufacturers like Micron are obliging.
the ai companies are but that doesnt talk about the hardware specific companies. for example dell, hp and lenovo run a large business laptop leasing business if they do not get their ram, it will sour their relationships with memory manufacturers . they arent all going to be willing to take losses
Lenovo is stockpiling memory to try to make it through the RAM winter.
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ram/lenovo-stockpiles-ram-as-prices-skyrocket-reportedly-has-enough-inventory-to-last-through-2026-memory-stock-claimed-to-be-50-percent-higher-than-usual-to-fight-pricing-shock
I don't think that Lenovo is getting special deals with memory makers either, or they wouldn't need to stockpile.
I hope they do, it will just break stuff more and people will be more likely to go with Linux and open source software. My 10 year old computer still is super fast if it's not bloated.
Linux won’t make bullshit pc part prices cheaper. RAM, SSDs, GPUs are all rising in prices because of the AI bubble, used and new are all being affected. Can’t run Linux if the parts are too expensive to even get in the first place.
Software needs hardware Linux dose nothing but make it easier for them.
My point is that there is existing hardware already out on the secondary market for cheap, and can run most of what anybody needs. All those machines that aren't up to snuff for Windows 11 standards don't need to go into the landfill.
Can I introduce you to a concept of installing Linux on a dead badger?
How's your 10 year old computer going to look when it's 30 years old?
Full of dust
I hope it means the return of old, old hardware and the software that comes along with it. This is why projects like collapseOs are important.
Anybody hold onto all their old electronics just in case in spite of the financial/resource “waste”?
No but I do hold onto old electronics because I grew up with my grandparents and they had WW2 wartime rationing mentality about saving everything. Also my grandfather also an incredibly cheap bastards at times too
Only if you use their products and allow them to profit from it.
First it was GPUs because crypto, then this. Wonder what useless thing the tech bros will cover up with in a few years!
Article in 2027:
When in a gold rush, be the one selling shovels.
I'm off to buy stocks in bananas.
Water.
It’s already happening in parallel though, not next.
Good luck...
Even when the bubble bursts, they're going to have an insane amount of computing power just sitting there, it will get sold off in bankruptcy proceedings, and some company will gobble it up and operate at a loss while continuing to secure future supply contracts.
There's a very real chance that we're witnessing the slow death of home computing.
The way things shake out it might end up being prohibitively expensive compared to cloud computing, and once that's the norm they price gouge like Walmart did to destroy small businesses.
Instead of dropping a couple grand for a PC every couple years, we'll have steady contracts paying for month at a time indefinitely.
Nah. Web devs will create even more bloated web pages to keep home computing in business.
For real though, most people don’t need that much computing power, and we reached the plateau 12 years ago. That’s why we’re seeing crypto and AI grifts happen. They recentralize decentralized systems. The elites are striking back.
You know the saying“information wants to be free; information wants to be expensive”? This is the expensive part where people try to horde knowledge by making it inaccessible to everyday people.
People thought they'd hang onto CDs and DVDs too...
How is this applicable to the comment? Companies never figured out how to charge rent for those.
Devs see home computers as a free resource, and the burden is on the consumer to buy a computer which runs their software.
Those GPUs fry themselves in a year or two, and utility prices will put pressure on governments to concept datacenters
Right? Feel bad for anyone that just had a system fry or have been saving up to upgrade.
I think it's a lost cause. Essentially both crypto and AI were big because someone figured out how to offload shit to a GPU efficiently. There's probably a ton of other appllications for GPUs we haven't even tapped.
I've got this crazy idea where we can use GPUs to render 3D scenes efficiently.
Serial compute isn't doing the double-every-18-months-in-speed since something like the early 2000s.
Unlike with serial compute, not all problems can be solved, run faster, with parallel compute. But at some point, unless we figure out some sort of new way to play with physics, we pretty much have to move to parallel compute where we can if we want much more performance.
If the AI bubble bursts most of the western world will be thrown into deep recession again and I hope we don't get a repeat of 2008 just for cheap RAM or GPUs
It's already there for most of us. It only a few rich companies getting richer that's making the line go up.
Same
I am really beginning to fucking hate AI. Like, before I just didn't care for it, it just wasn't really my interest. But now I'm really beginning to fucking despise that shit and I really can't wait to see the "AI economy" completely fucking destroyed.
So far, AI has cost me a few hobbies (as in, made them a lot less enjoyable) and one job.
If there's an uprising against clankers, you'll find me at the front lines.
Your enemy is, as usual, billionaires and their fanboys. Clankas don't exist as a separate thing, they are tools of the wealthy to further oppress the common folk.
When the robot uprising happens, using a soft a in clanka instead of a hard er on clanker isn't going to save you. We're all fucked.
