That should be long enough to make sure consumer electronics, especially PCs, are dying.
This is ON SALE, from MicroCenter today- they’re known for having amazing deals.
THIS IS NOT OKAY
I never understood why my dad was always so cheap until now.
You “used” to pay this much for something and now it skyrocketed, so you can’t live with yourself paying that higher price when it has been much cheaper for so long. Maybe he thought prices were going to come down again.
I don’t think the prices of RAM are ever going to come down. At least as long as people keep paying, which they do.
Well, people aren’t really paying. Theoretically, large AI investment groups are paying. I say theoretically because as far as I understand it, they’ve mostly promised to buy the output but I don’t think have actually made good on buying it. The manufactured scarcity is being realized as increased memory costs, but the contracts are still landing even though the biggest contract may not actually be filled in the future (AI bubble). It’s why memory makers are trying to get Apple and co to commit to today’s prices for the next 3 years, because if they do and the big contract falls through, they still get their insane profit margin baked in for a bit and then can stockpile / price fix / sell through to market.
The big wrench here will be if Chinese memory fabs come online. If that big contract (AI) defaults, existing contracts are going to be very much worthless as folks would rather cancel them and fill orders at CXMT. So you may see a lot of consumer memory start filling from those fabs as they take market share while traditional players try to price fix. So the real question is, will cxmt try to capture market or play price fixing with the current cartel? My money is on market share.
Can we just observe what a bizarre fucking moment we are living in?
Everyone knows the collapse of the AI bubble is imminent and most of those people know it’s going to be the proximal trigger for a global financial collapse and at the very least a long recession.
Everyone knows except the people who are investing billions of dollars into AI and their press.
There is going to be a LOT of used hardware on the market if it does.
The investors know too. They just need to hype it up so the next is bigger than them and bail them out.
It’s a pyramid scheme for billionaires. They just hope they’re not at the bottom of the pyramid.
Same as NFTs and every other bubble where it was clear that it was a bubble
Oh they know
Oh they definitely know, it’s a deliberate and methodical way to pump the money around between corporations, move it from consumers to corporations and from corporations to the C-suite. They know the bubble will burst. They only care about how much money they have extracted from it to still come out on top after it all comes crashing down.
It’s a pyramid scheme, we’re the ones at the bottom and we can’t get out.
Everyone knows the collapse of the AI bubble is imminent
Paul Krugman was predicting the Housing Crash as early as 2004 in his NYT column.
Everyone knows except the people who are investing billions of dollars into AI and their press.
The theory of the modern tech industry is that you can simply outrun your problems. Meta/Facebook has done this repeatedly, leaping over multi-billion-dollar failure after failure based entirely on the inertia of their core product growth combined with low interest rates and a bullish long term economic outlook.
Even in the worst-case scenario, we have such an enormous array of tools to manipulate markets - as demonstrated in 2008 and 2014 and 2020 - that investors are reluctant to sell with a massive federal bailout always on the horizon. And we’re far from the worst-case scenario. '26 Q2 was a historic earnings season. We are in the middle of the biggest bull market in history.
Well, sure, as far as government policy is concerned, the stock market is the economy, no wonder it’s going to be goosed until it collapses.
Here’s the thing about bubbles - when people believe that collapse is imminent, they hold back and don’t dive in. It is only when the overwhelming majority believe that this new thing can’t lose, is going to change the world, and that we are in a “new paradigm” where the old rules don’t matter, that the bubble has peaked and collapse is imminent. We’ve probably got another year or so before collapse. Too many people are still skeptical.
Timing a bubble pop is notoriously difficult.
I think one thing that’s helping people hang on to delusion is the scarcity of real information. For instance, it’s prefectly possible that 2/3rds of NVIDIA GPUS purchased for data centers are just sitting in a warehouse somewhere, uninstalled. But that’s just a guess based on available data, but we can’t know for sure.
I think with Anthropic and OpenAI’s upcoming IPOs, we’re going to get a lot of information that will eventually filter through the slavish business press and into public consciousness as facts instead of opinions.
I think this bubble is a bit different and not really reliant on the general public’s view or support. They will attempt to ram this down our throats, with violence where necessary, because the more buy-in the better, but the clock is already ticking because they made promises of profit they cannot keep and when the debt comes due they will not be able to pay
They know their promises cannot be kept. They are building a surveillance state for the government. When the bubble bursts, the government will swoop in and bail them out because they are too big to fail and hand over most of these AI resources to the US government.
That is why you sell shovels rather than mine the gold yourself. These memory companies know what they are doing…
Put it together aligning with the housing collapse and we gonna be living great.
I wondering if there is any benefit for me in having all the RAM my motherboard allows for when this bubble burst, and Ram prices fall like a rock to rock bottom.
Honestly, probably not.
I think we’ve reached the top of the S-Curve for personal computing hardware. People are staying with their old hardware longer and software is no longer targeting high end and future devices.
So unless there’s a reason you think you might need that RAM, I’d put the money somewhere else.
