In the Dwarkesh podcast with Semi-Analysis's Dylan Patel they forecast the phone market will shrink by 50% this year because of RAM prices:
But that’s the high end of the market, which is only a few hundred million phones a year. Apple sells two or three hundred million phones annually. The bulk of the market is mid-range and low-end. It used to be that 1.4 billion smartphones were sold a year. Now we’re at about 1.1 billion. Our projections are that we might drop to 800 million this year, and down to 500 or 600 million next year.
We look at data points out of China from some of our analysts in Asia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. They’ve been tracking this, and they see Xiaomi and Oppo cutting low-end and mid-range smartphone volumes by half.
Yes, it’s only a $150 BOM increase on a $1,000 iPhone where Apple has some larger margin. But for smaller phones, the percentage of the BOM that goes to memory and storage is much larger. And the margins are lower, so there’s less capacity to even eat the margins. And they have also generally tended not to do long-term agreements on memory.
Why this is a big deal is that if smartphone volumes halve, that drop will happen in the low and mid-range, not the high end.
Smartphones are widely available on the used goods market though, perhaps even more so than second-hand SBCs or old PCs. The "low and mid range" can be filled by the former high end.
I had an iPhone 11. It was a good phone. It started giving up in early 2024. I held on with poor battery life until the new iPhones that year and bought the 16 Plus. I'm glad actually because they're discontinued the Plus models, annoyingly.
But I'm glad I don't need to upgrade for the next couple of years. I honestly want to get 4-5 years out of any phone going forward. There's basically no difference between models 12 months apart.
I can see the prices going up this year. IT's already happened to the PS5, which is bascially unheard of.
It really sucks more because the reason for it--AI--is just so godawful and pointless.
Helium supply issues are only going to make this worse.
I feel like for the first time in our lives we might have seen peak technology for the next few years. Everyone is going to have to make do instead of depending on ever increasing performance.
> Helium supply issues are only going to make this worse.
I believe helium, although important constitutes a small percent of the cost of semiconductors, so its effect on price will be less severe. It will be more noticeable in other uses of helium though - party balloons could get very expensive etc.
This one might last longer. The AI race is on, and the US tries its best to make it as expensive for China as possible to participate in it. Every dollar China spends on GPUs they get at markup is one not spent on building navy ships.
If there is an escalation over Taiwan, then that will cause the loss of most of the world's high grade chip manufacturing capacity. TSMC is busy doing technology transfers into the US, but it is going to take time, those fabs won't have capacity for the whole world, and they still heavily depend on Taiwan based engineers if something goes wrong etc.
Just like with COVID you don't know how long this shortage will last.
Finally, good efficient code is going to get its moment to shine! Which will totally happen because it's not like 80% of the industry is vibe coding everything, right?
This is my theory: we're going to see a lot of languages with straightforward and obvious semantics, high guard rails, terrible dx, and great memory allocation and performance behavior out of the box. Assembler or worse, but with extremely strong typing bolted on in a way that no human would ever tolerate, basically, something in that vibe.
Helium is almost all captured from gas wells by cryogenically liquefying the nitrogen out of it. I guess you could do technically do that with the fab's air but it is a LOT of volume of air to liquefy and likely costs more than even inflated helium prices.
Most helium from most wells is simply vented because it is expensive to separate even with its relatively high concentration, and I imagine even the best case scenario for capturing it from a fab has abysmal concentration of helium. But because most of it is vented it also means if the capital is put down to build more helium separators on gas wells it wouldn't take long to increase supply. Short term for a year or two it can be a problem, but beyond that it is simply a cost versus demand issue. There is neither a technological nor source limitation, it is a pure capital investment limitation.
Helium is actually pretty hard to keep ahold of, being a very light and small noble gas. It can diffuse through a surprising amount of materials, flow through far smaller cracks than you would expect, and is quite hard to filter out of a mixture of gases.
Also superfluid helium (a big chunk of helium used for refrigeration like in e.g. the LHC) has the weird property of flowing the same speed through a tiny hole as a large one and coating everything with a molecular coating. Superfluid helium is basically a bose einstein condensate but macro-scale, totally counterintuitive. Essentially a thermal superconductor. Zero viscosity.
AFAIK they recapture most, but recapturing all simply isn't possible / financially feasible. And they use a lot of helium, so even if they capture most of it, the losses are still higher than the currently available supply.
I know this is a pipe dream (govt’s of the world working together to benefit their citizens instead of blowing some other country’s citizens up!) but if we aren’t gonna regulate AI collectively to ensure we are developing it responsibly, the least we can do is ensure AI is given bottom billing when it comes to all the resources it’s sucking up. Energy, components, engineers, construction, etc.
My preference is responsible AI development which prevents it from turning into an arms race but that’s clearly not on the cards, especially with current leadership.
Even before the hikes, SBCs were $50-$100 a pop, compared to pennies for basic MCUs and maybe $4 for high-performance ones. People were clearly willing to pay 100x more just for familiarity and the ecosystem ("hats", forums, etc). I don't know if 300x is going to make more hobbyists see the light, or just result in fewer of them being able to afford the hobby?
Yeah, never understood why I would want an entire OS running just to blink an LED. I was going to make a pro-Arduino comment but I guess my LED example warrants little more than an R/C circuit and a transistor, ha ha.
(Anyway, I still remember the thrill of writing assembly for a 68HC11 and getting a pair of hobby servos to respond.)
I’ve been having a lot of fun with the Pi Pico 2W. It can host an access point, a web server, be a USB host, and of course has GPIO. And not running an OS means it’s way simpler.
Those will dry up soon enough. Corporate laptop refreshes will be drawn out as they try and cost save on the increased price.
You also better hope the aliexpress dont figure out a way to get the RAM out of those things because they will start harvesting it for sure if there is money to made.
We're talking about a pi replacement. The Pi 5 is slower than a 10yo laptop. That's gives us a very vast pool of used laptops.
> You also better hope the aliexpress dont figure out a way to get the RAM
That is a real worry and I can see used machines being gutted because selling DDR3/4/5 sticks is way easier and profitable than the whole machine. Adapters for SODIMM to regular DIMM are readily available and cheap, too.
For most older laptops it's easy enough, you just open them up and take the RAM sticks out. There are SO-DIMM to DIMM adapters to fit a laptop memory stick in a DIMM socket.
There are ups and downs in the prices of components. Often people forget that during COVID prices were high for SBCs because of supply chain issues. Video cards just were not available in the UK and afterwards (every supplier had long lead times) and are still relatively expensive (at least there are now lower priced options). Raspberry Pis you couldn't get hold of and many people (Jeff Included) was using a website checking for availability which was non-existent for anything other than low end models.
I remember 15-20 years ago when hard drive prices went up through the roof because there was a flood in Thailand and it too years for prices to come down.
There is going to be supply chain issues due to the current Geopolitical situation (Helium comes out of the Gulf and that is need in chip manufacture) is also going to affect the price of components.
Eventually in a few years (as the article states) the situation will change. It just sucks at the moment.
TBH I am more worried about my ability to fill up the tank on my car as both Petrol and Diesel is unavailable locally. I can make do with whatever computer equipment I have.
I remember that literally everything, including basic necessities like food and housing jumped 30% higher overnight and never really returned to pre COVID prices. It erased about a decade worth of wage increases for most people.
I think the doomers are probably anticipating another round of that and they're probably right.
> People are quick to forget that during COVID prices were high for SBCs because of supply chain issues.
inb4 AI has the same supply chain effects as a worldwide pandemic. I guess those AI doomers that talked about it being the end of the world had it right!
There is a saying that is often trotted out my economists "That the cure for high prices, is high prices".
There is a consumer market and business need for DRAM outside of AI. Someone will fulfil the need as there is a high incentive to. It just going to take a bit of time for this to happen. My equipment is going to be fine for another few years. So I am going to just hang tight and make do with what I got for now.
Main producers actually reduced dram output in 2026. When you have few players with very high capital cost you will end up with cartels like light bulb cartel.
Someone will come in when the price goes up enough. It will take time, but it will happen. What people are complaining about is that the time for this to happen is too long.
Oh look, there is a player coming into the market it seems:
Maybe they will. However people often claim that there won't be anyone to want to enter the market to take advantage of high DRAM prices when if they spent two minutes doing a web search they would discover that isn't true.
In reality were they going to survive anyway? I would wager likely not.
Raspberry PI is the defacto standard for SBCs. Almost all the other SBCs had significant problems usually around software support and also third party support e.g. Hats, cases etc.
The price for a couple of 32GB sticks is now over $1200 after being stable at about $200 for several years until last September. That's not a blip; that's 6-fold hike and there is no sign it is slowing down any time soon.
Let's see, this is a low speed 2x16GB DDR4 kit for $300.
The closest option on the pcpartpicker chart was about $75 as a stable price. So that one's only a 4x increase.
Versus DDR5 where... it looks like a 5x increase to me? I'm seeing a jump from 200USD up to 1000USD. Edit: Oh there's an extra jump in the last month on the CAD version but not the USD version.