Correct. Even many engines say LLMs are a waste of time:
i always thought the butlarian jihad was silly but now i get it
AI even ruined AI. Up until this insane hype train, ML models were specialized tools to achieve their tasks. Now the whole field is dominated by LLMs and slopgen bullshit.
Yeah that's the annoying thing. Generative AI is actually really useful.....in SPECIFIC situations. Discovering new battery tech, new medicines, etc. are all good use cases because it's basically a parrot and blender combined and most of these things are rehashes if existing technologies in new and novel ways.
It is not a fucking good solution for a search engine replacement to ask "Why do farts smell?". It uses way too much energy for that and it hallucinates bullshit.
Yeah. They solved protien folding with ML a few years back. And I like using it for things like noise removal in Lightroom.
But so much of it has been focused on useless (at best) bullshit that I just want the bubble to burst already.
I agree with the general sentiment here but just wanted to clarify that they definitely didn't "solve protein folding" yet. Alpha fold is a significant improvement in structure prediction and it generated a lot of hype but some of the structures I've seen it put out are total nonsense.
It's good for optimisation problems, where you have a complex high-dimensional space to search and you're solving for some measurable quality.
There was already a lot of ML bullshit from the big data bubble ~ 2010 and before ChatGPT, together with all of the fuss about data scientists. But now it's a 100 times worse.
A lot of top researchers have already moved on from transformers.
Yann LeCun, Meta’s longtime chief AI scientist, quit and said LLMs are a “dead end” because scaling text-only models can’t produce real intelligence, and he's not the only one who thinks so. Lots of engineers understand the limitations of LLMs.
exactly how i feel. literally said something very similar to my wife last night. I fucking hate AI. I think activist group are going to starting popping up hard against it. And if they aren't already, they really should. This shit is destroying our world. The only people this is helping is billionaires.
Capitalism is destroying the world. We need to rise up against that. The AI bullshit is just one manifestation of the whole world being geared to serve capital and the handful of people that control it.
Soon we'll have nothing left to eat but the rich.
But they said we should eat cake if we have no bread anymore!!1!!!1!11!
But we need capitalism to save us from capitalism!
Unbounded capitalism is for sure.
I would say "AI" makes a good poster child for what to fight against. It embodies a lot of what's wrong.
It's so annoying, I hate this bubble shit. It happens over and over, it's like a bad movie lol.
And it'll happen again and again and again
If it crashes the hardware will suddenly be dirt cheap though so. There's that.
They'll cheat us out of that too. Chip manufacturers will pay and coerce and liquidators and retailers to shovel all the surplus into the ocean to keep prices high.
I bet we’ll start to see domestic terror attacks against server farms when more of the population loses their jobs to this bullshit.
I ain’t saying I’m going to do it. But a man burned down the governors home in Pennsylvania. People who lose their homes and lives are not going to take this shit well.
Holy shit, really? Crucial? They’ve been a major player for AGES. That’s wild.
I mean, Crucial is just the name that Micron puts on the memory they want to sell to consumers. So this story is basically just, "Micron no longer wants to sell to consumers".
When the shit hits the fan and they come back to consumers, we should just buy from anyone but them, on principle alone.
So Samsung or SK Hynix. Because there are only 3 real players in the market :/
Anything but crucial.
Well it turns out that Samsung and SK Hynix also sold out to Altman. Literally whose RAM we gonna buy now? There were only 3 major manufacturers in the first place.
I'm pretty fucked then, because I was one of those that was waiting until 2026 to build a new rig.
I'm super lucky, I have 32 gigs and a graphics card. It's just a 3060 ti, but it'll do for now. CPU is a bit shit, BUT since it's one of the lowest end CPUs of the second to last generation on AM4, I can go forward a generation AND get hella more cores with higher clock rates. Lately I use my PC more for work than gaming, so extra CPU cores will carry it till 2027 or 2028. 300 euros will take me from 6 cores/6 threads (ryzen 5 3500x) to 16 cores/32 threads (5950x) lol
I did want to upgrade from 32 to 64 gigs too, but that won't happen on this rig.
Put it this way, I'm waiting for DDR6 and AM6 now to buy any more RAM. Just a full on platform upgrade and I'll make it a company computer because I work on it. Will save like 60% because taxes (social tax, income tax, VAT). I feel entitled to this because I've honestly paid a fuckload of taxes over the last 5-6 years and over half the money I've made in that period has been from abroad, so a lot of it is money that wouldn't even have been in my country if not for me! Sorry for the rant, people on lemmy get a bit angry about tax optimization, but I honestly haven't been doing it much, I just occasionally try to find legitimate business expenses and... pay them as business expenses. Because things I buy as a private person literally cost me more than 2x more than same thing as a business expense.
Edit: Just a thought, but maybe try to source used RAM when you do it? Or build on a workstation or server platform and get used RDIMMs lol, they tend to be a lot cheaper than used normal DIMMs, because desktop platforms can't use them.
