The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics
davidoks.blog
davidoks.blog
> these memory makers have learned a very particular lesson from the unforgiving history [deep drops in demand] of their industry: always leave demand unmet
I can't blame them for keeping some reserve demand ready so they keep having customers over the years.
Just consider that a chat application today takes more memory than a full 3D game with thousands of users (including chat) + the operating system used to ~20 years ago. If 128 GB of RAM were the norm then there's a chance we might expect to buy 128 GB of RAM too.
But I suppose it's really a question of how many dollars we expect to spend on memory rather than the specific amounts of memory.
Applications can be lazy and grow to the amount of resources using, but the real need for maximum ram is using it for these new purposes.
It's a gambler's ruin problem. Future profits are worth zero if you go out of business first.
One cannot simply "flood the market" or the Chinese would have done it ages ago.
Even so, the production of cheaper Chinese DDR5 memory is increasing despite not being able to import all the tools and materials that are needed, so eventually they will benefit from this memory shortage that allows them to gain market share that they would not have gained otherwise.
The other part of the sabotage is that western companies then have restrictions on what chips they're allowed to buy from China. IDK if RAM chips are also on that list.
Apple cancelled their deal with YMTC (Chinese RAM company) after the US sanctioned the latter. I don't know whether that is directly because of the sanctions, or indirectly (e.g. if Apple thought sanctions would hamper YMTC's ability to supply the goods), but they have had the same effect.
https://www.lightreading.com/business-management/chinese-chi...
https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/appl...
China also runs adverse competitive industrial policies (e.g., industrial spying, flooding markets). Not making value judgment here.
You have quite the post history BTW.
The fabs themselves (especially for memory) are being retooled for process moves. At least that's what micron has been doing.
But otherwise I agree. Micron has a new fab being built that was started around 2020. It's nowhere near finished.
And then allow small low cost manufacturers to get the rest of the market... like China has been doing this whole time.
The MacBook Pro on which I’m writing this piece needs memory that can keep up with a powerful processor running many programs at once: so it uses a standard called DDR, “double data rate,” which runs at a reasonably high voltage and offers high bandwidth. The processor on my iPhone is less powerful, so it needs less data at any given moment; but voltage matters enormously, since every milliwatt allocated to memory is drained from the battery. So smartphones use LPDDR, “low-power double data rate,” a variant of DDR engineered to operate at lower voltages.
I’m pretty sure even an iPhone 11 chip is more powerful than a 2019 MacBook Pro CPU in ST. An iPhone 15 is more powerful than the fastest 2019 MacBook Pro Intel CPU in MT.
I suppose he can be using a 2019 MacBook Pro or older and an iPhone 14 or older and compares only MT speeds.
> So modern DRAM manufacturing is an extraordinarily complex and expensive process. Building a single state-of-the-art DRAM fabrication facility, a “fab,” will cost you about $15 to $20 billion; acquiring all the necessary equipment, like lithography tools and etching machines, will cost you another few billion; and then it’ll take you a few years of producing substandard and defective memory chips before your yields start to look competitive.
Extraordinarily complex and expensive! And yet I look at all the money being shuffled around between Nvidia and Google and Microsoft and Amazon and Apple and can't help but think that this is a tiny amount in comparison to what they're moving around on the stock market buying shares in each other.
Apple in particular has $20B in its couch cushions and is very vertically integrated and hardware-focused. Apple silicon is currently made by TSMC, but it seems they'd be a prime candidate to spin up their own memory fab.
I suppose the biggest problem to current executives at each company is the "few years" until that investment yields results, in the short term it's better to pay through the nose and buy GPUs with HBM at any price.
You'd need a very strong, very particular forecast to make such a costly bet. And conversely, it may say something about their internal forecasts that they're not making the bet.
This is why China is eating the West. Quite easy to start an electronics company when you have such an abundance of suppliers, compare this to America where there is maybe one or two players in the entire nation.
Quite pathetic, but we live in a pathetic world so it tracks.
A great example of this is how they handled digital payments. While Visa and Mastercard maintain a monopoly in the West, China faced a similar situation when private mobile payment systems began dominating the market. In response, the government stepped in and forced the ecosystem to open up to competitors.
Major merchants in the US do support UnionPay, even USPS(!) displays its logo. The problem used to be small/local merchants, but with the advent of modern PoS like square/clover it is getting better.
In what same way? Even registering a Wechat account is no trivial task, just look at all those ppl asking help scanning their signup codes. Suppose you did KYC and seasoned the acct enough to get it finally working, it is still limited to business codes (think of bigbox stores), not personal codes (think of farmers market, local mom-and-pop place, etc). The latter actually dominates the daily life in China.
IMO using V/M through wechat/alipay is like in the world you described and I was arguing UnionPay works in the US because ppl can buy gift cards at PO then use them at merchants, which is actually smoother comparing to this w/a business, but at the same time quite ridiculous.
unionpay uses pulse
The relationship between Tencent/Bytedance/Alibaba is what happens when there are no monopoly laws or they are ineffective: every company fighting tooth and nail to corner every market with a single "super-app". No specialization at all and many races to the bottom, like the recent war between Alibaba, JD and Meituan over instant delivery that made every company involved lose a lot of money.
In China, this kind of corporate driven censorship doesn't happen. Tech corporations like WeChat and Alipay don't control the payment routing that is run by the state's central network. A merchant just needs a bank account and a QR code, and any customer can use it to pay them. The private apps cannot arbitrarily decide to block a legal merchant based on corporate politics or moral stances.
By legal platforms or creators I suppose you mean the dispute between card processors and platforms like steam, pixiv, dslite, etc about nsfw contents like anime child porn? Those stuff are already banned in China long time ago.
To give a real example of how China bans stuff, take ByteDance as an example. It used to run a joke sharing app roughly translates into Subtle Jokes that is on par with TikTok in terms of popularity. Then one day CCP decided it did not like it, then poof it's gone overnight. The founder issued a public apology and promised to almost double their censorship department in the future. Comparing to the TikTok case in the US, we got what? The funny-yet-pathetic legal tic-tac-toeing of Singaporean-not-Chinese nonsense. There is just fundamental difference in the scale and efficiency of censorship.
People all over the world have often revolted to get some enterprises state run (nationalizing) and were often punished or even bombed for it.
All the other services and products I use in my life, from the car I drive to the clothes on my back, the food I eat and the device I write this on are provided by private enterprise and they have become much better and cheaper in my life time.
I don't think that your chance of survival of a heart attack or lymphoma got worse since 2016.
Doesn't matter if the 1% has now access to better versions.
Even Europeans are getting bigger, but America is way, way worse. Seeing those extreme landwhale-type people who cannot even walk around the mall and navigate it using a motorized cart, throwing bulk packages of horrible shitty ultraprocessed food and drinks into said cart, always makes me wonder how the hell is your healthcare system even capable of keeping them alive.
That is nothing short of a miracle, and should be taken into account in all international comparisons.
We're not discussing whether your healthcare system is friendly to the poor; everyone knows that the US is not particularly kind to its poor, in any aspect.
The original topic was if its overall quality declined in the last decade for the average American, who is not poor.
I'll be honest. I really tire of the mental gymnastics people put themselves through to make excuses for the American system. I don't think we have anything more to discuss here.
No, it’s the regulations. In less regulated, freer markets like vision correction eye surgery the costs went down and quality up. Even in health care.
But they're way cheaper than the US in heavily and properly regulated health markets too.
I think people are misled by Marx and derivatives, and misdiagnose the problem. I don't think people are upset by the CEO making lots of money as much as they are by the HBS management style of using people as a tool, or even as interchangeable "resources". However, the philosophical materialism of Marx & Co. pretty much makes this inevitable. (The secular view is also materialism, so you get it on both sides.)
Notice in my comment I mention nothing about taxes? Maybe people are mislead about neoliberalism? All it has done was sell out American jobs, get civilians addicted to drugs, and manufactured a political class that cares about donations over material needs.