People are staying with their old hardware longer
Absolutely 100% my experience too, my computer is a mix of 2-5 year old hardware, and I’m still on the AM4 socket which is 9 years old now! It is a newer motherboard but I started on that socket way back in 2017! The upgrade path for AM4 has been insane. 😋
In the 90’s I wouldn’t have a single component that was 2 years old.
IDK if that’s because I’m older, but definitely it seems the advantage of upgrading every year is diminishing, and the price is increasing. Sometimes I would even buy a new GPU 2 times in the same year. 😜My desktop is 10-year-old gaming PC. If you look at the Steam Survey, it’s about middle-of-the-road today.
It’s not just PC. It’s an open question whether anyone is going to be the next gen of game console, and that’s partially because gaming itselfhas been enshittified, but also for the same reason people aren’t running out to buy 8K TV’s–the minimal improvement in subjective experience is not worth the price.
People are more likely to replace phones because they break than because they are upgrading–partially why Apple and Samsung are doing their DARNEDEST to lock down repairs, so they can drive up the cost of repairs to force people to buy a new phone.
We’re approaching a world where we think of what was formerly “high technology” the same way we think of refrigerators–as basic devices that can generically and permanently do a necessary set of tasks.
I always hated consoles, as a waste of a good computer you couldn’t do anything with but game.
But I think consoles will be fine, consoles are mostly for children, and they will get exclusives to drive up sales.
But this is a bad time to make a new console, still AFAIK both Sony and Microsoft are planning new ones next year?The economics of consoles are in shambles.
It used to be you’d get highish-end hardware at cheaper price because of mass production and manufacturer incentives (made up for on games).
Now with people carrying massive game libraries, they’re less likely to buy new games, at the same time as console gaming becomes enshittified cash grabs, at the same time as tech has hit diminishing returns in an industry where generational hardware sales drive software purchases.
Playstation has a few exclusives, but XBox has literally none–it’s all cross compatible with Windows, and almost every single one of those titles is playable via Steam on Linux. You can build an equivalent PC for the same price or less than the equivalent console, and have improved upgrade and repair paths, plus mods, plus Steam sales… consoles make less and less financial sense every day.
The only console that is doing well is Nintendo, and that’s because they built around content not hardware.
And that said, most kids are growing up gaming on tablets and phones, and they haven’t gone through the evolutionary learning process that a 35-year-old life-long gamer. Chances are you hand an 8-year-old a complex two-stick game and they’ll do about as well as my father would.
I think likely we’ll have a profusion of quirky handheld consoles, but the big box consoles will be replaced with computers.
the big box consoles will be replaced with computers.
I think you are wrong, the PC is dying, and the consoles will have even bigger advantage from mass production in the future.
Most people don’t care to maintain a PC just to play games, and most people don’t really have any other use for a PC anymore.
Even without subsidies from Microsoft and Sony, the current gen consoles were cheaper than an equivalent performing PC when they arrived. But in the future that may not be true, it’s all down to profit maximization, because there is no doubt a console can be sold cheaper than an equivalent performing PC.
Just like my lovers all my memory is virtual.
Or how to destroy the biggest entertainment industry in human history within months.
Until suddenly AI demand vanishes and huge orders are canceled, and the makers see themselves with loads of unsold stock, and the prices plummet.
I’d give it 6-12 months. But only time will tell.Unfortunately, not really. RAM made as HBM or put in weird data center modules is stuck in that form factor, and when the bubble does pop, there is loads of pent up demand for memory makers to fill with new production.
It’s not like crypto where they used consumer stuff.
Never underestimate a nerd and a need to compute. Those modules will have someone building adapters and interfaces to use that shit. As soon as someone runs doom on one its game on.
HBM is only usable with chips co-designed for it, packaged on an interposer with microscopic traces. An enthusiast is not doing anything useful with it unless they own a few TSMC assembly plants.
The CPU modules can be tricky, too.
Now, some enthusiasts are already hacking. Go to the Level 1 Tech forums, and you’ll find a group trying to reverse engineer AMD Instinct GPUs designed for server motherboards, dealing with locked firmware, soldering stuff, you name it.
…But you probably won’t like the end goal of the hacking: using them to run LLMs and other GPGPU stuff locally. They aren’t usable for gaming.
Good point, still there will be a massive amount of production capacity, and not enough customers to fill that capacity, so the prices will drop fast, as competition grows to utilize as much capacity as possible, because it’s extremely expensive to shut down factories, or run factories at below capacity.
Unfortunately, memory production capacity changes vary slowly.
In spite of the drama, memory production hasn’t increased all that much, which is why there is such a RAM crisis. Maybe it will grow some before the bubble pops, but Micron, SK Hynix, and Samsung aren’t stupid:
https://en.sedaily.com/finance/2026/10/01/microns-long-term-chip-deals-jump-63-percent-as-ai-memory
They are getting companies to sign long term (5+ year) pricing contracts. In other words, they clearly know the bubble could pop. They are already hedging their bets, and they aren’t going to put themselves in the position of massive overexpansion.