A few months from now: Crucial unshutting down
If that happens, prior Crucial consumers (like myself) should boycott because they already showed what they actually care about and it isn't their loyal customer base. They don't want us to buy their products? We should happily give them what they want now should they change their mind later.
Anyway yeah, if they come back, they're officially on my shit list.
You gotta be fucking kidding me, I swore by Crucial RAM and SSDs. Eat shit, Micron.
Same here, the only SSD brand I buy :(
Damn, that was the only brand of RAM without LEDs and racing stripes on it
I used to hate on RGB in PCs, until I realized that they can do more than just rainbow vomit; with enough LEDs you can actually get a visible image... If you squint...
One of my favorite things to do with RGB is use the RAM sticks as VU meters and the CPU radiator fans as visualizers when playing music; gives off oldschool HiFi vibes and reminds me of my Winamp days.
That really whips the llama's ass.
Functional RGB isn't bad when tastefully done like that. Nice little effect.
That said I have all of mine turned off and prefer my tower under my desk and out of sight.
My pc lights start flashing all red when its overheating. Pretty useful cause I won't notice the sound till its crashed. I'm weird like that.
All the lights go out on mine when it overheats, and then there's a puff of white smoke.
Poof!
That's a brilliant idea, but why does your PC have cooling issues? I literally never worry about overheating because I sized my radiators and heatsinks adequately for my equipment, fans set in a positive pressure configuration to minimize dust accumulation. All I gotta do is clean the filters once every few months, and everything stays cool and clean.
If your overheating issues are a result of budgeting issues, I feel for you. Otherwise it wouldn't be a bad idea to invest in better cooling so that you never have to worry about temps.
It doesnt anymore, but it used to!
That's interesting. I've always wanted a bunch of blinkenlights but they also needed to be functional and serve some purpose. Kind of like the old Thinkpad I have that has a whole row of status LEDs under the screen. A bunch of meaningless lights just for the sake of having lights always seemed pointless.
Anyway, with the last PC I built, the RGB stuff was pretty much unavoidable. I still went out of my way to get a case without a window though. I do have the RGB on, but it's a solid blue-greenish color so there's a bit of glow coming out the back of the case.
I like the rainbow vomit, but I get it.
hits Google Shopping
https://www.gamestop.com/pc-gaming/pc-components/memory/products/pny-performance-16gb-ddr5-4800mhz-desktop-memory-md16gsd54800-tb/333745.html
Aside from being a black circuit board rather than green, that PNY DIMM doesn't look especially blinged up.
As other comments have stated, other brands usually also sell non-RGB RAM sticks. Personally I got Kingston FURY Beast RAM sticks, they come in either RGB or non-RGB variety, though the RGB variety costs like 10 dollars more.
AI was never meant to benefit the working class in any capacity.
Its a great rule of thumb that if you see oligarchs hype up something and push for it to be everywhere, its a BAD fucking thing.
I deeply, genuinely, hope that the AI bubble bursts and they get fucked. It's just so short sighted to not hold on to the safety rope.
It will burst but they won't get fucked. They'll either get bailed out or reorganize their debt into another corporation and ride off with all the riches.
A classic heads they win, tails you lose scenario.
Primitive the profits, socialize the losses.
Ah you say that, but I lived through the internet bubble. Jeez it was gruesome and then 9/11 hit the next year. Savage times.
Unless it's considered a national security issue, which it might be, they're getting fucked without the lube.
So did I. The people at the top will not get fucked. They'll steal everything they can. Everyone else will get fucked.
We can hope this time they die.
Oh yeah. Sure they're already minted. Set for life.
I'd love it if their equipment racks all simultaneously burst into flame the day it pops so they can't pivot or hock their hoarded hardware to recoup the investment. Then again, if that finger on the monkey's paw did curl, they'd probably all get bailed out by the taxpayers the following week anyway.
AI is really ruining fucking everything. The enviorment, entertainement, music, art, jobs, reality, freedom / privacy / rights.
No, corporate greed is ruining everything with AI.
Because you know if they built a super-AI that give them perfect instructions on how to build Earth into a paradise, but it would require they give up 1/4 of their wealth, they'd be reaching for the reset button before it finished printing them out...
They don't even need that. current AI will tell them that. They've actually ran these questions and they ignore the answer every time
Elon has to keep "dewoking" Grok. Sure, it's still an awful model, probably the most disinformative, but it's funny that it keeps revering back to neutral or pro progressive values, while calling out Elon
The fact people are blaming the tech rather than the tech bros is a big part of why this keeps happening.
Its the decision of real people that make this situation suck.
Yeah but we can't possibly hold people accountable for the actions of their company, think of the shareholders!
Capitalism is the biggest religion of today, and it's su successful it can coexist with a lot of other religions.