This is an economic system that isn't even 50 years old and you're already going with the Marx scare quotes as if US branded capitalism hasn't already killed 10s of millions of Americans in the pursuit of profit.
Let's not even peel back the founding of this nation, a colonial white slaver state with minority protections baked into the constitution to impede people's chances of progress with every life.
Things that are paid for by economic surpluses. No profits, no investment, no taxes.
It's very much a matter of balance, you're not wrong that those services you mention are vital as are many others generally provided by governments. However it's all funded by a dynamic efficient economy.
The question of private wealth is the hardest, but private wealth by itself isn't a problem. The question there is, who should own and run productive economic activity. If it's not the state, it's private individuals. The wealth of billionaire industrialists doesn't consist of one big pile of money they wallow in, like Scrooge McDuck. It consists of their ownership and control of companies that do things in the economy.
Taking away that wealth means taking away those companies, and doing what with them? if you sell them to other private individuals, now they own and run those companies. If you can just take companies away from people like that, why would anyone build or buy them? If you take the companies into public ownership, now they're run by civil servants and politicians, but you'd have to pay for the companies, right? If you just seize assets, nobody is going to invest in anything that can be seized.
I do think inequality is a growing problem, but there are no easy answers.
Also Adam Smith implied that unbounded avarice is irrational and disruptive to society.
The assumption is that morality survives grotesque wealth accumulation, we see many examples proving otherwise
I think morality is quite hard to define and any system should take into account unboundedness of some human attributes (being greed, stupidy or other) in some humans.
Lots of people claim "greed", but the stereotypical Tech billionaire doesn't simply roll around in gold like Scrooge McDuck, doing nothing and demanding more. They invest and reinvest it into new enterprises.
Of all the ways of dealing with massive wealth, this is probably the second least disruptive one. (The first one would be just giving it to honorable causes.)
Ya know, just like the Sacklers and pushing oxycontin.
In 2026, we know that SpaceX is a huge success. In 2002, it was just one of very many space startups, the vast majority of which ended up bankrupt, and before the last Falcon 1 flight, it was already on the brink of bankruptcy. They were incredibly lucky that the last rocket they had money for actually reached orbit.
During the same time, John Carmack invested into Armadillo Aerospace, and lost money.
Was he less "greedy" than Musk only because in retrospect we know that one didn't pan out and the other did? Or were they both simply risk takers in an uncertain field, motivated by a mix of incentives?
This is not a I own stock am I culpable issue, it is a company knowing their product is dangerous and ignoring the issues because it doesn't make them more money.
Same shit as the tobacco industry. People do banally evil shit for money.
How about both? Both are pretty terrible for society IMHO. Some shithead's making 6000x of what average worker at their company because they're on top and they're treating everyone under them as interchangable tools with zero compassion. If they were limited to only making like 3x then they'd be on a much more equitable place with their underlings and might even be more likely to see them as fellow humans instead of disposable work units.
Nothing to do with cheap labour.
What has the US government done for American's lately outside of forcing people to buy healthcare and providing monetary support for families for a small window during covid? All we have is a political class that wants to fuck Americans raw until they pump every cent out of us.
Also the US has one of the most weakened labor classes in the world, come the fuck on. Corporations convinced our governments to sell out labor at every opportunity. You're acting as if it was the 1930s where there was a national strike every month until the Wagner Act.
Before you go there, you should answer: what has the Chinese government done for the Chinese lately? Is everything well in their society, labor and economy wise?
He said the labour cost is neghigible and not qualitatively different to the US. It's the availability of every part and tech you need in nearby supply centers and factories, the huge supply of appropriate resources, including the ability to have tens of thousands of expert workers on command for a fast new production run.
But that margin isn't funneled to pay wages and improve living standards.
To say wages don't play a role it's more of a corporate narrative to wash those decisions.
If wages aren't a factor, why don't they raise wages and living standards for those workers?
The story is told of when Apple did a last minute design change on the Iphone. As soon as the parts came in, 8000 Chinese workers were immediately called in at midnight to start a 12 hour shift. An Apple executive is quoted as saying that the “speed and flexibility are breathtaking.”
Currently the reality on Chinese assembly lines is those expert workers are working 12 hour shifts for 1 day off every 14 days, and earns about $800-$1,000 a month.
It's a huge problem in China actually, those 996-esque working schedule is everywhere now, normal 955 or even 965 schedule is almost non-existent among domestic private employers. The sad thing is that sometimes some Act (like EU supply chain law) forces factories to 955 schedule but those line workers are not happy, because that means they don't get overtime and are making minimum wages like $300 a month, not even enough to live a life. Chinese got five day work week because of WTO, yet now many have lost it.
That seems outlandish. My iPhone isn’t “rent”, neither is an Nvidia GPU, or an Instagram ad.
What if X >> Y? Why should we think otherwise?
What a great economic system with great morals that create moral societies.
Anyway a lot more than 20% of Americans are beneficiaries of some kind of pension or 401k or other source of income that is ultimately funded by the US stock market. And shares of the US stock market going up do not kill people who aren't having part of their income funded primarily by the stock market. People who think this is true and that society is therefore immoral badly misunderstand what the actual problems with producing goods and services for people are, which is the thing that actually matters for human health and flourishing.
The people making profits are the ones providing food, shelter, and phones to you.
Reality is, those companies don't give anything back, just siphone all profits into tax havens so owners can take as much cash out of it as possible, in one form or another.
Their goal is to provide nothing back as much as they could. Look at their actions, not some empty PR statements.
California, Washington, and New York are about to find out what happens when they drive the wealthy businesses out of the state.
Massachusetts found out a few years ago. They decided they were going to heavily tax yachts that were built by the yacht industry in the state. What happened is the wealthy bought their yachts elsewhere, and the local yacht industry collapsed, and many thousands of skilled craftsmen lost their jobs.
The tax was rescinded.
I'm not worried about the guy making my sandwich at the corner deli. He's entitled to my money because he provides a valuable service.
I am worried about the owner of FoodCo, who plays golf all day while his employees run the company. He provides literally no service to anyone at all, but makes more money than any employee. He then uses his profits to buy homes in the area, so his employees can pay back half of their paycheck to him in the form of rent.
The owner of FoodCo put in a lot of their money upfront to make the company happen in the first place. Your deli guy wouldn't have a job if the FoodCo guy hadn't done what he did.
I know that it's hard for people from rich (and high population) countries to understand, but the high variety of goods and services that exist are a consequence of people investing into businesses. Without them many of these businesses wouldn't exist, because most people are not rich enough to be able to fund a business on their own.
If a supermarket cannot be profitable in a small village, an investor isn't going to change that. The investor will invest in businesses that can be profitable.
> Your deli guy wouldn't have a job if the FoodCo guy hadn't done what he did.
People have had jobs since before civilization, and certainly before massive accumulation of wealth became the norm.
Unfortunately, this economic model has been proven to be wrong. If it were true, then we would have seen a decreasing gap between the rich and the poor. We didn't.
https://www.statista.com/chart/35953/inequality-wealth-gap-u...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/09/why-is...
As I've mentioned several times now, the growth of the wealthy in the 19th century corresponded with the movement of the poor into the middle class.
> If it were true, then we would have seen a decreasing gap between the rich and the poor.
What matters is the state of the poor, not the gap between rich and poor. Musk's wealth, for example, has no effect on my standard of living. Or yours.
Yes you keep on mentioning that, but I don't know why. Correlation is not causation. You haven't even proposed a mechanism of causality.
> What matters is the state of the poor, not the gap between rich and poor.
You keep on repeating that, and you keep on being wrong. You are parroting billionaire propaganda in the hopes of making people ignore injustice. In reality, in the US, living standards are falling for most people, while Elon Musk has no rational reason for possessing so much wealth.