Did you not read what I said? I couldn't even get a replacement video card at any price during the height of COVID and believe you I had the money to pay for one. I couldn't even get a Raspberry PI (any model) for about a year. They were constantly out of stock.
> That's not a blip; that's 6-fold hike and there is no sign it is slowing down any time soon.
How does that invalidate anything I said? As states in the article this will change, it will take years but it isn't forever.
I find it hard to believe that people here cannot make do with whatever hardware they already have.
I also don't believe those small SBCs would have survived long term anyway. Most people just use a Raspberry PI. It is either a MiniPC or a Raspberry PI.
Discord groups that had real-time line counts and pictures of the line at most best buys across the country (US).
The only way I got one was overpaying and a lottery system that bundled it with other hardware because they knew everyone would still buy it. It was impossible to buy online normally as you needed some kind of automated way to buy it before stock zeroed the minute it was posted.
You could pay a scalper for a gfx card, but stores had none. Now, stores have RAM at least.
> Did you not read what I said? I couldn't even get a replacement video card at any price during the height of COVID and believe you I had the money to pay for one.
You're comparing to memory sticks that went up 6x. If you were offering anywhere near 6x MSRP and you couldn't get a video card... I don't believe you.
> If you were offering 5x MSRP and you couldn't get a video card... I don't believe you.
My 1080Ti had died. I had to use a 8800GTS from the late 2000s for about a year. As that was the only GPU I had. I have no iGPU on my CPU.
There was at one time, no stock available. Not on Amazon, Not on Overclockers, Not on Scan. They had some weird lotto system taking place on most sites.
Scalpers claimed to have cards. But I wouldn't risk sending a lot of money to some random seller on ebay.
> Unless this article is massively misleading, sure it was out of stock at 1x price but it wasn't out of stock at 2-3x price.
Again I am in the UK. You could not buy any PI other than 1GB model and maybe the zero. Both of which were useless to me.
Okay, UK, maybe that changes things more than I expected. But what about ebay and the sites that replaced classified ads? And is it unreasonable for me to say that you could have bought a US listing and had it reshipped?
Edit since you added: Scalpers claimed to have cards. But I wouldn't risk sending a lot of money to some random seller on ebay.
Even with ebay's buyer protection?
Well not to be mean but I think "I refused to use ebay" invalidates your claim that you couldn't buy a card.
I've had problems with it before (I can't remember specifics as it was a while ago). I'd rather not going through the hassle and/or risk in the first place.
There are still plenty of scams on ebay. During this era there were people scamming. e.g the box for a GPU. Listing the entire specs and then putting right at the bottom of the listing it was only the box and not the card.
> Well not to be mean but I think "I refused to use ebay" invalidates your claim that you couldn't buy a card.
What you are doing is being hyper-pedantic. It is fucking tiresome when people do this online.
If you are going to be a smart arse, I will modify my statement to say "I could not get a card from a reputable online store as they were all out of stock and did not wish to risk buying from a less reputable one".
I would be foolish to trust some overpriced (or underpriced) listing on ebay. I've had an ebay/paypal account now for 25+ years, I've learned to never do this because I got screwed every time I did.
> What you are doing is being hyper-pedantic. It is fucking tiresome when people do this online.
That's not pedantry. There's a huge difference between "they were unavailable and I couldn't get one at any price" and "I could have bought one from a scalper but I didn't trust them". Even if it's reasonable not to trust them (it is!), the first statement is sensational, and untrue, especially considering you emphasized "at any price" in your comment upthread.
> If you are going to be a smart arse, I will modify my statement to say "I could not get a card from a reputable online store as they were all out of stock and did not wish to risk buying from a less reputable one".
That's what you should have said in the first place; that would have been honest and correct.
And please, there's no need to call the other poster names. That's uncalled-for and childish. You seem to be new here (9-day-old account), so please read the site guidelines and turn it down a notch or three.
> That's not pedantry. There's a huge difference between "they were simply unavailable and I couldn't get one at any price" and "I could have bought one from a scalper but I didn't trust them". Even if it's reasonable not to trust them (it is!), the first statement is sensational, and untrue, especially considering you emphasized "at any price" in your original comment.
It is for any normal person in relatively normal setting.
Only amongst technical people is this sort of discourse tolerated where someone pretends that an unreasonable option (the scalper in this case as you admitted yourself) should be included in a statement when it is perfectly obvious it should not be included because it is not in any way reasonable.
I could have flown to the US and bought a card or China. Is that reasonable? For most people it isn't reasonable. It wasn't for me. Buying from an untrustworthy seller, is unreasonable.
> the first statement is sensational, and untrue, especially considering you emphasized "at any price" in your original comment.
They were out of stock on every reputable site. Therefore I could not buy a card at any price from them because they didn't exist.
> That's what you should have said in the first place; that would have been honest and correct.
I was honest and correct to begin with. The poster was using prices and availability in the US and not the UK.
> And please, there's no need to call the other poster names.
I never called them names. I expressed my annoyance at their behaviour.
You are being a pendant as far as I am concerned and arguing semantics with me is not going to convince me and many others.
So I suggest in future you should learn that using this line of logic (where you expect me to do something unreasonable to a huge number of people) is not something that people are going to put up with. It is really annoying to have to converse in this manner and in fact I believe that often that is wholly disingenuous and I no longer wish to speak to you.
If I categorized these situations the way you do, and I said what I'm saying, I would be a pedant.
But I see things a different way. The logic I'm actually using is not pedantic.
You calling me disingenuous over this is painful to look at. Get out of your own head for a second. We're using different premises, and we're reaching different conclusions because of that. My logic is fine, and your logic is fine.
> If I categorized these situations the way you do, and I said what I'm saying, I would be a pedant.
I am not categorising any situation. The vast majority of people would omit unreasonable options.
I could buy a racing bike that is £5000 new, for £200 when I live in London (back in 2000s). The bike would most likely would have been stolen. So technically I can buy a £5000 bike for £200. But most people wouldn't want to buy from a thief and consider it unethical.
People feel similarly about scalpers and other untrustworthy sellers.
> You calling me disingenuous over this is painful to look at. Get out of your own head for a second.
You started the conversation claiming I was outright lying. Then when I clarified to you what I meant you continued claiming I was lying/misstating. That is really annoying.
If you could have just said "okay that is fair, while you might have been doing X and Y, I can understand why you didn't want to do that". That would have been fine. But that didn't happen.
> You started the conversation claiming I was outright lying. Then when I clarified to you what I meant you continued claiming I was lying/misstating. That is really annoying.
I said I didn't believe you, and I was right in what I meant by that.
> If you could have just said "okay that is fair, while you might have been doing X and Y, I can understand why you didn't want to do that". That would have been fine. But that didn't happen.
So if I had explicitly said "I think it's fine you didn't use ebay" that would have fixed everything? Because I never argued about your personal choice, I argued about you calling ebay "unreasonable".
Well for the record, I was going to say something like that in response to "If you are going to be a smart arse, I will modify my statement to say "I could not get a card from a reputable online store as they were all out of stock and did not wish to risk buying from a less reputable one"."
But then I saw you had called me "hyper-pedantic" and I focused on rebuffing that attack instead.
I like these many posts about how you, specifically, chose not to use any of the available systems to get a GPU that rapidly organized and became common globally during lockdown. The line from “I just didn’t feel like doing something once” through to “My predictions for the future about a different problem are obviously true” is clear as day. Can’t see why anyone would disagree
I wasn't trying to be a smart arse at all. "I couldn't get a new card from a store" and "I couldn't get a card at all" are extremely different claims in my mind.
I'd rate my pedantry level as quite low. From my point of view this is not a nitpick.
Especially because you emphasized "at any price". It's the scalpers and the used market that were selling at any price. Sticking to reputable stores means sticking close to MSRP.
Paying a scalper on ebay isn't. Which is what I said. Misstating what I said is disingenuous.
> You could have gotten another 1080Ti from a legitimate previous owner.
They were being scalped as well. Also people were holding onto their 10 series cards because the other cards were too expensive. So I would have had to buy an older card (which I had already had one fail) at an inflated price.
I could have bought a GT 710 or a GT1030, but that wouldn't have been any better than my 8800GTS really.
I could have flown to Taiwan and bought a card. I could have stolen one. I am sure you will invent another fantasy scenario where I could have gotten a graphics card that I didn't think about at the time.
The fact is that I could not buy a new card from an online retailer in the UK as they were out of stock. Even when they did come into stock there was a lotto system. So you couldn't really buy one then. That is a fact.
> Scalpers claimed to have cards. But I wouldn't risk sending a lot of money to some random seller on ebay.
Ah, so you could have bought one, but you judged the available suppliers to be too risky.
Completely fair, but then it's not true that you couldn't buy one "at any price". It was just not a price+risk that you were willing to take.
Also, re: Raspberry Pis, you couldn't always get the exact RAM configuration you wanted, but they were pretty continuously available during COVID on Aliexpress. You did have to pay 3-5x normal price, but you could do it. I really needed one after one at home died, and paid the 3x markup, and it was annoying but fine. Not sure if Aliexpress is equally as available in the UK as it is here in the US, though.