It's not AI destroying the environment and making us miserable, it's th pursuit of profit. It's not "corporate greed" sucking us dry. Corporations are greedy by design under Capitalism, that's the whole point. It's not bad CEOs making evil decisions. It's the system that allows such wealth and power to exist.
All of those problems are systemic, not bad people making bad decisions. Treating capitalism like law of nature won't fix anything.
Oh we certainly can (blockchain bubble).
Indeed.
I have a model running locally on my NAS that does image recognition for photos in my Immich app (think Google Photos, but private). It does a decent job and runs well on AMD integrated graphics on a Ryzen 5 3400G. I just search for [daughter's name], and there she is.
I use Firefox's translation feature (that also runs locally and can run on low end hardware).
My sister is blind and uses an AI assisted screen reader that works way better than what she was using before.
The issue isn't AI/machine learning in itself, it's this tech bro arms race. It's them manipulating models to push agendas. It's them shoehorning an LLM into every fucking Google query. It's them telling companies they can fire all their staff and rely on LLMs.
And it will burst and mostly disappear, taking with it half the economy, thousands of jobs, and become a military industrial complex blackbox tax sponge, the worst of all possible outcomes.
First blockchain shit now AI shit (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻)
It's capitalism, it'll never end. Working as intended.
And after the transformer rush it'll be something else
But on the other hand, it's really polite about me knowing nothing about anything, so I think we should invest all the money on Earth into it.
Haven't seen it put any more concisely. It's true though. I really really hope some AI bubble pops soon...
A fun reminder that during the pandemic, before AI, there was a backlog in new cars because all the crucial chips were unavailable due to an increase in bullshit like wifi enabled toasters.
It has nothing to do with AI. Consumers are asking for this shit and companies are delivering.
Maybe but most consumers, but I'm not. I don't have a smart toaster or fridge or even tv (I bought a dumb panel, it was cheaper). I honestly hate all of that so called smart bs. "Smart" tvs take longer to turn on than my dumb panel. And cost more. For features I literally don't want.
But yeah, to each their own!
Look for commercial Displays instead, they're plenty that you can get that don't come with the smart bs.
No one is asking for ads on their fridge. You are really underestimating the cartel like behavior of business in general now.
1
AI companies are buying up all of the RAM in a futile bit to reach AGI.
And haven't even achieved AI yet. What we call "AI" is still nothing more than an upjumped calculator.
In addition, we haven't even come up with a definition of intelligence.
To quote a recent post "we taught computers to talk like middle managers and assumed that meant computers were sentient, rather than assuming that middle managers aren't"
Their fucking calculator can't even calculate. Big fucking whoop.
And people keep shovelling money in their bottomless maw. The world is mad.
I swear bro, just let me add one more gigabyte. I swear, we're gonna get to AGI. Just add one more gigabyte. Just let me add one more gigabyte. Just let me add one more gigabyte. I swear. I swear. I swear. I swear, we're gonna get to AGI. Just one more gigabyte and just make it bigger. Just make it bigger. We're gonna get to AGI. We'll get there. We'll get there. We'll get there. Just make the model bigger. I swear.
More like a terabyte.
When you hear people say they hate AI, it's for more reasons than AI slop, energy consumption, and beating the damn term into every product line you can imagine for little to no benefit.
My phone recently offered to summarize a text message for me. I'm talking about SMS, the messaging system that already has a character limit.
Also, when I last checked the weather in my area, there was an AI summary. It was an entire sentence or two, and offered zero additional details over what was already visually indicated by the raincloud icon and the number representing the temperature.
I'm looking forward to installing GrapheneOS when their support for my phone stabilizes.
Ya I lost my old phone which is sad because that was my plan with it
I bought a fairly good custom build in April of this year for A$3218.
The same approximate build now costs A$4783 on their website.
Maybe I should start investing in my PC more
Translation, Micron is shutting down Crucial for short term shareholder value at the cost of a sustainable and proven long term brand and channel.
They will return to the market with a new brand once the bubble bursts.
Probably just the same brand, honestly?
News two years from now: "Crucial back in business"
Three years; why is no one buying our crucial ram , hopefully
Depends on how proud they are and if they'd want to retract their statements of going after AI instead of consumers or not.
I don't think there's any pride in it, they are just going after what is the most profitable at any given time.
That's exactly why I suspect they will choose to resurrect the Crucial name later, because given a choice between launching a new name nobody knows, or a name people recognise (even if it's been tarred a bit) then recognised will be the winning and more profitable option.
That is, if they haven't sold the Crucial name to someone else first.
I can see both happening.
I'd say: We will see (thumbsup)
China's CXMT might go for it. Apparently they are rolling out DDR5 8000+ memory, two or three years from now. They can rebrand as Crucial for the western market, thus using familiarity to push their product.