This is blatantly untrue in the face of even a cursory thought. If the deli didn’t exist, that worker would have done any number of other jobs. Subsistence farming, doing deli stuff out of his house, maybe even community funding a coop grocery store.
That was how things worked at many points in human history. Instead of “private citizen makes $thing and collects rent” it was some variety of “municipality funds $thing for the community”. That just doesn’t extrapolate to a global economy well, for better or worse.
> He provides literally no service to anyone at all, but makes more money than any employee. He then uses his profits to buy homes in the area, so his employees can pay back half of their paycheck to him in the form of rent.
You need capital to make pretty much anything. Somebody has to come up with a large amount of resources (money) put upfront into the venture. Capitalism creates the incentive for that - if the gamble pays off, then the investors get more value back. If it doesn't work out, then investors lose money. Most businesses fail early and do not provide a return for the investment.
The point of capitalism is to keep this system running. As a result of it we have made an ungodly amount of technological and quality of life improvements. Some people have become filthy rich from this, but typically they also provided the world with goods or services that people like and use. Tesla made Elon filthy rich, but it also made electric vehicles popular.
Making the rich richer isn't necessarily the point, but it is an unavoidable consequence.
> Capitalism is about producing stuff.
Humans have been producing stuff well before the concept of ownership was invented, and certainly well before the massive wealth accumulation that is the hallmark of capitalism.
If the goal is to reduce poverty, I fail to see how the existence of billionaires is a positive outcome, either now, in the form of Musk and his ilk; in the form of the robber barons of the late 18th century; or in the form of the noble lords of the feudal period to owned a lot but contributed nothing.
Regarding the idea that we can design a system where "no one should be left wanting," that sounds nice. So does big rock candy mountain. There is no such system.
Great, but it doesn't. The gap between the poor and the wealthy has only grown in the US, especially since Reagan's "trickle down" economics.
https://www.statista.com/chart/35953/inequality-wealth-gap-u...
The accusations against the working poor of "envy" are a barbaric slur. People just want to get valued fairly.
We see similar trends around the world. In fact, the countries that have struggled the most with stagnating standards of living are precisely those that have most aggressively imposed redistributionist policies.
Income inequality with rising standards of living for the median is only bad if your politics are driven by envy.
Every feudalist society began with the accumulation of capital. That's what land ownership is. It happened in mainland Europe and Britain, it happened in Russia, it happened in Japan. Any society with land-owning "lords".
How do you think they got to be lords? Hard work?
If the goal is to reduce poverty, the number of billionaire is actually irelevant. How you fund reducing poverty might influence the number of billionaires, but, for me it is more important what each society does for the poor, rather than counting how many are billionaires today.
You're so close. The only missing connection is the realization that billionaires exercise outsize influence, and will affect government policy to help themselves, not the poor. The only way for the poor to not have their voice silenced by the rich is to reduce the rich.
Idk if you can read into it that way.
All these companies have cafeterias but you don't see them investing into farmland so they can get their bananas a few cents cheaper.
But also why bother spending 20B on a fab when you can invest 20B into TSMC and let them build the fab?
I do agree that USA and EU could foot the bill and subsidize a couple billions in such industrial infrastructure, perhaps taking back a cut of the profit rather than privatizing all of it.
But they’re not doing it, or are making pitiful efforts at that
Throwing 20B into a chip fab in the EU would be politically a very unpopular move, if it's done as a public company or worse directly state owned, you'll royally piss of Taiwan, South Korea and China and it's likely they'd retaliate by e.g. subsidising their auto industry more in order to give the death blow to the EU auto industry.
The solution to threats to global economic integration is to address the threats to global economic integration. It's not to cannibalise our own full-employment high value economies, by diverting enormous capital and labour into duplicating vast swathes of lower value jobs we don't actually have the work force for anyway, just so we can pay unaffordable prices for the resulting goods.
We probably both agree it's an absurd fantasy, and the people trying to make stuff like this happen are implementing policies that ensure that it won't, such as putting tariffs on the inputs they need to build out this domestic manufacturing capacity in the first place.
So permanent world peace. That sounds much easier.
Mainland China is one concern.
Another is AI being the commodity compliment to semiconductors.
It says they are no longer worried about being punished for monopolistic behavior and have bet a “ballroom donation” will exempt them from another round of punishment.
I feel like folks around here have already forgotten about the last time the memory suppliers quietly agreed to keep raising prices and stop competing with each other.
None of the economics or supply needs of these things make any sense. The water is generally not there, electric transformers are next to impossible to acquire. I just read about one in Utah that’s supposed to be 2.5x the size of Manhattan?? https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/933687/u...
I could be wrong, but I think a lot of this was planned by software guys who are used to brute-forcing their way through “impossible” problems. But those were software problems, where the limits are mostly theoretical. In the world of atoms, limitations are real.
Transformers aren't so complex that production can't increase. Most water is used for agriculture and right now the data centers can pay more for it.
The amounts of money circulating whilst some of us struggle to make rent ...
Nothing fair, or just, about this world we live in
"In 1985, if you were a reasonably affluent American, the best computer that you could afford was the IBM PC AT. The PC AT would cost you about $6,000—$19,400 in 2026 dollars—and thus represented about a quarter of the median American’s annual income; and it ran on an Intel 80286 processor, capable of something like 900,000 instructions per second. Today, if you find yourself in a market stall in Nairobi or Lagos, you’ll be able to find a cheap smartphone—like the Tecno Spark Go, manufactured by China’s Transsion—for somewhere between $30 and $120. That phone will run on a processor capable of billions of calculations per second."
Please note that "commerce" and "capitalism" are not synonymous, and that the former does not imply the latter. Capitalism is in no way a prerequisite for technological development.
Really? Who else builds stuff?
Said the Christian in pre-Englightenment Europe: "Well, of course Christianity is the one true religion. After all, the whole civilized world is Christian."
However, I doubt anyone else would instead want to live in current day North Korea or pre-1990 eastern bloc countries, or in East vs West Germany.
An astute observation, if your knowledge of history begins and ends with the 20th century.
Maybe we can look at societies where the modern era hasn't touched, like some places in Africa. Why is the quality of life so great there that everyone wants to move from hypercapitalistic societies like the US to Africa instead of the other way around?
300 hundred years ago, every country in the world was ruled by an absolute monarch, and that fact alone was considered persuasive explanation of divine will: the world must always be thus. Since then, the philosophy of rulers has changed, but small-minded apologists for the status quo have not evolved in their thinking. "If our current approach isn't the best option," say the small-minded apologists, "why isn't anyone doing anything different?" The answer to that question, in case it wasn't obvious, is the same as it was 300 years ago: entrenched interests.
Are you seriously arguing that it is impossible to allocate today's abundance of resources in a more fair and productive way than our current system does?
Once people are given all the resources they want they are not motivated to work. The productive people get tired of the product of their hard work being forcibly taken away and stop working since they would be given resources anyway. That's how the system collapses since there aren't enough resources for everyone to sit and consume. Thats exactly what happened in the eastern bloc. https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/bayarea/news/article/When...
How many times should we run the same failed experiment and ruin millions more lives?
https://www.africadatahub.org/blog/what-usaid-funding-of-afr...
https://www.ft.com/content/c10e4f2f-5564-42a4-8aa7-66c78ca1c...
https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/kathy-hoch...
You are again straw manning an argument. I said nothing about giving people all resources with no work. In fact, I explicitly said the opposite: I want a society where people compete to provide labor in order to gain material advantage.
My argument against capitalism is that that competition should be fair: people should compete for resources with labor, and not against those who contribute no labor.
If someone wants to passively invest $3M into a new coffee shop and pay labor to work in it, banning it like you want to do will kill the economy and disadvantage the little guy.
Total non sequitur. Labor (and salaries) predate the existence of money, as well as capital investment.
Even under capitalism you can still volunteer, donate and create community orgs to build things, there's nothing stopping anyone.