> Completely fair, but then it's not true that you couldn't buy one "at any price". It was just not a price+risk that you were willing to take.
You are being pedantic. I find this type of discussion very tiresome. I've explained why in other forks of this thread. Quite honestly it pisses me off.
> Also, re: Raspberry Pis, you couldn't always get the exact RAM configuration you wanted, but they were pretty continuously available during COVID on Aliexpress. You did have to pay 3-5x normal price, but you could do it. I really needed one after one at home died, and paid the 3x markup, and it was annoying but fine. Not sure if Aliexpress is equally as available in the UK as it is here in the US, though.
Not in the UK. Someone was running a site with all the places that you could buy from. I was checking most days. Stock was extremely limited other than a few models.
At work we just got a quote to upgrade a couple servers, original price a few years ago was ~ $150k. Essentially the same hardware, just newer, is now quoted at ~ $450k.
We decided to just keep our current hardware for now and extend a support contract for ~ normal price.
Between this revelation and that post recently on HN about the scanned receipts and egg prices, I find myself wondering if we're worrying about the wrong things.
We're seeing massive inflation in computing, but because the dollar is holding its value we call it increased prices. But the buying by the big buyers is the thing driving the inflation, its mechanism is scarcity.
But it's also localized. Only we experience this as a problem because compared to the hyperscalers we're poor.
The same idea applies to the price of groceries. As the prices increase, base increase being inflation, but logistic efficiency also plays a big role.
The effect is the same. The ones with more spendable income don't experience an issue yet in the projects nobody is eating fresh veggies.
The part that scares me is the creep, as I call it. Throughout the years I've always been able to carry price shocks and such but this time I'm out of the game. No more DRAM for me.
I then wonder if one day, without losing my job, I won't be able to pay for veggies.
You're right that fuel prices have risen. But usually the impact of fuel prices is mostly felt on bulkier, lower cost items first.
After all, a truck can carry a 10kg sack of rice, or a 10kg nvidia gpu. If shipping costs for 10kg rise by $15 the sack of rice has doubled in price, but the GPU is only 0.5% more expensive.
For a truck yeah, but across the ocean, it isn't quite that simple because GPUs and grains are sent in different types of ships (or different modes entirely) that aren't interchangeable.
You're right - perishable goods have to be shipped fast. Your bananas, berries, fresh fish, and not-fron-concentrate juice can't be on some slow-steaming container ship with the furniture, clothes, building materials and vehicles.
This is driven by AI datacenter demand, not fuel prices. RAM prices have actually dropped significantly in the last couple days as the Iran war hit and the possibility that interest rates might go up and pop the AI bubble sunk in. (Though let’s see where they go after the last couple days of whipsawing.)
Yeah. Not true. Or send me the name of your server vendor. I’m buying.
Having issues with both price and availability on NVMe, SATA flash, starting to see some CPUs, and for a personal project high density spinning rust (24TB+).
Living in Korea where Samsung and SK Hynix are headquartered, the DRAM pricing situation is interesting from the supply side too. Both companies have been aggressively shifting capacity toward HBM for AI/datacenter use because the margins are 3-5x higher than commodity DDR5. The hobbyist SBC market is essentially collateral damage of the AI boom — manufacturers are rationally choosing to serve the more profitable customer.
Unfortunately I don't see this reversing until HBM demand plateaus or new fabs come online, which is 2-3 years out at minimum.
Taking a big, complex, already well optimised program like Chrome or the linux kernel and optimising the memory footprint is hard. But 90% of programs are just crappy web apps that nobody has even bothered to optimise at all. (Sometimes wrapped in electron or something.)
If you go look, you often discover that 90% of the requests are useless, or at least could be combined. That 60% of bandwidth is used up by 3 high res images which get displayed at 30x30 pixels. That CPU performance is dominated by some rubbish code that populates an array of a million items every call, then looks up 1 element then throws the whole thing away, only to regenerate the exact same list again a few microseconds later.
We have plenty of RAM. In absolute terms, 8gb of ram in the macbook neo is 8 billion bytes. 64 billion ones and zeros. You don't need rocket science to make a CRUD app that runs well with that much ram.
Computers don't get slower over time. If we were merely as lazy with computing resources as programmers 10 years ago, most programs would scream on modern hardware.
It isn't that they are crappy web devs. It is that often the org paying for the development doesn't care.
I am a web developer of over 20 years. I can create insanely optimised pages using nothing other than vanilla CSS and JS.
I have been paid exactly once to do this. There is a site I built in 2023 that has a JS and CSS footprint of less than 100KB after GZip (large site). We even had the Go templates compiled when the web app initialised so the server responded as fast as possible.
Guess what happened when it went live? The content team use 8mb images for everything and every single optimisation I did at CSS/JS was totally useless.
Devs don't care because the people above them don't care and therefore there is zero incentive to even bother.
There is something very wrong now with how companies operate in general.
You get beaten down eventually. Late last year. I spent like an hour going through why a PR (and this developer's work) in general wasn't acceptable to my superior. He said to me that he was perfectly fine with someone not understanding basic language features (after 6 months using the langauge). He then merged it.
It didn't work (as I had warned) and created a situation where I had to turn off tests in some projects as it totally broke them. I've spent months fixing his crap and still haven't recovered from one bad PR. Now add two other employees that are like this and my manager does nothing about it. I bought a AI package from Jetbrains and now have it do almost all the work. I normally spend some time cleaning it up. Management have made it clear to me that they don't care about quality, they won't hold anyone accountable and won't even fire people that clearly cannot program.
I am 43 years old this year. I just can't be bothered trying to be a hero anymore.
Similarly, my father who retired last week was a joiner/carpenter and would be considered a master boat builder. When my sister was little my dad made her new bed with hearts and flowers carved in the headboard.
He described how adversarial he was too his employer before he retired. He was engaging in Malicious compliance (he is a layman and didn't know it was called that) because management was making his life miserable by employing the same sort of the stand-up meeting ceremony nonsense in carpentry.
They managed to make someone with that level of skill hate their job because of process.
This feels kind of worn out. Yes we use more memory but we have more to work with. At the very worse you just let your favourite LLM take a pass at improving memory usage. For example, yesterday I was debugging an Electron crypto mining blockchain 2.0 app and the WebWorkers wou—-
You can still write JS or TypeScript code that tries its best to keep memory use under check. JavaScript was around in the late 90s when the memory footprint of software was at least an order of magnitude lower, so it's absolutely doable.
You don't have to go that deep. 99% of the time our analytics or risk management teams have some really memory inefficient Python and they want me to write them one of our "magic C things" it turns out to be fixable by replacing their in-memory iterations with a generator.
Most people don't have the chance to do that, but hopefully we can see some other languages get first class access on the web. At least there is the whole WASM project.
Just rewrite your biggest memory hogs in Rust, it routinely slashes RAM footprint and demand for RAM throughput. The effect is even bigger than the typical reduction in CPU use. You can even ask AI to help you with the task, it will use a lot less RAM for it than the rewrite will save down the road.
Why is that less realistic than saying 'rewrite in rust, make sure there are no memory leaks'?
My point, which I should have been clearer with, is that we aren't at a state where you can just one shot a rewrite of a complex application into another language and expect some sort of free savings. Once we are at that state, and it's good enough to pull it off, why wouldn't the AI be able to pull it off in C as well?
You don't have to trust the AI to do it with Rust, you just have to ensure certain conventions are followed and you can formally prove you're 'safe' from certain classes of issue, no AI magic dice-roll.
A lot of people are very excited by the idea that now language capabilities (and almost every other technical nuance) somehow don't matter but much like gravity they will continue to assert themselves whether you believe in them or not.
So far humans have proven unable to write large apps in C without those issues, given their work is the training basis for LLMs this creates two problems, one being that they don't 'know' what a safe app looks like either and any humans reviewing the outputted code will be unable to validate that either.
LLMs are great at C, probably because C is historically the most popular language in the world, by far. It only declined slightly very recently. But there's insane amount of code written in it.
Based on a FIDO2 spec I used it to write a reasonably compliant security token implementation that runs on top of Linux USB gadget subsystem (xcept for attestation, because that's completely useless anyway). It also extracted tests from an messy proprietary electron based compliance testsuite that FIDO alliance uses and rewrote them in clean and much more understandable C without a shitton of dependencies that electron mess uses. Without any dependencies but openssl libcrypto, for that matter.
In like 4 hours. (and most of that was me copy pasting things around to feed it reasonable chunks of information, feature by feature)
It also wrote a real-time passive DTLS-SRTP decryptor in C in like 1 hour total based on just the DTLS-SRTP RFC and a sample code of how I write suckless things in C.
I mean people can believe whatever they want. But I believe LLMs can write a reasonably fine C.
I believe that coding LLMs are particularly nice for people who are into C and suckless.
Most software uses 10x more memory than is necessary to solve the problem. In an ideal world, developers would stop building bloatware if their customers can't afford the DRAM.