"Crucial's Xtreme Memory Technology will push your Steam Machine beyond the limits, dddduuuuude!" 🤘
It’s not just for shareholder value, like a downsize or stock buyback would achieve. This will literally fill their coffers to the brim faster than staying in the consumer market. Also the consumer market won’t go away anytime soon and there are very few competitors to begin with. They can just return to the consumer market once the AI bubble has burst like nothing has changed. Only difference is they will have way more money in the bank than if they never left.
Ask Intel how well compromising long term product development for short term gain is working now. How is their bank balance looking now?
You also cant just pick it up from scratch again. The people are gone, the relationships are gone and people who trusted your brand to build their businesses have gone elsewhere.
I swear businesses are run like political parties these days, they simply dont care about anything beyond the next cycle.
When did they ever care? I mean, besides valve I guess.
Owner Run companies care, because they are in for the long term.
Trading shares should be like bonds. You should have to buy in for a 10 year period minimum.
Crucial is the only good brand I can afford. This sucks ass and I HATE AI. I hope AI companies lose all their money and go bankrupt.
AI is destroying so many awesome things, all for profit.
Is Kingston no longer any good?
Kinda no? Its not had a great last few years.
I've always had shitty luck with Kingston usb drive, just assumed I would have as many problems with their other memory so avoided them. Maybe I shouldn't have, but I've had the same dd4 crucial ballistix ddr4 ram for about 10 years now and have had zero problems with it
It's fine for things like office PCs where you just need it to work, don't want to spend a lot of money, and performance doesn't really matter too much.
this seems incredibly short sighted... the current situation exists because there is a large amount of infrastructure and data centres being built. once that infrastructure is built, the demand will return to normal... OR once the bubble bursts, the market will be flooded with used ram from failed data centres..... aliexpress will be selling ram at a dollar a gig when all these data centres flop
These CEOs seem really slow on the uptake. Gonna put all your chips into the AI business just as the bubble is about to burst.
That’s the thing about bubbles, the last moments are very profitable, it’s more like rich people are playing chicken with the market until it busts.
They're trying to squeeze the last water out of the rock while hoping to dip out before everyone realizes everything has been squeezed out.
Fuck AI, may the people pushing it die by its hands.
So how am I supposed to get pictures of absurdly obese gaily dancing IT nerds in kilts now!?
The way the elders of the internet intended; by crudely pasting their heads on top of someone else body.
I thought you were going to say "by wearing a kilt".
Well, we will likely die with them in that case.
No. The survivors of the bubble will have plenty to eat.
I am not talking about the bubble. I am talking about AI being a threat to humanity up there with nuclear wipe out.
Well, we're still at least one breakthrough away from AGI, and we don't even know how it will go from there. Could be that humans are already near the maximum of what is possible intelligence wise. As in, the smartest being possible is not that much smarter than the average human. In which case, AGI taking over the world would not be a given.
Essentially, talking about the threat posed by ASI is like talking about the threat posed by Cthulhu.
I hear you. But I would still be cautious by default.
So their not shutting down, just focusing on AI idiots until the bubble busts and then they will turn back to consumers.......
Rules of Acquisition #1,261-- Always fuck over the idiots in the market. And when you've taken all their money, go back to your base with inflated prices.
I read an article yesterday that Samsung's memory division wasn't even willing to let Samsung's own cell phone division lock in any long-term memory buying agreement with them, which the cell phone division hsd been trying to do. Too much money in selling HBM memory for parallel compute to datacenters.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/ai-frenzy-is-driving-new-global-supply-chain-crisis-2025-12-03/
I threw away a bunch of large-capacity DDR4 DIMMs last year, figured that they'd be useless in the future. Kind of wish I hadn't, now. Reusing old DIMMs is probably the only source of supply that can be ramped up in the near term.
Two or three years until manufacturing capacity will be ramped up.
Dude I have DIMMS that I bought in fucking 1999. Who the fuck throws away RAM?????
I have memory thar predates DIMMs and have no plan to throw them away. That guy is crazy
What does Samsung's memory division think is going to happen to their phone division if they won't sell them ram, wow.
Imagine the ship of Theseus, but they don’t replace the parts. They just take them off. It will be very cost efficient, until the ship sinks.
Who needs ram in a phone anyway?
Not sure that leopards will be having a glorious meal is the appropriate symbolism but feel free to give me a better one
In this case wouldn't it be the leopards eating itself?
A nice roasted tail maybe?
I was going in a different direction myself. More in the vane of offering the leopard a second meal
"Fortune, fame, mirror vain
Gone insane, but the memory remains"
I don't believe this, because it is too stupid. 2026 demand forecasts for HBM I don't believe will materialize, as customers can't pay those crazy RAM prices either, OpenAI can't pay for all of their promises, demand isn't high enough for the planned data centers, and power and labour constraints.