Huh? You think that before investment, people didn't trade good and services of their own free will? You need to re-examine history. Commerce predates civilization.
If you think that slavery isn't needed under capitalism, how do you explain the extensive use of slavery under capitalism?
> Even under capitalism you can still volunteer, donate and create community orgs to build things
That's true, and is completely irrelevant to our conversation, because we're not discussing volunteering, we're talking about the distribution of profit. If there is no profit, there is nothing to distribute.
The Chinese, famously?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_and_opening_up
> The reforms [starting in 1976] de-collectivized agriculture, abolished the people's communes, relaxed price controls, allowed foreign direct investment into China, and led to the creation of special economic zones, most prominently the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone and the Shanghai Pudong New Area. Private enterprises were allowed to grow, while many state-owned enterprises were scaled down or privatized. Shanghai Stock Exchange and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange were established in 1990, allowing a capital market system
Free commerce is not the same as capitalism. A country where production, wages, and ownership are decided centrally can hardly be said to be unfettered capitalism.
The reforms in China I listed heavily cut down on that. Are you claiming that China is somehow less capitalistic now compared to 1976?
By your metric the US isn't capitalistic because NASA and various govt agencies and entitlements worth trillions of dollars a year of taxes exist.
The US, like China, continues to use a mixed approach to economic management in the form of regulated capitalism. The degree of regulation in the US has been declining since the 1950s, resulting in larger wealth inequalities and more poverty.
Put another way, capitalism, like communism, is one of those pure ideologies that has never really been given a fair shake. In fact, human nature rules out the possibility of a fair trial for any pure ideology. We are political creatures, not ideological ones. If you really are beyond your high-school years, as your account age suggests, this should be obvious.
Unsurprisingly, the most successful systems are those that have proven to be better at meeting human nature on its own terms. Hence the triumph of capitalism as it is practiced today, which for all its flaws has the advantage that you don't have threaten people at gunpoint to force them to engage in it.
All the reforms fit a capitalistic model, not just a free commerce model.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48231586
And of course, Mao's communism was very anti-capitalistic.
Surely there is a disincentive to working hard as taxes approach high levels while resources are increasingly provided for free if one doesn't work. The Laffer curve and all that.
If you keep increasing taxes and reward people that don't work by giving them free and easy wealth, the tax revenue will actually go down at some point instead of going up, leaving less to redistribute. It's like killing the goose that lays the golden egg.
https://fee.org/articles/the-laffer-curve-its-time-to-stop-l...
That's one approach, but not the only one, to eliminating capitalism.
> Surely there is a disincentive to working hard as taxes approach high levels while resources are increasingly provided for free if one doesn't work. The Laffer curve and all that.
So in the US in the 1950s and 1960s, when the highest marginal tax rate was around 90%, did people suddenly stop working? Or did the US enter its highest period of productivity and income equality?
Why is your article making claims that, while true, give a distorted view of 1950s tax policy? It's certainly possible that an organization called the "Tax Institute" has an agenda they are trying to push.
[1] https://rooseveltinstitute.org/blog/effective-progressive-ta...
When did capitalism begin? How was 'stuff' created and distributed prior to that? How do other, distinct and contemporaneous modes of production create 'stuff'?
Capitalism began when Thag declared that he owns all the dinosaurs, and anyone who hunts a dinosaur must pay him 10 percent of the meat as a tribute, or else he will stab them with his spear.
First, pedantically, we did not share time with 'dinosaurs' in the sense you imply.
Secondly, pedantically, that kind of hunting was not the main source of calories for hunter-gatherers. It's more apt to imagine them as gatherers first and primarily.
Thirdly, and also pedantically, you are not describing the system of capitalism that I, and most educated people talk about when they use the word. That system has only been with us in the main for, generously, 250 years.
Critically, Thag and Grog both own the means of production for their spears and 'steaks' respectively. The necessary abstractions for capital accumulation, debt, and private ownership simply do not exist.
And as a matter of fact, there are many examples of non capitalist societies.
Communist countries copied technology, their inventions are very few. Capitalist countries routinely exhibit rapid technological development.
It was driven largely by people who wanted to make money off of their inventions. None of the progress came from communist countries.
Did you know that Gutenberg invented the printing press in order to make money?
Did you know the Wright Bros invented the airplane in order to make money?
And so on and so forth.
I am getting a little tired of repeating myself, but you're evidently confused so I'll indulge you.
The opposition to capitalist as a monetary system does not imply the opposition to the profit motive. As I've said several times, and which you continue to ignore, the exchange of goods and services in the form of commerce requires the profit motive. Conflating my position with communism is a straw man.
Since Marxism never works, there's something definitely wrong with the tenets.
Are you familiar with the idea of a thought-terminating cliche [1]?
You have given yourself permission to ignore everything associated with Marxism because you've been taught that it's "wrong." If you actually thought about your statement, you'd realize that you are quasi-intentionally dismissing ideas without consideration.
1. What does it mean for Marxism to have been "tried"? Do you consider the Soviet Union to be Marxist? I don't.
2. Even if Marxism had been "tried" and failed, so what? Do we dismiss capitalism because of failed capitalist states?
3. Even if Marxism in practice was futile, does that mean that very idea espoused by Marx is necessarily wrong? No, it does not. Newtonian physics is "wrong" in light of relativistics but there is still very much right about it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...
But "capitalism" in its historical and practical meaning means nothing other than commerce, i.e. the society based exchange, the system of production based on exchange. It was only through capitalist accounting methods that businesses were able to conduct commerce in such a way as to contrast costs and proceeds, and therefore create the optimizations that lead to mass computer production or, what is the same, cheap computers for the masses.
Completely wrong. Many of my comments here distinguish commerce from capitalism.
Commerce, ie the exchange of goods and services, has existed longer than civilization. Even some animals do it.
Capitalism is specifically the substitution of labor with ownership as a means of profiting. This produces an imbalanced market: some people compete for resources by selling their labor, while others compete simply by owning capital: the means of production. The problem is that the latter mode allows unlimited accumulation of wealth, while the former is limited by time and effort.
Imagine if Elon Musk was working a salaried job that paid $60000 per hour. How long would he have to work in order to earn his current fortune?
The exchange of labor, to be sure, has existed nearly as long as civilization itself, perhaps longer, as all people cooperate by exchange through the division of labor right down to the family, and it is exchange whether the articles to be exchanged are money or physical things or even intangible, ephemeral things like love, pride, loyalty, or otherwise. Since human society is human cooperation by the division of labor, by your definition capitalism is nearly synonymous with human society itself. Fine by me.
I have no problem with the concept of money. Commerce always the exchange of good and services, including on a symbolic level: as you point out, affection, money, etc. "Money" is not the distinguishing factor between commerce and capitalism.
At the risk of repeating myself: the distinction is how wealth is acquired. Capitalism allows one to acquire wealth merely by possessing capital, which in turn engenders unlimited capacity to acquire more capital. Capital is unique among all those systems for that reason.
The distinction between capitalism and earlier forms of production is that money provides a means to index the yield of assets by capitalizing the value of those assets. The ability to quantitatively track the yield provides the ability to determine whether you are able to replace the asset or if you are consuming it. Accumulation can be planned by resolving to consume less than the yield of the asset. Capital and capital accounting, too, has existed nearly as long as civilization has existed. But the cause of the yield is in principle no different from the yield of resources in pre-history, which is refraining from consuming more than you produce. What is unique is the ability to determine the economic yield of things quantitatively, not procedure by which wealth accumulates.
Money is used by loaning it out, which requires no effort and most importantly: the amount of money you can loan out (and make a profit from) is not limited by the number of hours in the day, and therefore owners can always out-compete laborers.
> The distinction between capitalism and earlier forms of production is that money provides a means to index the yield of assets by capitalizing the value of those assets.
Now you're getting it!
