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Comment by linguae | Hacker News Reader

It’s sad to see the one area of life that has long resisted inflation (computing) now succumb to inflationary forces. Other than emergency situations such as COVID-19, I’m used to seeing prices going down over time for computers and their components. It’s one of the rare bright spots when everything else is escalating in price, and now that’s disappearing.

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Firstly, this is not due to inflation. The price increase is explicitly (per the article even) due to increased market demand that is causing raised prices.

Secondly, Computing has always been subject to inflation. It cannot escape inflation. You may not notice it , perhaps due to the increase in performance but the cost of parts definitely has risen in the same tiers if you look over a long enough period to avoid pricing amortization

Inflation simply refers to the rate at which prices are increasing. It's agnostic as to the origin ( any single/combo of demand increase, supply shortage, money printing, price fixing, etc).

Only if you phrase it devoid of any context.

And if the definition was that loose to begin with, then the original comment is even more incorrect since there have been multiple rounds of demand/scarcity led pricing increases.

Inflation isn’t just "prices increasing". It’s the sustained, broad-based rise in the overall price level. Your comment treats any price increase as inflation, but economists draw a pretty clear line here: a relative price change (say, eggs getting more expensive because of a supply shock) isn’t the same thing as inflation. You can have sector-specific increases (as in this case, with RAM) that are independent of changes in the general price level.

> the cost of parts definitely has risen in the same tiers if you look over a long enough period

This is especially apparent if you’re a hardware manufacturer and have to buy the same components periodically, since the performance increase that consumers see doesn’t appear.

> if you... buy the same components periodically... the performance increase that consumers see doesn’t appear.

Good point and that should properly be called inflation in the semiconductor sector. We always have general inflation, but the different sectors of the economy exhibit different rates of inflation depending on the driving forces and their strength.

As of today, tariffs are the major driver of inflation and semiconductors are hit hard because the only high-volume, reasonable quality/price country has been practically excluded from the the US market by export bans and prohibitively high tariffs - that's China of course.

The other producers are in a near monopoly situation and are also acting like a cartel without shame or fear of law... which isn't there to begin with.

I've seen prices for memory, SSDs, thunderbolt hubs, and thunderbolt/high end USB cables, flatline or get worse over the last 3 or so years.

Most in-demand electronics got worse post-2020 and haven't recovered.

That's why I just buy something when I need it or when I think the price is reasonable, because nowadays, if I wait for something to get cheaper like I used to do in the 90s-00s, chances are it's gonna get even more expensive as time passes, not cheaper.

The days when you would wait 6-12 months and get the same thing for 50% off or a new thing with 50% more performance for the same price are over, when there's only one major semiconductor fab making everything, 3 RAM makers, 3 FLASH makers, 2 GPU vendors, 2 CPU vendors, controlling all supply, and I'm competing with datacenters for it.

> 2 GPU vendors

Intel Arc GPUs exist, I have a B580 in my desktop and it works well enough.

Parent means "2 vendors of GPUs that actualy matter".

In general, your dollar buys a _Crazy_ amount of compute...but over the last 30 years or so, RAM has spiked several times (Taiwan plant fire) and suffered from several market driven spikes (DDRx shortages, Apple's crazy pricing structure)

There was the issue of hard disk prices for years after the floods in taiwan in 2011.

GPU prices were horrendes when crypto happened (they migrated into a stable issue but it was still because of crypto).

DDR4 jumped because they started focusing on DDR5 before these news right now.

I could probably find more examples but hey

I know one area of computing that has dramatically risen in price in the past 10-15 years or so is GPUs. Cards that fit into midrange today sell for prices that would've been considered ultra-highend just a few gpu generations ago. Today's highend prices for just a graphics card are higher than I've paid for entire computers in the past. It's ridiculous.

imo this is wrong. what's changing is how high end having a discrete GPU is. as integrated graphics have become increasingly powerful, the discrete GPU has shifted to being more of a luxury item.

> time for computers and their components

Seems it has been the opposite for some components like GPUs though for years (well before the AI boom)

Speaking as someone who used to buy them regularly to support a PC gaming hobby stretching back to the original glQuake -- GPUs were on average very reasonably priced prior to the crypto boom that preceded the AI boom.

So its technically not AI "ruining everything" here, but there was a nice, long before-time of reasonable pricing.

Memory price fluctuations due to market demand and monetary inflation - the increase in quantity of fiat money, diluting its value - are two separate and unrelated things.

And both are at play here - it's not just RAM, to ascribe it to AI

It was always subject to inflationary forces due to money printing like everything else, it was just the one place where natural deflation due to improving technology was temporarily enough to offset it

It's not inflation tho ? It's just rise in demand.

Seriously doubt it.

When Sam Altman buys 40% of global DRAM wafer production, that looks like a demand increase to the market.

Not to mention the other companies panic buying another ~20% (guess).

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