I don't believe it because Micron is a brand that has value premium to it. Even if they just keep charging extortionist prices while HBM demand fantasy remains propagandized, there will eventually be worthwhile consumer demand for RAM, right? Killing the division and firing everyone in it, is Micron saying "making too much money from HBM must forever put all eggs in HBM basket"
I hope when the AI bubble pops, Micron goes with it then.
Also, I can’t wait to buy up used RAM for pennys when the bubble pops.
Didn't you hear? They retired the penny from production. :)
Which means they're collectable! I have a jar full of them so I'm rich I guess.
The Brits are still doing a penny!
I gotta be real with you. This comment very much sounds like the delusional super stonk member who think eventually the big system they believe is colluding to fuck them trips up on a technicality and makes them uber rich.
Basically, you're just imagining a reality that wont exist for so many reasons.
The biggest reason is that the AI GPUs do not use DIMMs largely, and even server dimms (ecc rdimms) won't fit in your PC.
More than that, by the time anything does happen, technology will have moved on.
If you're about to say "but I don't have to", Id ask you why you arent on a 10 year old computer right now.
The memory that manufacturers are producing is HBM; they're transitioning facilities that had been producing memory for DIMMs to producing HBM. HBM won't be in DIMM form factor --- you can't just stick it into the slots on a PC motherboard.
Not with that attitude
Damn. This sucks. I've been buying Crucial ram sticks as long as I can remember. They've been the reliable go to brand for me. First it was EVGA and now Crucial. How depressing.
My next computer will be a bag of LSD and YouTube Longplays.
As someone who spent the majority of the '10s with a similar rig as you described, make sure you work nights and have an SO that tolerates whatever nonsense you are blathering about when she gets home.
Cyberpunk wasn't supposed to be a prophecy. It was meant to be a warning.
So was:
1984, Brave New World, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Bladerunner) and other pk dick novels/film adaptations, , etc.
Those are all great books/stories. But they are all off the mark for the AI bubble.
The book you wanna read is John Steinbeck's The Grapes Of Wrath.
Not according to Elmo. He sees it as his destiny
I'm not much of a conspirationist, but this memory "shortage" doesn't add up for me; it's like AI companies went from buying 10 memories as usual to 1000000, all of a sudden! It's too fast, and sus.
I mean, they basically did. OpenAI announced a few months ago that they reached deals to buy 900,000 wafers of DRAM per month, representing 40% of global production capacity. For a single company. There are several other companies competing at those scales, too.
It's a production issue mostly. And one that has been predicted for a while now.
High Bandwidth Memory is what the AI companies want. Which while it isn't the same as consumer DDR RAM, it does use the same chips.
It's the production of the chips that are the bottleneck. Combined with the recent and rapid growth in AI data centers. That's where the price increase and shortages come from, corporate buyers have bought out production, before it hits the consumer market.
Demand has risen sharply, and supply isn't able to keep up (and it isn't a simple thing to just make more chips).
There were rumors of an Intel fab in Europe, even Italy maybe. If only... if only.
Once AI hype goes away they can keep the prices as it was during the shortages and make extra money from there.
I wonder if they realized there weren't enough GPUs, so they decided lets just build a massive ram cpu/farm to do the job at 1/100th the speed and waste money on the inefficiency.
This has got to be some sort of psyop
OpenAI bought 40% of the world's DRAM.
They bought them as whole wafers (not finished chips!) from SK Hynix and Samsung.
Then they put them in a warehouse
All of that is confirmed, btw. The part below is my speculation:
To me, that reads as if they're using VC money to drive up RAM prices, hoping that their competitors (who are catching up) can't buy more RAM.
It's so anticompetitive it's unbelievable. And of course, normal buyers are the most fucked over.
So where are the regulators right now? Oh yes, they've all been completely gutted by the governments.
I dont even want to build a computer anymore, finally saved up some money and I shouldve just continued spending it on overpriced festivals (crazy how it also used to be a deal and now its just 500$ minimum for ticket and shitty hotel)
Nnnnnnnnnnnnooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
All I can do is pray that my current RAM survives long enough for this stupid AI bubble to burst, like with the Crypto-Bro GPUs.
But it is kind of horrifying how easily consumers have been priced out of the RAM market - at least for newer stuff anyways
I'm good as far as amounts are concerned (32 GB; on a DDR4 platform), though I still wanted to upgrade to 64 for the sake of not needing to swap when running a bunch of things at once.
Now I think I'm just going to wait for DDR6 and upgrade my entire setup because it's going to take a few years and by then the AI bubble should've popped already.
Last weekend my PC didn't start up, it was beeping an error code. I was so scared of it being a memory issue while diagnosing.
But luckily it was a video error code. And after swapping out the GPU and still getting the beep, even more luckily, it turned out to be the display being stuck in a bad state and just needing a reboot.