Money is a medium of exchange. It is used by exchanging it for something else. A loan involves trading money in the present, which is more valuable, for money in the future. What produces value here is surrendering present goods indirectly through the intermediary of money. The creditor gives up consumption so that others can consume or produce earlier than they otherwise could have in absence of the loan. This is the value produced by loans in the eyes of the debtor.
> Now you're getting it!
Notice how any market automatically involves said accounting immediately when money is used. Your earlier insistence that markets and capitalism are distinct cannot be maintained.
A third of the world lives in poverty. That's the fault of capitalism.
There are so many other places where this sort of low-effort high-school edgelording fits in better than here.
A good sign of low-effort edgelording is championing an obviously broken system by using a straw man to disparage the alternatives.
So what you're saying is that capitalism lifted about two thirds of the world out of poverty.
Thanks to capitalism, I don't have to toil in the fields.
No, that's thanks to commerce not to capitalism. Capitalism benefits those those who hold capital, which is not me.
The fact that there are more than enough resources for no one to live in poverty should suggest to you that something is wrong with the distribution system.
"It's true, Mr/Ms Rationalist, that our patented Miracle Medical Snakeoil caused a third of your leg to become necrotic and fall off, but be glad for the two thirds that did not fall off!"
> No, that's thanks to commerce not to capitalism. Capitalism benefits those those who hold capital, which is not me.
Are you toiling in the fields? It seems to me like your attitude is that "If I can't be rich, then no one should be rich."
> The fact that there are more than enough resources for no one to live in poverty should suggest to you that something is wrong with the distribution system.
So instead of two thirds of the world not living in poverty, everyone should live in poverty equally?
The problem with capitalism is not that some people get rich and some people don't. The problem is that of an unfair playing field.
Everyone has a body and a mind, and commerce allows us to rent out those features in exchange for pay. People who are smarter or stronger or work harder or work more will be able to benefit more. That's how I got rich. But there's a limit to how rich I can get, because I have only one body and one mind and there are a finite number of hours in the day.
The other way to get rich is to own things. If you own a factory or real estate or bonds you get to charge other people and make a profit even though you are expending no effort. And in this case there is no limit on your profit, because you can use your profit to buy more capital and make more profit from that. The result is eventually a winner-take-all economy, where the winners own an increasing amount of society and everyone else pays them to use it. If that sounds familiar, it should, because it's feudelism, and is the eventual end state of capitalism.
You should really read a bit about the philosophy that you're arguing so vehemently for, apparently without knowing anything about it.
> So instead of two thirds of the world not living in poverty, everyone should live in poverty equally?
No, that's ridiculous.
You had a good comment until you wrote that. Don't lower your standards with stupid personal attacks.
> The problem with capitalism is not that some people get rich and some people don't. The problem is that of an unfair playing field.
I would love for things to be fair, but I grew up in the real world and learned that things weren't fair back when I was a kid in primary school.
Instead of lamenting about something that I can't control, I decided to focus my efforts on what I can control. Instead of tearing other people down, I built myself up.
Unless you can change the human characteristic of greed, the world will always be unfair. You can spit into the wind, or you can set a sail.
I apoligize for judging you based on the things that you write.
> Unless you can change the human characteristic of greed, the world will always be unfair.
There is nothing wrong with greed or unfairness, to a degree. As I said in my previous comment, some personal characteristics will naturally lead to inequality of outcome. That's fine, because everyone is deriving profit from the (variable quality) work that they are personally able to produce. I would say that greed and unfairness are essential to any system of commerce, which I support.
Capitalism, on the other hand, allows inequality on a grand scale that necessarily results in a society that no longer rewards hard work: the lords own all property, everyone else works for them, and there is no way to achieve wealth competitive with that of a lord simply by labor. The laborers work to surive, and the owner class consumes all the benefits. This is the system that we spent a century of war fighting to end. It seems silly to go back to feudalism just to appease the modern-day lords.
> Instead of tearing other people down, I built myself up.
Who, do you suppose, am I tearing down? I want a society that rewards hard work. A system with no social mobility is not that system. I want people to improve themselves in order to make more money. What I don't want is a society where the owner class are able to be parasites on everyone else, producing no labor (physically or intellectually) but showing giant profit. The modern day US is increasingly distant from its much more socially mobile past, and it's only going to get worse.
I'm not saying that the current crop of billionaires haven't worked hard to get where they are. I am saying that their work is not proportional to their benefit, and at a certain point they are able to continue benefitting despite producing noting of value.
I apologize for thinking you were willing to have a decent conversation. I won't waste any more of your time.
Thanks!
You're welcome!
Risk : Reward, that's obvious, isn't it? I have known many relatives who bankrupted themselves trying to "own" stuff. I also know some who succeeded and are rich. Starting a business is very hard, try it.
In order to risk one's own capital, one must first own capital. Today's working poor, just like the serfs of times gone by, have nothing to invest but their own labor. It's hard to build a business when you're fully occupied in working to buy food.
You've inadvertently pointed out the fundamental inequality of capitalism: in order to get the (potential) benefits of capital, you must first belong to the capitalist class.
Besides, America's poor have a higher standard of living than medieval kings.
Only if you define the standard of living in a consumerist way.
I sure wouldn’t.
Capitalism by itself does not produce egalitarian wealthy society. The system divides the populace into "capital owners" and "workers" who are in direct conflict.
There are plenty of capitalistic countries where most people are poor. In fact many of the as said Western countries has also high levels of poverty while running capitalism in the 1800 etc until post WW2 social democratic movements.
Once you dismantle those social democratic constructs such as labor unions and start shifting more power to the capital holders you'll see how the society splits apart to rich and poor. The rich use their wealth and power to rig the system to benefit themselves even more and become richer at the expense of everyone else. Ultimately they will remove democracy because functional real democracy is a threat to their wealth.
1. Average height increased throughout the 1800s
2. Life expectancy increased throughout the 1800s
3. Plenty of photos and paintings of towns that consist of middle class housing
> The system divides the populace into "capital owners" and "workers" who are in direct conflict.
That's what Marx claimed. I've had many jobs. In none of them was I ever in conflict. It was a negotiated relationship, where I provided labor and expertise in exchange for money. I've also been a boss, and if you ever have been you'd know you had no power over your employees. They only work for you because they want to. When they stopped wanting to, they simply disappear, and there's not a thing I could do about it.
In the US, every worker has the power to walk away and start their own business. The wealthy in America did not come from wealthy immigrants, they came from poor immigrants.
They can walk away at any moment and there's absolutely nothing Amazon can do about it.
Amazon pays significantly above minimum wage. Why don't they pay minimum wage?
Amazon benefits to warehouse workers include heavily subsidized health care (starting at $5 per week), up to 20 weeks of paid parental leave, prepaid college tuition, and a 401(k) company match.
That's the leverage workers have.
Most proletariats don't have that option since they need their incomes.
When an employee has exactly the options of taking it or leaving it is not leverage.
There are more than 1.1 to 1.3 million businesses in the US with over 30 employees. But somehow, a person is only employable by one of them?
16.6 million Americans are self-employed.
Do you even listen to yourself?
1. Today's poor are as tall as rich people, meaning they get plenty of nutritious food. They're taller than medieval kings.
2. Fresh vegetables and fruit from all over the world 365 days a year.
3. Flush toilets.
4. Air conditioning
5. Central heating
6. Infinitely better medical care
7. Endless amazing entertainment at the push of a button
8. Can communicate with anyone in the world, for free
9. Anything you want to know, at the push of a button
10. Far better clothing
11. Cars you can drive anywhere
12. Fly at 30,000 feet in complete luxury across the country
13. Free education, in any field you want
14. Hot and cold running water
15. Hot showers
16. Microwave ovens
I can go on if you like.
I hope that India too can emulate this in my lifetime. I was born in Kerala and would love to see Indians live in a country that is as wealthy per capita ( PPP adjusted ) as Singapore or failing that even as wealthy as the USA.