I agree, OTOH there are many very cool things that we can build if we're able to assume a user can spare 2GB of RAM that we'd otherwise have to avoid entirely like 3D scenes with Three.js, in-browser video/photo editing. Should be making sure that extra memory is enabling genuinely richer functionality, not just compensating for developer laziness (fewer excuses now than ever for that).
I remember my company buying RAM expansion boards for our PCs back in 1989 so we could run OS/2. The 4MB boards (MB! Not GB.) cost around $2000 at the time.
Like everyone, I love getting tons of RAM or SSD storage on the cheap; but we have a ways to go before we reach the 'unaffordable' level.
am I crazy for thinking that the 16GB Pi 5 is just there to absorb money from people who purchase the most expensive version of things? Like really nobody needs that much RAM on a Pi?
I am running a bunch of stuff on my 8GB Pi and I've run out of memory to put more stuff on. I use it as a low power server running a bunch of Docker containers. Some of these require at least 200mb and some use 2G of memory.
I was going to buy a small nuc and load it up on memory but I've acquired an old Mac Mini with 16GB of ram, which will do.
Yes, you are crazy for thinking that. The extra ram is useful for small LLMs and also running lots of dock containers. The very low power consumption makes it ideal for a low end home server.
I use the 16GB SKU to host a bunch of containers and some light debugging tools, and the power usage that sips at idle will probably pay for the whole board over my previous home server, within about 5 years.
Docker is about containerization/sandboxing, you don't need to duplicate the OS. You can run your app as the init process for the sandbox with nothing else running in the background.
I think that on linux docker is not nearly as resource intensive as on Mac. Not sure of the actual (for example) memory pressures due to things like not sharing shared libs between processes, granted
Only Java qualifies under your arbitrary rules, and even then I imagine it's trying to catch up to .NET (after all.. blu-ray players execute Java).. which can run on embedded systems https://nanoframework.net/
I listed some popular languages that web applications I happened to run dockerised are using. They are not arbitrary.
If you run normal web applications they often take many hundreds of megabytes if they are built with some popular languages that I happened to list off the top of my head. That is a fact.
Comparing that to cut down frameworks with many limitations meant for embedded devices isn't a valid comparison.
Browsers treat RAM as infinite, if you want to for whatever reason open LinkedIn, you might wanna get a bigger model. I’d personally rather buy more ram than I need rather than deal with the cost of fixing / working around the issue in future
It’s an incredibly lopsided machine. The Pi 5 is decently powerful, but you really really should not be attempting to use one as a desktop replacement. While theoretically possible you are so much better off with a $50 used SFF PC.
No you are not crazy. It's silly to try to use a raspberry pi 5 16GB (or equivalent priced product) as a desktop workstation with a GUI on it when much better actual x86-64 based workstations exist. Ones with real amounts of PCI-E lanes of I/O, NVME SSD interfaces on motherboard, multiple SATA3 interfaces on motherboard, etc. In very small form factors same as you'd see in any $bigcorp office cubicle.
Yep. I just bought a Pi CM5 for my son, for his ClockworkPi uConsole. CAD $200 for the 8GB module. I bought a whole Pi5 16GB not long ago for under CAD $200.
I will not be buying any more SBC's at this price point. I wonder if Raspberry PI will survive.
Bought a couple of 32gb SBCs before this all hit the fan. And also built a SSD NAS before the wave hit.
So timed that all pretty great. What worries me is my desktop is up for a full new buy somewhere around early '28. That could be a train wreck depending on how taiwan situation goes
> So timed that all pretty great. What worries me is my desktop is up for a full new buy somewhere around early '28
That's a very specific date / timeline. How do you decide to do a full new buy? I ask because I own a desktop that I built 15 years ago which I was flirting with replacing completely last year, but unfortunately I didn't pull the trigger ... oops :(
My old rig is still going strong. The motherboard can only take up to 32GB DDR3 though. CPU is an Intel i7-4790k which is still very fair today if you are not running a resource hog OS (looking at you Windows). Overall it is completely serviceable for my needs. Being honest with myself the only reason I wanted to upgrade was for nerd cred but I don't game much anymore and don't do any ML tasks that require lots of local compute.
The extreme DRAM market has had an unexpected side effect of triggering a lot of panic buying. I know several people who delayed PC upgrades for years but then panic bought new systems in this market. The trigger was seeing all of the "It's only going to get worse" and "This is the end of personal computing" headlines.
They're already regretting spending so much now that prices have started to tick downward.
I keep telling everyone: If you don't have a pressing need to buy right now, please wait 6 months and check again.
wasn't "panic" buy but I built a new comp early 2025, cuz at worst case would be complete supply crash and at best case it was going to be more expensive.
Def don't regret doing that, though I regret not springing for the extra RAM.
That's actually a reasonable response to market volatility and illiquidity. It's not just high prices, but prices that still fail to be representative of the actual market stance despite the rises.
It's only a spike if it comes down. Every RAM chip is a lottery ticket with a plausible chance of giving one lucky winner fabulous prizes like absolute dictatorship of the entire world and physical immortality. What else are the billionaires going to spend their money on? Arms races can absorb unlimited resources.
In January I bought a barebone ASUS NUC, which is relatively expensive among mini-PCs, but I need to run it 24/7 for many years, so I made a choice based on expected reliability.
After adding to it DRAM and SSDs, the cost of the barebone remained of only 40% of the total, so the price of the memories was 50% higher than the barebone computer.
At that time, the memories were still cheaper than today, so now the price ratio would be even worse. (The barebone NUC had an Intel Arrow Lake H CPU and it cost $500, while 32 GB DDR5 + 3 TB SSDs cost $750.)
Got my RPi 5 16GB quite a while ago for around $160 and already thought that was expensive... It’s still powerful enough for almost everything I throw at it, honestly a bit overkill in most scenarios.
With prices steadily going up, for me it's starting to feel more sensible to repurpose the RAM sticks I've collected from old PC builds / laptops and just throw together small amd64 boxes instead of buying more RPis.
I wonder if there are low power Intel or AMD boards that accept DDR3. So many sticks of 2 / 4 / 8GB DDR3 inside laptops going into recycling or landfills which would do perfectly fine for low power purposes. Hell, performance for standard workloads scales with access times, not bandwidth, and DDR3 sits nicely at CAS8 1600MHz and CAS10 2133MHz..
The SBC markets been on life support for a long time. Youtubers making videos about them don't seem to grasp that and keep pumping out reviews and projects like its still 2019. The pi specifically has plummeted in popularity and for most use cases they just aren't a cost effective option when second hand micro pcs are dirt cheap and vastly more capable.
I don't think comparing new Pis to used micro pcs is fair. Compare a _used_ Pi with a used micro pc. If you have any geek friends, it's probably not hard to find a used Pi for free.
The main cost input is presumably ram. They are passing it through.
If everything on the board but the ram costs $30, and ram is going from $10/gb to $20/gb, then they have to change the price $50 -> $70 to break even on the 2gb board, and $190 -> $350 for the 16gb board.
In other words, the raspi is now priced like a stick of ram with a bonus computer attached because ram is massively more expensive than the rest of the computer.
It's terrible. Fake money is fueling the exhaustion of real resources in search of questionable outcomes ("AGI"). Imagine if all of these money were invested in curing cancer.
Let's also imagine an alternative reality where some reasonable percentage of the $2.5T in current year AI spending was instead invested in the "general intelligence" researchers we already have for the same purpose. I think it's a pretty reasonable expectation that 1) they'd probably make more progress and 2) that money would help a lot more people in the process (through jobs and economic activity).
Obviously there's no "evidence". Why would you even think we need AGI? But I'm happy to hear your reasoning if you were one of the few/only? people who imagined that software that could predict the next word could do what it now is doing.
I've already seen at least one person who was pretty sure that the preprint paper they co-authored with AI (read: AI wrote for them) was going to cure cancer and make them billions of dollars.
There was only one problem. The paper jumped straight from "this paper will show how our new treatment could cures cancer forever" to "as you can see, these results clearly show that our treatment cures cancer" - with neither any actual results nor any specifics on the treatment. And I don't just mean that the paper didn't go into details; writing the paper was the full extent of their "research".
AI was used fundamentally for COVID vaccine development. AI is used for research in all modern drugs. It’s a certainty if cancer gets cured AI will have played a fundamental role since it’s already fundamental to precursors.
The title should say: "Collusion of large corporations promoting LLMs with RAM manufacturers is killing the hobbyist SBC market (and bankrupting anybody trying to get a PC or laptop)".
Because we all know that DRAM prices have spiked since production is going to those infernal chatbot training data centers. Same as a lot of the electricity in some parts of the world, BTW.
Can you elaborate on the collusion aspect? Is the implication that OpenAI and Anthropic are coordinating their purchases in such a way that they target the hobbyist market? What’s the collusion angle here?
Only works so long as you eventually pay up... well unless the manufacturers make too much this way. That said are there some Chinese manufacturers that aren't part of the cabal and could undercut them?