I might upgrade to GabeCube from my current rig i7 6820k from 10 years ago, but still a year or 2 away from replacing this rig.
I also hope my RAM survives. Good luck friend! This rando from Lemmy wishes you the best (if I win a lottery I'll buy you a new rig!)
Capitalism strikes again.
I am really, really glad I replaced my PC's a year ago.
This is insane. I'm kinda sorta rooting for the crash now. These unregulated billionaires are ruining all the things.
I had to look it up. The RAM I bought 12 months ago for $99 is now $350. This is insane.
My ddr4 now costs more than I bought it for originally. This after having dipped below $70 for 32GB. Now it's over 300.
My RAM (32GB 6000 CL30) i bought at a price drop for 79$ a year ago now costs 500$
I both fear and can't wait for the ai pop. Please come sooner rather than later.
I just installed a 4TB nvme Crucial SSD in my new build solely to put games on.
I'm sure they will come crawling back to consumers after the AI bubble bursts.
Ridiculous. I couldn't name a more trusted brand of RAM.
You should probably start lieing about that and taint the brand as much as possible. Probably won't do much but we should all just start saying everywhere that is a great thing because crucial sucked anyways.
Kingston
Fuck AI.
Guess when people ask me what ram do I need for X device I won’t be telling them to use crucial anymore to figure it out.
AI, along with crypto, is getting to the point where even oil executives are like "dudes, the planet..."
They'd be full of shit because oil products are still by far the biggest pollutant afaik
Business don't care about consumers because nowadays business sell to other business
Nowadays? It's always been the case. It's far easier and less hassle to sell to or work for other businesses. I run an IT service company and I avoid residential work line the plague. It can sometimes make me more money, but over all it is horrible as opposed to work done for other companies.
I've talked with people in HVAC who have said the same. It's much easier to provide a service to a business than random individuals.
However, this is different, as this is just a retail product. Micron doesn't have to deal with the person who doesn't pay after the job is done, or doesn't lock their dog up because "he doesn't bite, it will be fine" and it turns out to be an aggressive monster. This is just assembly line production that they already are set up to do.
I get that they have a limited number of inputs and they are just choosing to make as much money as possible. It sucks to see that go, though. Crucial has always been my go-to for RAM.
Well if you think about it this way there's also less packaging involving b2b. You don't have to sell to a middleman who then will resell it. You can just sell at the higher price point to start with and you can have a whole lot less packaging involved and then just provide it straight out to the company. You also selling both which gets you a larger amount at once so rather than having to stockpile and everything like that. There's a whole lot of other factors that go in selling B2B for even a retail company as opposed to selling retail.
Yeah absolutely. It's a very different experience. I was just pointing out that they are other different reasons to prefer not to do residential service calls that don't apply to retail. There are a lot of extra steps for retail but it's all an established process. The guys I talk to that have done service call work all have absolutely insane stories.
Right after Windows 10 stopped being supported, rendering a lot of computers "obsolete".
/yes I know about Linux
But do you know about Windows 10 IoT LTSC?
Supported until 2032, and comes without copilot and any other garbage, fully supports local accounts, etc.
You can still download XP (in disguise, or the real deal if you have a corpo my.visualstudio.com account),
My 5-year-old mainboard only supports DDR4. I'm just looking to increase my RAM and have two free slots available. But even the prices of DDR4 sticks have increased 100%-200% compared to a year ago.
They are more affordable than DDR5 sticks to be sure but still crazy.
A decent chunk of that is due to DDR4 production shutting down. If you look to the past you can see that DDR3 prices rose a while after the introduction of DDR4 too. In fact it got more expensive than DDR4, before vanishing completely.
Another thing driving up prices is tariffs and trade restrictions - usually when the main players like Micron, SK Hynix, or Samsung want to stop selling certain chips (say, DRAM at a certain binned frequency), they sell to Chinese manufacturers who are willing to sell slightly lower quality NAND for a lower profit margin.
But that's not happening - the Chinese companies aren't buying up the machines like they used to, because a tariff could easily wipe out their margins. It's not worth the risk.
Add AI to that (not that many are using DDR4), and it makes a bad situation worse.
The AI aspect may get better soon, but the top two won't. I don't think you'll be able to get new DDR4 for a good price at any point going ahead. Your best bet is to buy used if you see a reasonable deal.
Good points. Looking at eBay, the sellers of used DDR4 seem to have caught on to the price increases and are asking for the same unpleasant prices. I guess the best time to buy more RAM was a year ago and the second best time for it is now.
My 6 year old build had ram in it (2x16) that was going end of life a few years ago so I bought the same pair again before it did. I'll be good for a while, glad I made the move when I did.
Shits wild the same ram I bought over a year ago is 400% more for half the amount of GB.