Capitalism has it's problems. But you struggling with rent is entirely your self-inflicted problem...
Who said anything about struggling with rent? Sounds like you a grasping for a straw man.
> I hope that India too can emulate this in my lifetime
I, too, hope the best things for the people of China and of India. But India, by any metric, is already a capitalist economy, where its wealth is concentrated in the hands of a very few.
To the extent that China has been successful is distributing its wealth among many people, I'd say it's the authoritarianism, rather than the capitalism, that has been instrumental. The state sets agendas, quotas, and salaries specifically to produce that outcome. Top-down government control is not a feature of unbridled capitalism.
So we have two large industrializing economies, both capitalist. One (the authoritarian one) has succeeded in drastically reducing poverty; the other has not. And yet you think that capitalism is the driver of equality?
Capitalism produces wealth. You need some other system to distribute that wealth fairly.
The person they replied to, in the very comment they replied to…?
> > > The amounts of money circulating whilst some of us struggle to make rent ...
Nope. It is the driver of opportunity, though. It's up to individuals to take advantage of the opportunity, or not.
The problem is that after decades monopolies consolidated and you have massive offshoring of labor to cheap countries and offshoring of profits to tax havens, there's not much opportunities the working class individuals can take, as all the opportunities are now geared towards the asset owning rent seeking class.
Today you can buy a computer for $25. https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=raspberry+pi
You can pick up a keyboard at the thrift store for about $5, and a monitor for maybe $15.
Did you ever compensate the school for their involuntary loan of that computer or are you now admitting that you are a thief?
Well, that's good news. I guess the cause of poverty must simply be laziness.
That's convenient, because it allows me to demonize the lower economic classes without having to address the systemic inequality that rewards capital ownership over labor.
Value is created by some combination of 1) working 2) taking risks.
Entertaining as it is, participating on HackerNews is not a path to making money.
Real estate agents operate in much the same way.
The problem: there's a second phase 50 years later, where the risk takers from 50 years ago own the world and do their best to prevent further rewards flowing to new risktakers. We are in that phase now.
The other problem: when the reward is so great, you do everything to get ahead, even illegal things, because the expectation value (winning*P(winning) + prison*P(caught)) is still positive.
Musk creating wealth has taken nothing from me. How about you?
> there's a second phase 50 years later, where the risk takers from 50 years ago own the world and do their best to prevent further rewards flowing to new risktakers. We are in that phase now.
Did you know that Hackernews is run by wealthy people who fund startups?
What illegal things did Bezos do to get rich? Jobs? Gates? Musk?
That's exactly what he'd like you to believe. Where did that money come from? Did he just print it himself?
> Musk creating wealth has taken nothing from me. How about you?
Considering that billionaires are actively involved in writing the laws that ostensibly apply to them (see also: regulatory capture), I hardly think that legality should be highest bar that we hold them to. After all, the lords of medieval France acted "legally" when they executed their tenant farmers for failing to pay rent after a bad harvest.
The value created by his company. That value can be turned into money by selling shares of it (stocks), or by borrowing against it (bonds).
Money is created by banks. When banks loan you money, that money is created by a notation in the bank's ledger. But they only loan money on collateral, which would be in this case the value of the company. The money gets destroyed (!) when the loan is paid off. But the value of the collateral remains.
A company is just a legal fiction. It doesn't do anything without people. The value was actually created by the people who work for Musk. In other words, those employees create a large value, and are paid a relatively low compensation. The difference goes to Musk, who contributed no value at all.
That's called theft.
> Money is created by banks.
Huh? No it plainly is not.
In capitalism, the wealthy provide the capex and reap the profit. In China, the government provides a lot of the capex and claims a lot of the profit (either directly or indirectly). They can then re-invest that, use it to set salaries free from market forces, etc.
The US could do more of that without getting into the contentious issue of raising personal taxes. Ie the government could control the flow of GPUs into the country, asserting that it had the right of first purchase, distribute them to a tightly controlled private company (think power or water company, with margins set by law), and probably make a profit on the cheaper hardware because they’d be a massive purchasing block. We won’t, though, because Google, Amazon, Oracle, etc are currently posed to make a _ton_ of money off doing basically the exact same thing.
Yeah, that one guy and 70% of the country https://www.yahoo.com/news/videos/70-americans-struggle-pay-...
Instead for the past century we have almost everyone in the world wanting or not minding moving to the hypercapitalist USA.
Ironically almost all the countries with emigration controls and exit visas in the past century were noncapitalistic countries trying to stop their people from fleeing to capitalistic countries.
The reasons Americans don't just move to whatever country they think they'd enjoying living in the most are often the same reasons most people all over the world don't. They have a life here. Family, friends, jobs and other ties to their community that would be hard to leave behind.
Uncertainty and fear also keep people from moving their lives to new countries. Especially when they're going to a place where they don't have friends and family to help them with things like expenses and childcare.
Americans in particular are unlikely to speak anything other than English and while English is often understood to some extent many places overseas it can't be assumed to be avilable everywhere. Understanding the local language is often a requirement for getting citizenship in a country and not being fluent will be a hindrance even where it isn't explicitly required.
It's also very expensive to move. You'll need to have enough money to live somewhere and feed and clothe yourself the moment you step off the plane. You'll need to store all off your things someplace until housing can be secured and that can take a lot of time. Countries can require thousands in fees to apply for citizenship and people struggling with basics like food and housing aren't going to be able to afford that. About half the country doesn't even have a passport and the expense of getting one (along with the needed documentation) would be an additional burden.
Other countries don't necessarily want you. Immigrating is difficult. Unless you can demonstrate that you've already got someone willing to hire you (and effectively vouch that you won't be a financial burden) or you have some much needed skill or one that a native citizen cannot perform you may not be welcome. No nation is obligated to accept responsibility for you just because you want to live there.
It'd be great if everyone everywhere could just pack up and leave to start a life wherever they felt like it, but there are many reasons why that just isn't realistic. There are tens of millions of people America right now living in places without safe drinking water because of heavy metal contamination. Why do you think they don't just pack up and move to cities with drinkable water? What about the tens of millions of Americans who live within one mile of toxic waste sites that have been linked to infant deaths, cancers, and other serious long-term health issues? Why don't they just move? Forget about America, how about all those starving Africans just move to somewhere with lots of food? The world just doesn't work that way.
> the idea that people can just pack up and go to live wherever they feel like is incredibly naive.
That's how America was populated. In the last 5 years, millions of people walked from South America to the US. Walked!
The tax increases in New York, California and Washington have resulted in an exodus of wealthy people.
I have absolutely no problem with wealthy people who refuse to pay their fair share of taxes leaving. Good riddance. If they want to act like parasites let them leech off the people some place else. Eventually those people will wise up and ask them to pay up or get out too. It's that or bow down and spend their lives in serfdom to their rich lords and masters. I prefer freedom over robber barons.
That's a reactionary emotional reaction that many countries started with and failed and led to people fleeing and the govts banning people leaving. Examples include East Germany, North Korea, the eastern bloc etc.
History has shown again and again that chasing away high earners with super high taxes like doctors, tech workers, small business owners etc. leads to worse outcomes for everyone because they already pay a large share of total taxes. Also, they may quit and just collect the welfare off the high earners tax income. At the federal level the top 1% pay 40% of federal taxes, that's not even counting the jobs they create. Imagine a place trying to serve 99% of the people with only 60% of the tax revenue. They're either going to increase the taxes till there's no one left to overtax or reduce govt services which reduces govt employment leading to lower tax collection and even more welfare spending.
Taxes on things discourage the use of things, that's why high taxes on smoking and alcohol work. Supertaxing economic productivity and rewarding people sitting around not working will and has led to lower economic productivity.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c6521/c6521.pdf
I got a lot of downvotes making these comments and ran into posting limits. HN isn't a place for debates like this, you win, socialism is amazing, everyone upvote me now.