Except that it doesn't work like that. If you buy DRAM and don't do anything genuinely worthwhile with it, you'll ultimately dump it all right back onto the market, and everyone knows that. The biggest worry is that it's actually OpenAI and their direct competition starving the rest of the market because they predict AI research and the like to be a highly valued use for the stuff, compared to building gaming PC battlestations or whatever the highest-valued use was before. Many observers think that this will also happen with GPUs and cutting-edge digital logic more generally.
> We all know that DRAM prices have spiked since production is going to those infernal chatbot training data centers
I know it's very fashionable here to talk about capitalism as some hand-washes-hand big corp organized scam, but if you put that ideology aside for a moment, you contradicted yourself here, I think.
I personally don't like conspiracy-theory-thinking. If I was a DRAM manufacturer and had to choose between servicing a single customer, who orders hundreds of millions worth of my product, or service a very large number of customers who order tiny amounts of the product a piece, then of course I would focus on the large client, because they are easier to service for the expected profit margin. I wouldn't even need to think about advertisement, sales, all that jazz. Looking at it from that perspective, it seems pretty logical to me that a spike in demand from datacenter operators would rise prices dramatically. I struggle to see room for collusion / conspiracy here.
A couple of issues, first there is a history of price collusion (see DRAM price fixing scandal on Wikipedia) and while it may be "logical" from a seller point of view to prefer large orders, this upsets a lot of people and used to be illegal in the United States (it may still be illegal, but it's not enforced)
The barriers are the US demands that nobody should sell semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China.
Otherwise their memory manufacturing companies would be happy to exploit this opportunity.
Actually some Chinese companies already sell cheap DDR5 memory modules, but their production capacity is severely limited by the US blockade, so the cheap memories are available in few places, mainly in Asia.
So the high memory prices are caused by USA both by the AI companies that have bought most of the existing production and by the US government, who has sabotaged the Chinese memory vendors since a couple of years ago, in order to protect the market share of Micron (the US sanctions coincided with the moment when several companies, including Apple, intended to use the cheaper Chinese memories, so preventing this to happen seems a much more likely reason for the "sanctions" than the BS excuse that consumer DDR DIMMs and SSDs are dual-use products that may benefit the military. Even if that were true, the US sanctions did not prevent at all the Chinese from producing anything that would be needed in a small quantity, like for a military application. The sanctions have prevented only the mass production of devices using state-of-the-art lithography, which would have impacted the prices in consumer markets).
Startup costs measured in the billions, with no guarantee of success, and a long payback time horizon in a market that almost everyone thinks is - in one way or another - a bubble.
Oh yeah, the market is also getting intense scrutiny from powerful geopolitical entities that are quite explicit that they don't believe in fair play or consistent, stable rules.
After discovering Dell Alienware clearance and graphics card availability in those Alienware computers, I haven't felt the need to build a computer for the last five years.
We're somehow in a race between LLMs curing cancer, destroying the planet by "You're right to be mad, I shouldn't have issued those launch codes, it's even in my Claude.md file, I'm sorry," and rendering modern technological civilization uneconomical. I know this is statistically the best time in history to live, but lord, I could use a vacation.
This is a good thing. Pis were priced too low for OEMs and too high for hobby work. It's no longer an accessible board for fledgling hackers . Reclaim hardware for your nephews, which is good for the environment, too.
Is there anything (technically) preventing SBC manufacturers adding SODIMM slots?
I was expecting the Milk V Titan to avoid this memory nonsense since it has two unpopulated DDR4 slots, but it has fallen off the radar like several other SBCs.
SODIMMs are huge compared to a BGA memory package which is a problem if your goal is to minimize your board size (e.g. I don't think there's a reasonable way to fit it into a Raspberry Pi form factor without something weird and expensive like a mezzanine connector). Routing the signals is also somewhat more annoying because they all come out of one edge of the connector compared to a BGA package which has them fan out in every direction, giving more space for length matching traces, etc. You'll likely need additional PCB layers compared to a BGA chip.
Unless you're really using the GPIO pins or other weird I/O, I really fail to see the purpose in having an 8GB or 16GB RAM Raspberry Pi (at a much higher price than it used to be) as a desktop workstation with a GUI on it.
The idea of putting sixteen gigs of RAM in a raspberry pi is nuts. The legit thing you want to use a raspberry pi (or a competitor) for as an embedded headless thing with no KB/mouse/display attached should run fine in 2GB of RAM or less, assuming an ordinary debian-based OS environment.
I would much rather have a used, ex-corporate/ex-lease, small form factor or ultra small form factor x86-64 desktop PC (Dell, HP, Lenovo, whatever) with 16GB of RAM in it and an SSD on a SATA3 or NVME interface. Whatever is the "best" SFF that you can buy via huge eBay used equipment dealers on any given month.
Despite being many years old, whatever you can buy on ebay for 200 bucks (at least before the recent RAM fiasco) with some recent-ish quad core core i5/i7 or Ryzen in it will run circles around a raspberry pi 5.
A few, until their current stocks run out. Orange Pi already increased prices (their boards are similar price or more expensive than equivalent Pi's now), and Radxa seems to just stop selling certain models (at least in NA) once they run out of stock.
Arduino has one of the cheapest 4GB boards now, but I wonder if it's just because they made a ton and the demand for their strange board has been low?
Not everyone earns tech bro salaries and can sustain a thousand cuts. Many hobbiests are scraping and saving money to acquire hardware. For some it very well msy be the end of their world.
We are talking about brand new latest gen hardware here. People with low budgets are always scraping and saving for deals and don’t need to buy something brand new from a pricey brand name like raspberry pi.
You can still jump on eBay and buy all kinds of dirt cheap used pieces of hardware.
My buddy just bought a used ThinkPad T14 with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage for about $500. You can get by with a whole lot less.
In this context, I will also present the idea that Rasperry Pi has represented quite poor cost value for many years now.
Have you looked at how expensive international shipping is? eBay covers just a few countries, the rest of us can't buy there because we'll be paying 10 times the cost of hardware to get it over here.
I already moaned about this recently, but to briefly reiterate: the only hardware that's becoming available for most people in my region are Frankenstein desktops built from heavily used 10+ year old Xeons running on suspicious motherboards made by obscure Chinese manufacturers you've never heard of. This is pushing ever more people towards smartphones and away from actual computers.
But at least we got the bullshit machine in return, that's something, I guess.
> Frankenstein desktops built from heavily used 10+ year old Xeons running on suspicious motherboards made by obscure Chinese manufacturers you've never heard of.
I've heard reports that these are actually surprisingly good. I wouldn't want to use one in a production environment, but for homelab stuff they're an incredible deal.
> Have you looked at how expensive international shipping is?
It really shocks me how bad shipping has gotten. It's nearly unaffordable to buy things on eBay from the US as a Canadian due to shipping costs, so I can only imagine just how bad it is for people from other countries.
It's probably unaffordable for anyone to buy things from the US due to shipping costs, because the Trump administration has completely screwed up everything there with tariffs and mismanagement of the USPS and more. But the US is not the world. A better comparison is how much it cost to ship things from China a year ago compared to today.
Yes, 90%+ of sellers refuse to ship here (and we're not even under any sanctions and/or political pressure of any sort). I hear about these magical 100$ Thinkpads all the time; I'm yet to see anything cheaper than 300$ (add another 100$+ for shipping).
But that’s the high end of the market, which is only a few hundred million phones a year. Apple sells two or three hundred million phones annually. The bulk of the market is mid-range and low-end. It used to be that 1.4 billion smartphones were sold a year. Now we’re at about 1.1 billion. Our projections are that we might drop to 800 million this year, and down to 500 or 600 million next year.
We look at data points out of China from some of our analysts in Asia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. They’ve been tracking this, and they see Xiaomi and Oppo cutting low-end and mid-range smartphone volumes by half.
Yes, it’s only a $150 BOM increase on a $1,000 iPhone where Apple has some larger margin. But for smaller phones, the percentage of the BOM that goes to memory and storage is much larger. And the margins are lower, so there’s less capacity to even eat the margins. And they have also generally tended not to do long-term agreements on memory.
Why this is a big deal is that if smartphone volumes halve, that drop will happen in the low and mid-range, not the high end.
But I'm glad I don't need to upgrade for the next couple of years. I honestly want to get 4-5 years out of any phone going forward. There's basically no difference between models 12 months apart.
I can see the prices going up this year. IT's already happened to the PS5, which is bascially unheard of.
It really sucks more because the reason for it--AI--is just so godawful and pointless.
> It really sucks more because the reason for it--AI--is just so godawful and pointless.
Strong disagree.
AI is the best thing I've seen in 30 years working in software and expensive RAM for 2 years is a price I think is worth it.
I feel like for the first time in our lives we might have seen peak technology for the next few years. Everyone is going to have to make do instead of depending on ever increasing performance.
I believe helium, although important constitutes a small percent of the cost of semiconductors, so its effect on price will be less severe. It will be more noticeable in other uses of helium though - party balloons could get very expensive etc.