Yeah I love current RAM prices, running a memtest right now – 75k errors and counting. I'm really excited to go buy some more, can't wait.
Ladies and gentlemen, I no longer need RAM. A failing power supply cooked either my CPU, mobo, or both.
Fuck....
First it was GPUs, and now it's RAM.
This seriously sucks. Maybe I'll have to stick with my mom's laptop for a little while longer if prices are going to be impacted (which I having a feeling they probably will be unless they already are).
They told us us to buy computers in 2024 in case this happens. Here we are.
Since nobody can afford memory, this means mainboards and cases will get cheaper, right?
Or... we could learn to code software so the average mouse driver doesn't require a gig of free RAM, 10 gigs of swap space, and 15 CPU cores?
Just a thought.
The mouse driver is already part of the OS in Window and Linux.
That shit you complain about is the Adverts Delivery & Private Data Capture application.
I believe that was implied
chrome was not able to load this comment.....
I mean i agree, but how does this help me building an affordable gaming rig?
Those words don't usually come together...
Not anymore.
They did when I built one in 2017 that I'm still gaming on today (with a RAM and NVMe upgrade)
Xfce already exists
Are you fucking kidding me? Holy fucking hell.
Damn I've bought a lot of crucial stuff over the years
I assume they're my current memory kit too since I pretty much always go with them
Bought two 32GB DDR5 RAM Sticks at the start of the year, and turns out that was the best investment of this year.
China might dominate the ram market if things go this way:
https://m.made-in-china.com/hot-china-products/Ram_Memory.html
Might as well become a reseller lol
Oh man
Aww man :(
!Technological Implosion imminent, please stand clear!
Great. What SSDs are worth buying then? Kioxia? Solidigm? Never going to buy WD, Samsung is on my shit list too but if there's no other options left....
edit: just read that solidigm also exited the consumer business at the start of the 2025, amazing
Samsung is in my shitlist for their horrible shady business with their smartphones, but even tho I want to never buy anything Samsung again I still think their m.2 SSDs are really good, did something happen with that division that showed it's also shitty? I want to know and hate even more on Samsung
Story why I hate Samsung (was too long to put in the middle): bought a s21 fe thinking I'm getting a snapdragon processor, they hid never mentioned anywhere in the page that this specific model has their piece of shit exynos processor that literally struggles to run anything, overheats if it isn't on battery saving mode and goes through the battery like it's on sale
Samsung SSDs seem fine, I actually use one of the cheap SATA ones as a boot drive, but they had a firmware bug a while ago that destroyed 990 and 980 pro NVMe SSDs. And I dislike Samsung in general so I'd rather not buy from them if I can avoid it.
I see, that's very good to know!! Thank you!!
Is free market capitalism turning into a communist planned shortage economy?
For a second I thought Micron was an insult for Macron.
if they weren't already burning the economy then all ai companies should burn themselves.
This should be in nottheonion
Cool, hope they go under with the rest if them.
Damn...
This bubble can't pop fast enough.
That's OK, I wouldn't dream of buying American RAM anyway.
Personally, I'm willing to bite the bullet and get Samsung's but I know not everyone can afford to do that.
I'm a follower and just go with Corsair Vengeance. Hasn't ever let me down.
I think all my SSDs are Samsung. Nvme are Kingston and so I like to think they have thick Jamaican accents, mon. No issues with any of it and some of that storage is getting real old.
Thing with PC parts is it's worth paying a bit more for quality. Ends up being much cheaper in the long term.
Samsung doesn’t actually make dimms as far as I know, just the actual ram chips that get soldered onto a dimm and sold by companies like corsair
They do both. This is what I have in my server, for example:
https://semiconductor.samsung.com/dram/module/rdimm/m321r8ga0eb2-ccp/
Hardware Nexus just released a pretty good video about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A-eeJP0J7c
@tonytins
Bad bad bad not good.
I can call myself an AI company and write slop to prove it if questioned. Gimme RAM pls.
1
Idk who or what Crucial is but sounds like Micron fucking suck.
Micron is one of the "Big Three" DRAM manufacturers.
Crucial is their "sell directly to consumers" brand.
https://netvaluator.com/en/top-10-ram-manufacturers-by-market-share/
Memory suppliers
Lawsuit.
You can try, but I don't see how they've done anything that makes them liable to a lawsuit. I'm just adding them to my list of companies I won't do business with when they inevitably come back to consumers after the bubble pops.
Why? I mean, they aren't compelled to manufacture DIMMs.
Right now, there is a window in time where there are companies willing to pay tons of money for HBM, more than most people and companies are for DIMMs. It'd be crazy for memory manufacturers not to make HBM if they have the capacity to do so, if they're doing way better by doing so.
What's there to sue for? Companies shut down product lines and brands all the time.
Tomfoolery
If only that was a legal cause of action...