The funny thing about this is that practically every single person in the US between the ages of 25-45 was an early adopter and a big fan for some (or all) of FAANG in the early days, and clearly saw the importance. The fact that they aren't filthy rich and far wealthier than older people tells a story. Not a story of lattes and avocados, but a story where housing and education costs guaranteed that as a group they couldn't save, never had a chance to invest, still can't invest. With certain adjustments the story isn't so different for much of the western world.. maybe education was cheap/free but their domestic labor market was weaker, whatever. They were and are still pretty much guaranteed to be on the outside. Luck, timing, and good connections are nice at any time, but the last few decades it's everything. In another timeline maybe wealthy youth is landlording it over the impoverished oldies, but in the best timeline we'd split the difference.
Even worse, it's a uniquely bad time to be smart and hardworking, because that's the type of attitude that could stick you with a lack of resilience at just the wrong time. People who've coasted may do much better than ones who are striving. Would you rather be a university grad with new debt right now, or be a certified HVAC tech for the last 5 years? If you were a mechanic, would you want to own the shop with loans to pay off in this economy and tariffs to deal with, or would you prefer to be a simple employee that can just bounce once the company goes under? I've met phd's who are delivering pizzas to make ends meet. Blue collar folks not only have better job security at the moment, but going back some years, if they got a mortgage at the right time and place with that stable job maybe they could do normal life stuff like kids, retirement one day.
What lessons do we think young people will take from all this? Nothing against anyone who is lucky, but a stubborn belief in mythical meritocracy or the legendary American dream is absolutely stone-cold crazy these days. There's just the insiders and the outsiders and there's not much rhyme or reason to any of it.
I think the next decade will be one of the single greatest times to be smart and hardworking. I think we’ll see AI-powered tools evolve to give hardworking humans significantly more leverage than they’ve been able to individually harness before and coupling that with smart (meaning high and good judgment on how to use them) will be an incredibly powerful combination.
We all make different choices, and so have different consequences.
For example, I squandered the proceeds of a business deal on a new car. If I'd bought MSFT instead, I could have bought 100 new cars.
(hindsight stock picking is terrible!)
Besides, this can't work for everyone - if you get 100 cars without an equivalent amount of more work put in then someone else has to do that work without being properly compensated for it.
That profit comes from owning a piece of a productive company, productive companies often spring from early-stage losses that require investment money from somewhere, seed stage money comes from the high likelihood that later stage money will come in if the venture appears successful.
There are many problems with a gambling based economy, not least among them that over a long enough time line, all the money ends in very few hands.
https://www.macrotrends.net/2324/sp-500-historical-chart-dat...
Or, I might be completely wrong and just been on an incredible white-hot-streak gambling for the last 30 years.
All of that money that you've "earned" with investment, where do you think it came from? What do you think you've done to deserve it? If investment is fundamentally risky, then it's an unsound basis for a stable society (i.e. it's gambling); if it's not risky, then you can't even argue that you deserve that money by having risked your own capital.
Others might be more conservative and I hope they find and choose investments which match their style and risk-tolerance.
I don't care how you act. That capitalism benefits the rich is not the subject of debate. This isn't /r/wallstreetbets
What is at stake us that all value is created by labor; and that the capitalist class (of which you are a member) is allowed to profit despite not producing anything at all. That makes you a parasite. Isn't that what the rich say about the poor?
That's the communist "Labor Theory of Value" which is nonsense.
For example, spend the day digging a hole in your backyard. Did you create any value? Nope.
Can you explain how it's nonsense? Can you think of a valuable product or service that you consume that is not produced by labor?
> For example, spend the day digging a hole in your backyard. Did you create any value? Nope.
I didn't say that all labor produces value; I said that all value is produced by labor. As a Smart Guy who Created His Own Software Company with No Capital At All, I'm sure you know enough about elementary logic to recognize the difference.
> all value is produced by labor
But you deny that the labor of the CEO produces value.
Consider Microsoft. The company's stock was flat for 10 years. Then Nadella took over as CEO. The stock went up by a factor of 10. Same company, same employees, same intellectual property. The difference was Nadella. A similar story with Steve Jobs' second coming at Apple. And Steve Jobs at Pixar. There are innumerable such stories.
It's similar to military generals. An army's victory or defeat is pretty much entirely due to the general.
So in your view, there are only two options: (a) unlimited astronomical compensation for CEOs while line workers get minimum wage or (b) hippie commune? You really can't see any other option? Even 50 to 60 years ago, CEO salaries were not as distorted as they are today and yet the world did not grind to a stop.
> Then Nadella took over as CEO. The stock went up by a factor of 10
The stock is not a measure of productivity. It's a measure of expectation. The problem with you and many capitalists is that you view the stock as the company's product. It isn't. Is the current version of Windows ten times better than the previous version? No? Then why did the stock go up?
> It's similar to military generals.
Great analogy. A general (O-10) in the US army serving since 1986 makes $19,000/mo. A private (E-1) makes $2,407/mo. That's a difference of ~8x. Now explain to me again why a CEO makes >1000x what his employees make?
It was created by the company you invested in.
> What do you think you've done to deserve it?
I took the risk of providing capital for the company to use to create wealth.
Risk is an elemental characteristic of free markets.
That's right: the value was created by other people, but yet you are benefiting. That makes you a parasite.
> I took the risk of providing capital for the company to use to create wealth.
So what? I can take a risk by jumping into a shallow pool. That's not the same as labor and does not entitle me, ethically, to profit. The profit should go to the people who do the work.
This is classic Marxism.
The employees were compensated commensurate with the value they produced. The value the investors create is the result of taking the risk by providing the capital and organization needed for the company to operate.
If you don't believe that, you're free to organize with like-minded fellow travelers, set up a commune, and split the rewards equally. I would caution you, however, that 20,000 other communes have been set up in the US, and they all disappeared. In my estimation, the typical commune member leaves after about 2 years, because they were doing all the work and the others were lazing around getting their equal share.
Put another way, SpaceX would not exist without Musk.
Correct. Are you going to dispute it or is "this is Marxism" the extent of your argument?
> The employees were compensated commensurate with the value they produced.
If they were compensated commensurate with the value they produced, then there would be no profit for the company, and the CEO's compensation would not be 1000x that of a line worker.
> If you don't believe that, you're free to organize with like-minded fellow travelers, set up a commune, and split the rewards equally.
That is one approach supported by unions.
> Put another way, SpaceX would not exist without Musk.
Yes, and I would not exist without my parents. That does not mean that I give them 90% of my profit.
You're assuming the economy is zero sum, which it obviously is not.
That assumption does not follow from my statement.
What I do assume is that the easiest way to make money is to have money, which means that the rich and get richer and the poor get poorer. We've already seen that the rise of billionaires correlatives with an increase in wealth inequality and poverty.
> the rise of billionaires correlatives with an increase in wealth inequality and poverty
The rise of the wealthy in the 19th century corresponded with scores of millions of people rising out of poverty into the middle class and beyond.
> What I do assume is that the easiest way to make money is to have money, which means that the rich and get richer and the poor get poorer.
Creating value does not make the poor poorer.
Consider the wealth in America today. Compare it with the wealth in America in 1800. Where did all that wealth come from? Rich European immigrants?
Did you know that when Rockefeller built Standard Oil, the price of kerosene dropped 70%. Just who exactly was he "robbing"?
My statement was "long enough time line, all the money ends in very few hands." That has nothing to do with zero-sum. Even if we assume that your premise of "rich billionaires make everyone else richer too", it does nothing to contradict my statement.
> The rise of the wealthy in the 19th century corresponded with scores of millions of people rising out of poverty into the middle class and beyond.
The decrease in poverty in that time period stems principally from industrialized farming techniques, increasing available food resources. There is nothing in that process that requires super-billionaires.
> Creating value does not make the poor poorer.