Were you born after COVID and the 24 months of dire component shortages that followed?
If there is an escalation over Taiwan, then that will cause the loss of most of the world's high grade chip manufacturing capacity. TSMC is busy doing technology transfers into the US, but it is going to take time, those fabs won't have capacity for the whole world, and they still heavily depend on Taiwan based engineers if something goes wrong etc.
Just like with COVID you don't know how long this shortage will last.
Or is this just a temporary thing based on where processing is located?
Most helium from most wells is simply vented because it is expensive to separate even with its relatively high concentration, and I imagine even the best case scenario for capturing it from a fab has abysmal concentration of helium. But because most of it is vented it also means if the capital is put down to build more helium separators on gas wells it wouldn't take long to increase supply. Short term for a year or two it can be a problem, but beyond that it is simply a cost versus demand issue. There is neither a technological nor source limitation, it is a pure capital investment limitation.
My preference is responsible AI development which prevents it from turning into an arms race but that’s clearly not on the cards, especially with current leadership.
(Anyway, I still remember the thrill of writing assembly for a 68HC11 and getting a pair of hobby servos to respond.)
Meanwhile, a refurbished corporate laptop with 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD can be yours for $199 [1]
I'm sure there will still be people who want the Pi 5 but at these prices, I ain't one of them.
[1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/327079631563
You also better hope the aliexpress dont figure out a way to get the RAM out of those things because they will start harvesting it for sure if there is money to made.
We're talking about a pi replacement. The Pi 5 is slower than a 10yo laptop. That's gives us a very vast pool of used laptops.
> You also better hope the aliexpress dont figure out a way to get the RAM
That is a real worry and I can see used machines being gutted because selling DDR3/4/5 sticks is way easier and profitable than the whole machine. Adapters for SODIMM to regular DIMM are readily available and cheap, too.
I remember 15-20 years ago when hard drive prices went up through the roof because there was a flood in Thailand and it too years for prices to come down.
There is going to be supply chain issues due to the current Geopolitical situation (Helium comes out of the Gulf and that is need in chip manufacture) is also going to affect the price of components.
Eventually in a few years (as the article states) the situation will change. It just sucks at the moment.
TBH I am more worried about my ability to fill up the tank on my car as both Petrol and Diesel is unavailable locally. I can make do with whatever computer equipment I have.
I think the doomers are probably anticipating another round of that and they're probably right.
inb4 AI has the same supply chain effects as a worldwide pandemic. I guess those AI doomers that talked about it being the end of the world had it right!
There is a saying that is often trotted out my economists "That the cure for high prices, is high prices".
There is a consumer market and business need for DRAM outside of AI. Someone will fulfil the need as there is a high incentive to. It just going to take a bit of time for this to happen. My equipment is going to be fine for another few years. So I am going to just hang tight and make do with what I got for now.
Oh look, there is a player coming into the market it seems:
https://economy.ac/news/2026/02/202602288291#:~:text=If%20eq...
EDIT: In fact many other chinese companies are now expanding into DRAM because of the high prices. Which confirms exactly what I said.
And those uses which fall short of the new threshold, e.g. hobbyist SBCs, slowly fall away.
Raspberry PI is the defacto standard for SBCs. Almost all the other SBCs had significant problems usually around software support and also third party support e.g. Hats, cases etc.
The price for a couple of 32GB sticks is now over $1200 after being stable at about $200 for several years until last September. That's not a blip; that's 6-fold hike and there is no sign it is slowing down any time soon.
The closest option on the pcpartpicker chart was about $75 as a stable price. So that one's only a 4x increase.
Versus DDR5 where... it looks like a 5x increase to me? I'm seeing a jump from 200USD up to 1000USD. Edit: Oh there's an extra jump in the last month on the CAD version but not the USD version.
> That's not a blip; that's 6-fold hike and there is no sign it is slowing down any time soon.
How does that invalidate anything I said? As states in the article this will change, it will take years but it isn't forever.
I find it hard to believe that people here cannot make do with whatever hardware they already have.
I also don't believe those small SBCs would have survived long term anyway. Most people just use a Raspberry PI. It is either a MiniPC or a Raspberry PI.
Discord groups that had real-time line counts and pictures of the line at most best buys across the country (US).
The only way I got one was overpaying and a lottery system that bundled it with other hardware because they knew everyone would still buy it. It was impossible to buy online normally as you needed some kind of automated way to buy it before stock zeroed the minute it was posted.
You could pay a scalper for a gfx card, but stores had none. Now, stores have RAM at least.
You're comparing to memory sticks that went up 6x. If you were offering anywhere near 6x MSRP and you couldn't get a video card... I don't believe you.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/scalpers-have-sold-50000-nvidia-r...
https://www.pcmag.com/news/read-it-and-weep-heres-how-bad-nv...
These show GPUs available for 1.5-2.5x price, which fits what I remember.
> I couldn't even get a Raspberry PI (any model) for about a year.
https://picockpit.com/raspberry-pi/why-are-raspberry-pi-pric...
I didn't look into Pi prices a whole lot, but this suggests they were continuously available for 2-3x price.
> If you were offering 5x MSRP and you couldn't get a video card... I don't believe you.
My 1080Ti had died. I had to use a 8800GTS from the late 2000s for about a year. As that was the only GPU I had. I have no iGPU on my CPU.
There was at one time, no stock available. Not on Amazon, Not on Overclockers, Not on Scan. They had some weird lotto system taking place on most sites.
Scalpers claimed to have cards. But I wouldn't risk sending a lot of money to some random seller on ebay.
> Unless this article is massively misleading, sure it was out of stock at 1x price but it wasn't out of stock at 2-3x price.
Again I am in the UK. You could not buy any PI other than 1GB model and maybe the zero. Both of which were useless to me.
Edit since you added: Scalpers claimed to have cards. But I wouldn't risk sending a lot of money to some random seller on ebay.
Even with ebay's buyer protection?
Well not to be mean but I think "I refused to use ebay" invalidates your claim that you couldn't buy a card.
I've had problems with it before (I can't remember specifics as it was a while ago). I'd rather not going through the hassle and/or risk in the first place.
There are still plenty of scams on ebay. During this era there were people scamming. e.g the box for a GPU. Listing the entire specs and then putting right at the bottom of the listing it was only the box and not the card.
> Well not to be mean but I think "I refused to use ebay" invalidates your claim that you couldn't buy a card.
What you are doing is being hyper-pedantic. It is fucking tiresome when people do this online.
If you are going to be a smart arse, I will modify my statement to say "I could not get a card from a reputable online store as they were all out of stock and did not wish to risk buying from a less reputable one".
I would be foolish to trust some overpriced (or underpriced) listing on ebay. I've had an ebay/paypal account now for 25+ years, I've learned to never do this because I got screwed every time I did.
That's not pedantry. There's a huge difference between "they were unavailable and I couldn't get one at any price" and "I could have bought one from a scalper but I didn't trust them". Even if it's reasonable not to trust them (it is!), the first statement is sensational, and untrue, especially considering you emphasized "at any price" in your comment upthread.
> If you are going to be a smart arse, I will modify my statement to say "I could not get a card from a reputable online store as they were all out of stock and did not wish to risk buying from a less reputable one".
That's what you should have said in the first place; that would have been honest and correct.
And please, there's no need to call the other poster names. That's uncalled-for and childish. You seem to be new here (9-day-old account), so please read the site guidelines and turn it down a notch or three.
It is for any normal person in relatively normal setting.
Only amongst technical people is this sort of discourse tolerated where someone pretends that an unreasonable option (the scalper in this case as you admitted yourself) should be included in a statement when it is perfectly obvious it should not be included because it is not in any way reasonable.
I could have flown to the US and bought a card or China. Is that reasonable? For most people it isn't reasonable. It wasn't for me. Buying from an untrustworthy seller, is unreasonable.
> the first statement is sensational, and untrue, especially considering you emphasized "at any price" in your original comment.
They were out of stock on every reputable site. Therefore I could not buy a card at any price from them because they didn't exist.
> That's what you should have said in the first place; that would have been honest and correct.
I was honest and correct to begin with. The poster was using prices and availability in the US and not the UK.
> And please, there's no need to call the other poster names.
I never called them names. I expressed my annoyance at their behaviour.
I disagree. But clearly I'm not going to convince you (and vice versa), so let's just call it a day.
> I never called them names. I expressed my annoyance at their behaviour.
"Smart arse" is name-calling.
Why don't you step back from the keyboard for a bit and cool down. Might do you some good.
Try it in a IRL conversation and see how quickly someone gets annoyed with you. It won't be very long.
> "Smart arse" is name-calling.
I said "If you are going to be a smart arse". Which means "If you are going to engage in this behaviour then ...".
I never called anyone names.
> Why don't you step back from the keyboard for a bit and cool down. Might do you some good.
I am perfectly fine. I can be mildly annoyed by someone and still be quite rational.
Also this sort of statement is close to concern trolling.
A normal person understands scalping and that if they want it badly enough they can go on ebay.
They're not going to say it's "unavailable at any price" when it's right there for double the price.
If you're willing to pay the scalped price, the risk of using ebay is not in fact unreasonable.
So I suggest in future you should learn that using this line of logic (where you expect me to do something unreasonable to a huge number of people) is not something that people are going to put up with. It is really annoying to have to converse in this manner and in fact I believe that often that is wholly disingenuous and I no longer wish to speak to you.
But I see things a different way. The logic I'm actually using is not pedantic.
You calling me disingenuous over this is painful to look at. Get out of your own head for a second. We're using different premises, and we're reaching different conclusions because of that. My logic is fine, and your logic is fine.
I am not categorising any situation. The vast majority of people would omit unreasonable options.
I could buy a racing bike that is £5000 new, for £200 when I live in London (back in 2000s). The bike would most likely would have been stolen. So technically I can buy a £5000 bike for £200. But most people wouldn't want to buy from a thief and consider it unethical.
People feel similarly about scalpers and other untrustworthy sellers.
> You calling me disingenuous over this is painful to look at. Get out of your own head for a second.
You started the conversation claiming I was outright lying. Then when I clarified to you what I meant you continued claiming I was lying/misstating. That is really annoying.
If you could have just said "okay that is fair, while you might have been doing X and Y, I can understand why you didn't want to do that". That would have been fine. But that didn't happen.
I said I didn't believe you, and I was right in what I meant by that.
> If you could have just said "okay that is fair, while you might have been doing X and Y, I can understand why you didn't want to do that". That would have been fine. But that didn't happen.
So if I had explicitly said "I think it's fine you didn't use ebay" that would have fixed everything? Because I never argued about your personal choice, I argued about you calling ebay "unreasonable".
Well for the record, I was going to say something like that in response to "If you are going to be a smart arse, I will modify my statement to say "I could not get a card from a reputable online store as they were all out of stock and did not wish to risk buying from a less reputable one"."
But then I saw you had called me "hyper-pedantic" and I focused on rebuffing that attack instead.
I'd rate my pedantry level as quite low. From my point of view this is not a nitpick.
Especially because you emphasized "at any price". It's the scalpers and the used market that were selling at any price. Sticking to reputable stores means sticking close to MSRP.
I would expect people to understand that unreasonable options should be omitted from conversation.
There was no stock at any of the online outlets that are commonly used in the UK when it came to GPUs for what seemed like a long time.
> I'd rate my pedantry level as quite low. From my point of view this is not a nitpick.
"I have investigated myself and found that I did nothing wrong".
Ebay is not all scalpers either. You could have gotten another 1080Ti from a legitimate previous owner.
Paying a scalper on ebay isn't. Which is what I said. Misstating what I said is disingenuous.
> You could have gotten another 1080Ti from a legitimate previous owner.
They were being scalped as well. Also people were holding onto their 10 series cards because the other cards were too expensive. So I would have had to buy an older card (which I had already had one fail) at an inflated price.
I could have bought a GT 710 or a GT1030, but that wouldn't have been any better than my 8800GTS really.
I could have flown to Taiwan and bought a card. I could have stolen one. I am sure you will invent another fantasy scenario where I could have gotten a graphics card that I didn't think about at the time.
The fact is that I could not buy a new card from an online retailer in the UK as they were out of stock. Even when they did come into stock there was a lotto system. So you couldn't really buy one then. That is a fact.
Ah, so you could have bought one, but you judged the available suppliers to be too risky.
Completely fair, but then it's not true that you couldn't buy one "at any price". It was just not a price+risk that you were willing to take.
Also, re: Raspberry Pis, you couldn't always get the exact RAM configuration you wanted, but they were pretty continuously available during COVID on Aliexpress. You did have to pay 3-5x normal price, but you could do it. I really needed one after one at home died, and paid the 3x markup, and it was annoying but fine. Not sure if Aliexpress is equally as available in the UK as it is here in the US, though.
You are being pedantic. I find this type of discussion very tiresome. I've explained why in other forks of this thread. Quite honestly it pisses me off.
> Also, re: Raspberry Pis, you couldn't always get the exact RAM configuration you wanted, but they were pretty continuously available during COVID on Aliexpress. You did have to pay 3-5x normal price, but you could do it. I really needed one after one at home died, and paid the 3x markup, and it was annoying but fine. Not sure if Aliexpress is equally as available in the UK as it is here in the US, though.
Not in the UK. Someone was running a site with all the places that you could buy from. I was checking most days. Stock was extremely limited other than a few models.
We just had a vendor uplift our quote 50% per unit for some machines because of a mix of memory + supply chain issues.
We decided to just keep our current hardware for now and extend a support contract for ~ normal price.
Try 200% (tho tbf our boss sit on that quote for like a year and a half because he thought it was too pricey. Bet he regretted it now).
And all the quotes are now only valid for a week due to insane price fluctuation.
Good thing they didn't increase it.
GPUs, ram, ssds, hdds, hell even CPUs are starting to climb in price. It's an everything shortage and it's only getting worse.
A workstation that two years ago cost $3,000 was $10,000 last month and $10,500 this month. There are parts which aren't available at any price.
Between this revelation and that post recently on HN about the scanned receipts and egg prices, I find myself wondering if we're worrying about the wrong things.
We're seeing massive inflation in computing, but because the dollar is holding its value we call it increased prices. But the buying by the big buyers is the thing driving the inflation, its mechanism is scarcity.
But it's also localized. Only we experience this as a problem because compared to the hyperscalers we're poor.
The same idea applies to the price of groceries. As the prices increase, base increase being inflation, but logistic efficiency also plays a big role.
The effect is the same. The ones with more spendable income don't experience an issue yet in the projects nobody is eating fresh veggies.
The part that scares me is the creep, as I call it. Throughout the years I've always been able to carry price shocks and such but this time I'm out of the game. No more DRAM for me.
I then wonder if one day, without losing my job, I won't be able to pay for veggies.
After all, a truck can carry a 10kg sack of rice, or a 10kg nvidia gpu. If shipping costs for 10kg rise by $15 the sack of rice has doubled in price, but the GPU is only 0.5% more expensive.
The GPUs can though.
Having issues with both price and availability on NVMe, SATA flash, starting to see some CPUs, and for a personal project high density spinning rust (24TB+).
"Memory card prices have TRIPLED in the last few months: when will this madness stop?!" https://www.digitalcameraworld.com/cameras/memory-cards/memo...
Unfortunately I don't see this reversing until HBM demand plateaus or new fabs come online, which is 2-3 years out at minimum.
or to teach that again
If you go look, you often discover that 90% of the requests are useless, or at least could be combined. That 60% of bandwidth is used up by 3 high res images which get displayed at 30x30 pixels. That CPU performance is dominated by some rubbish code that populates an array of a million items every call, then looks up 1 element then throws the whole thing away, only to regenerate the exact same list again a few microseconds later.
We have plenty of RAM. In absolute terms, 8gb of ram in the macbook neo is 8 billion bytes. 64 billion ones and zeros. You don't need rocket science to make a CRUD app that runs well with that much ram.
Computers don't get slower over time. If we were merely as lazy with computing resources as programmers 10 years ago, most programs would scream on modern hardware.
I am a web developer of over 20 years. I can create insanely optimised pages using nothing other than vanilla CSS and JS.
I have been paid exactly once to do this. There is a site I built in 2023 that has a JS and CSS footprint of less than 100KB after GZip (large site). We even had the Go templates compiled when the web app initialised so the server responded as fast as possible.
Guess what happened when it went live? The content team use 8mb images for everything and every single optimisation I did at CSS/JS was totally useless.
Devs don't care because the people above them don't care and therefore there is zero incentive to even bother.
I hear you, and this is a real problem. But it's kind of depressing to need incentives to care about the quality of your work.
You get beaten down eventually. Late last year. I spent like an hour going through why a PR (and this developer's work) in general wasn't acceptable to my superior. He said to me that he was perfectly fine with someone not understanding basic language features (after 6 months using the langauge). He then merged it.
It didn't work (as I had warned) and created a situation where I had to turn off tests in some projects as it totally broke them. I've spent months fixing his crap and still haven't recovered from one bad PR. Now add two other employees that are like this and my manager does nothing about it. I bought a AI package from Jetbrains and now have it do almost all the work. I normally spend some time cleaning it up. Management have made it clear to me that they don't care about quality, they won't hold anyone accountable and won't even fire people that clearly cannot program.
I am 43 years old this year. I just can't be bothered trying to be a hero anymore.
Similarly, my father who retired last week was a joiner/carpenter and would be considered a master boat builder. When my sister was little my dad made her new bed with hearts and flowers carved in the headboard.
He described how adversarial he was too his employer before he retired. He was engaging in Malicious compliance (he is a layman and didn't know it was called that) because management was making his life miserable by employing the same sort of the stand-up meeting ceremony nonsense in carpentry.
They managed to make someone with that level of skill hate their job because of process.
1. Check that you really need a SaaS SPA to solve the communication issues between your team members.
2. HTML and css should be enough for 99% of corporate websites.
3. Resize the images on your websites, they're too big.
4. Use teams in the browser, not as stand-alone app.
The old graybeards who know how to optimize efficiency may not work for them anymore, though.
Most programmers are JS web devs writing client side code or server side CRUD.
I would guess < 10% of programmers writing code today get perf / valgrind out on the regular. I know I dont.
Nobody who works with LLM generated code believes that LLMs produce fault-free code.
My point, which I should have been clearer with, is that we aren't at a state where you can just one shot a rewrite of a complex application into another language and expect some sort of free savings. Once we are at that state, and it's good enough to pull it off, why wouldn't the AI be able to pull it off in C as well?
A lot of people are very excited by the idea that now language capabilities (and almost every other technical nuance) somehow don't matter but much like gravity they will continue to assert themselves whether you believe in them or not.
So far humans have proven unable to write large apps in C without those issues, given their work is the training basis for LLMs this creates two problems, one being that they don't 'know' what a safe app looks like either and any humans reviewing the outputted code will be unable to validate that either.
In like 4 hours. (and most of that was me copy pasting things around to feed it reasonable chunks of information, feature by feature)
It also wrote a real-time passive DTLS-SRTP decryptor in C in like 1 hour total based on just the DTLS-SRTP RFC and a sample code of how I write suckless things in C.
I mean people can believe whatever they want. But I believe LLMs can write a reasonably fine C.
I believe that coding LLMs are particularly nice for people who are into C and suckless.
I remember my company buying RAM expansion boards for our PCs back in 1989 so we could run OS/2. The 4MB boards (MB! Not GB.) cost around $2000 at the time.
Like everyone, I love getting tons of RAM or SSD storage on the cheap; but we have a ways to go before we reach the 'unaffordable' level.
I was going to buy a small nuc and load it up on memory but I've acquired an old Mac Mini with 16GB of ram, which will do.
I use the 16GB SKU to host a bunch of containers and some light debugging tools, and the power usage that sips at idle will probably pay for the whole board over my previous home server, within about 5 years.
If stuff is written in .NET, Java or JavaScript. Hosting a non-trivial web app can use several hundred megabytes of memory.
If you run normal web applications they often take many hundreds of megabytes if they are built with some popular languages that I happened to list off the top of my head. That is a fact.
Comparing that to cut down frameworks with many limitations meant for embedded devices isn't a valid comparison.
Which bigcorp does use cubicles?
I will not be buying any more SBC's at this price point. I wonder if Raspberry PI will survive.
So timed that all pretty great. What worries me is my desktop is up for a full new buy somewhere around early '28. That could be a train wreck depending on how taiwan situation goes
That's a very specific date / timeline. How do you decide to do a full new buy? I ask because I own a desktop that I built 15 years ago which I was flirting with replacing completely last year, but unfortunately I didn't pull the trigger ... oops :(
My old rig is still going strong. The motherboard can only take up to 32GB DDR3 though. CPU is an Intel i7-4790k which is still very fair today if you are not running a resource hog OS (looking at you Windows). Overall it is completely serviceable for my needs. Being honest with myself the only reason I wanted to upgrade was for nerd cred but I don't game much anymore and don't do any ML tasks that require lots of local compute.
They're already regretting spending so much now that prices have started to tick downward.
I keep telling everyone: If you don't have a pressing need to buy right now, please wait 6 months and check again.
Def don't regret doing that, though I regret not springing for the extra RAM.
After adding to it DRAM and SSDs, the cost of the barebone remained of only 40% of the total, so the price of the memories was 50% higher than the barebone computer.
At that time, the memories were still cheaper than today, so now the price ratio would be even worse. (The barebone NUC had an Intel Arrow Lake H CPU and it cost $500, while 32 GB DDR5 + 3 TB SSDs cost $750.)
Where?
With prices steadily going up, for me it's starting to feel more sensible to repurpose the RAM sticks I've collected from old PC builds / laptops and just throw together small amd64 boxes instead of buying more RPis.
For a couple years, a Pi was a decent value as a cheaper small desktop replacement.
If you use a PC or mini-PC that you already have, that is much cheaper than using a Raspberry Pi or similar.
If everything on the board but the ram costs $30, and ram is going from $10/gb to $20/gb, then they have to change the price $50 -> $70 to break even on the 2gb board, and $190 -> $350 for the 16gb board.
In other words, the raspi is now priced like a stick of ram with a bonus computer attached because ram is massively more expensive than the rest of the computer.
There was only one problem. The paper jumped straight from "this paper will show how our new treatment could cures cancer forever" to "as you can see, these results clearly show that our treatment cures cancer" - with neither any actual results nor any specifics on the treatment. And I don't just mean that the paper didn't go into details; writing the paper was the full extent of their "research".
Because we all know that DRAM prices have spiked since production is going to those infernal chatbot training data centers. Same as a lot of the electricity in some parts of the world, BTW.
> We all know that DRAM prices have spiked since production is going to those infernal chatbot training data centers
I know it's very fashionable here to talk about capitalism as some hand-washes-hand big corp organized scam, but if you put that ideology aside for a moment, you contradicted yourself here, I think.
I personally don't like conspiracy-theory-thinking. If I was a DRAM manufacturer and had to choose between servicing a single customer, who orders hundreds of millions worth of my product, or service a very large number of customers who order tiny amounts of the product a piece, then of course I would focus on the large client, because they are easier to service for the expected profit margin. I wouldn't even need to think about advertisement, sales, all that jazz. Looking at it from that perspective, it seems pretty logical to me that a spike in demand from datacenter operators would rise prices dramatically. I struggle to see room for collusion / conspiracy here.
Otherwise their memory manufacturing companies would be happy to exploit this opportunity.
Actually some Chinese companies already sell cheap DDR5 memory modules, but their production capacity is severely limited by the US blockade, so the cheap memories are available in few places, mainly in Asia.
So the high memory prices are caused by USA both by the AI companies that have bought most of the existing production and by the US government, who has sabotaged the Chinese memory vendors since a couple of years ago, in order to protect the market share of Micron (the US sanctions coincided with the moment when several companies, including Apple, intended to use the cheaper Chinese memories, so preventing this to happen seems a much more likely reason for the "sanctions" than the BS excuse that consumer DDR DIMMs and SSDs are dual-use products that may benefit the military. Even if that were true, the US sanctions did not prevent at all the Chinese from producing anything that would be needed in a small quantity, like for a military application. The sanctions have prevented only the mass production of devices using state-of-the-art lithography, which would have impacted the prices in consumer markets).
Oh yeah, the market is also getting intense scrutiny from powerful geopolitical entities that are quite explicit that they don't believe in fair play or consistent, stable rules.
Would you place that bet?
I was expecting the Milk V Titan to avoid this memory nonsense since it has two unpopulated DDR4 slots, but it has fallen off the radar like several other SBCs.
The idea of putting sixteen gigs of RAM in a raspberry pi is nuts. The legit thing you want to use a raspberry pi (or a competitor) for as an embedded headless thing with no KB/mouse/display attached should run fine in 2GB of RAM or less, assuming an ordinary debian-based OS environment.
I would much rather have a used, ex-corporate/ex-lease, small form factor or ultra small form factor x86-64 desktop PC (Dell, HP, Lenovo, whatever) with 16GB of RAM in it and an SSD on a SATA3 or NVME interface. Whatever is the "best" SFF that you can buy via huge eBay used equipment dealers on any given month.
Despite being many years old, whatever you can buy on ebay for 200 bucks (at least before the recent RAM fiasco) with some recent-ish quad core core i5/i7 or Ryzen in it will run circles around a raspberry pi 5.
Arduino has one of the cheapest 4GB boards now, but I wonder if it's just because they made a ton and the demand for their strange board has been low?
Yes, a $250 mini PC I bought last year is now $350.
Is this pricing bad? Yeah, compared to what it was.
Is this the end of the world? Not really, and we’ve seen price spikes for all kinds of PC components in the past. It’s rarely permanent.
It had caused me to look around though. I have found the Pi Zero 2W to be surprisingly capable for Pi sized jobs.
You can still jump on eBay and buy all kinds of dirt cheap used pieces of hardware.
My buddy just bought a used ThinkPad T14 with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage for about $500. You can get by with a whole lot less.
In this context, I will also present the idea that Rasperry Pi has represented quite poor cost value for many years now.
I already moaned about this recently, but to briefly reiterate: the only hardware that's becoming available for most people in my region are Frankenstein desktops built from heavily used 10+ year old Xeons running on suspicious motherboards made by obscure Chinese manufacturers you've never heard of. This is pushing ever more people towards smartphones and away from actual computers.
But at least we got the bullshit machine in return, that's something, I guess.
I've heard reports that these are actually surprisingly good. I wouldn't want to use one in a production environment, but for homelab stuff they're an incredible deal.
It really shocks me how bad shipping has gotten. It's nearly unaffordable to buy things on eBay from the US as a Canadian due to shipping costs, so I can only imagine just how bad it is for people from other countries.
ThinkPad T14 which generation?