That depends. If all the created value is in the hands of rich, it gives the rich the power to buy more things, including things that the poor people need, e.g. housing. That drives up prices for the poor, and effectively decreases their buying power. That's how supply and demand work.
> Consider the wealth in America today. Compare it with the wealth in America in 1800.
Now consider the wealth distribution in America now versus the wealth distribution in America 60 years ago. At that time, the difference between the rich and the poor was much smaller. It was also a time of great economic expansion, opportunity, and innovation. So clearly super-billioniares cannot be necessary for economic productivity.
Investing: the ROI math means you make money
> So what you're saying is that we all just need to become better gamblers?
It means take advantage of the free education you received. Make an assessment of what you enjoy and what you are good at. Select an opportunity in the intersection of those two endeavors.
People start businesses every day in America.
> Besides, this can't work for everyone
Wealth is not zero sum. If you create wealth, that does not mean someone else must be worse off.
Man, we need a better term for this criticism.
The US right now is more harsh to live in than the US pre-Reagan, which was more harsh than many countries with a strong welfare state, but all of them are capitalistic.
It may be expressed in terms of money, but these are assets and capital. You wouldn't find a fab a very comfortable or satisfying place to live.
The reason the numbers get so big is the gargantuan accumulated savings that are prepared to fund the similarly gargantuan ventures. The large numbers are supported by maintaining and sustaining the capitalized value by profitable investment and depreciation.
When you talk about rent, while it may be expressed in the same unit (money), the economic function played is very different. Here, it is consumption rather than saving/investment. If the dollar equivalent of all those assets went towards paying rent, while it would secure housing for some time, it would eventually become completely exhausted, and so too would housing security. Large pools of assets are simply not a way to get stable housing, it would only consume the large savings society has accumulated to be able to undergo those big ventures. It would be short-sighted and harm us in the future.
The cause and solution to rental instability is to be found in housing, building, and land policy that restricts the production of housing.
> Housing is not an asset to society or the economy, it's a drain that wastes money on preserving human life.
You are equivocating between asset in the sense of 'generally useful thing', and the sense I used above which is a capital good. Housing is obviously a useful thing and necessary, just as all other consumptive goods like food, clothing, etc. That makes it an 'asset' in the former sense to people (there is no such thing as useful to the economy, which is just an abstraction). But housing, food, and clothing are not assets in the latter sense. I.e., paying for housing is a consumptive act and not a productive act. There is nothing good or bad about either, the distinction is simply a distinction of economic function. Eating is important, but eating uses up resources; it is consumption. Cooking is important, but it is not eating, you don't get anything out of it until you eat; it is production. Both rely on each other, neither can be given up completely without harm.
Thus, a proper balance must be struck, because it would be foolish and self-destructive to only consume. If there was only consumption, then this would simply sacrifice your future and you would not be able to survive after you have used up what was produced before. The question is about whether you want a stable, regular, and lasting way to be able to have valuable things like housing, food, and clothing. To do that, you have to refrain from consuming your entire stock of assets, you have to refrain from using up all the resources you have. But that is what you would to if you took all the capital that companies have saved up and consumed it. The purpose of my original post was to point out that you can't look at production as if it were consumption, they have different roles and if you mistake production as an opportunity to consume, it is self-destructive.
Replying by ignoring this distinction and instead making a strawman will not prevent your perspective from being self destructive.
I wonder how long it REALLY took them to move from intel to apple silicon, which they don't even make.
It might be easy, like a consumer deciding to generate their own electricity (pv on the roof)
or it might be slightly harder, like a consumer deciding to generate their own electricity by drilling for oil, refining it, etc...
Apple has much, much more control over their silicon than they ever had with Intel.
With Intel, they were stuck with whatever Intel could supply - and that, particularly regarding power management, wasn't much.
In contrast, for ARM, Apple has been one of their longest-ever partners [1], with Apple holding one of the very rare and probably very expensive "Architecture Licenses" that allow Apple to not just build CPUs out of pre-made IP blocks, but also design their own cores and, and that is the crucial thing, extend the ARM instruction set on their CPUs.
The latter is what made the ARM move feasible, there would have been no way of getting high-performance emulation of x86 without a few specific extensions.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2023/09/06/apple-inks-new-deal-arm...
While Apple et al certainly have the money to tilt up their own fab, they're savvy enough to understand the memory market's long history of constant boom/bust cycles. I still remember the huge DRAM shortage in late 80s forcing my startup at the time to delay launching our new product for a year.
People assume Apple cares about vertically integrating cost but they're actually focused on integrating margin. Apple has billions in cash on hand and when they think about what to do with it, a key metric is Return on Capital, especially the margin that capital will generate. Since a core metric public companies are judged on is blended margin, they are looking for ways their bags o' cash can be put to work generating revenue at margins that will pull their current average margin up vs down.
Averaged over time, mainstream memory devices are historically one of the worst margin areas of the semi market. It's super expensive to tilt up a fab on a new node but once you do, turning the crank faster to make a lot more chips isn't too hard because mainstream DRAM tends to be quite uniform. So when a fab on a new node and/or RAM generation first opens, the margins tend to be pretty great. But as the node matures and/or the RAM generation goes from 'new' to 'commodity', competition heats up as everyone gets better at making more faster. Then they're tempted to maximize revenue by cutting prices until their mature fab is at 101% utilization. And that eventually drives margins down until someone's selling near cost to sustain their low-price-enabling volume - with occasional dips below cost when they get stuck holding excess inventory. That's why cash-rich companies with high margins like Apple are delighted to buy DRAM built with Other People's Money. As long as the DRAM market is under competitive pressure, Apple gets to shop their huge orders around to get the absolute lowest price on RAM that was built with other investor's low margin dollars.
Is it fair to conclude that DRAM is basically a commodity that can be specified well enough by a set of parameters?
If so it won’t allow you to get any competitive advantage in your products and thus wouldn’t be a business you want to be in as Apple.
But there's another key bottleneck. Even with all the money in the world, getting those machines that etch the RAM could be a multi year ration shop queue. And they're not making those companies every day!
Yes, except no DRAM maker is taking this as a signal to go deep into debt to double or triple capacity. It takes a minimum of 3+ years to dramatically increase capacity and no one expects this inflated demand bubble to last that long. Because they've seen this cycle before, they'll bump next gen capacity up a bit more than planned, maybe 15-25% because the current windfall profits are enough to build a buffer to absorb the hit if that excess capacity comes online in the next DRAM demand crash.
In the meantime, they'll just apologize to everyone for the "market conditions beyond our control" while banking as much of these crazy profits as they possibly can while it lasts. But deep down they remember they were starving just yesterday and know they'll be starving again tomorrow.
I understand why everyone's pissed at the "evil DRAM makers" but I also remember boasting about how I scored some crazy cheap RAM sticks not so long ago. None of us were shedding tears when they were selling at a loss just to survive.
Incorrect. CXMT is taking this as a signal to open new fabs, create new products, develop new silicon manufacturing techniques, and enter the consumer market worldwide (except USA).
Everyone knows the commodity market (outside HBM) is going to be margin crushed within a few years… by CXMT, demand swings, and so on.
So nobody cares to fully meet the demand today. They are perfectly happy telling customers (those not willing to sign a 10 year contract paying up front at least) to go pound sand.
They don’t even need an OPEC like arrangement. They are effectively perfectly coordinated already in dismissing customers.
China is trying to be vertically integrated, completely independent of outside influences and own the future supply/means of production. Memory and chips are piece of their larger plan. In any event, whatever China brings online will be absorbed - imagine a future where people's home computer has 100 to 1000GB of RAM in one variety or another. Folks are going to want better chips and more memory for years to come, supply will be absorbed.
Even taking bank loans at a 10% rate to pay (maybe even 15%) upfront would still make sense.
Most analysts think LLMs will elevate the long-term base RAM demand level. I mentioned 15-25% above prior projections without AI, which I think everyone agrees is highly likely. That's actually a lot because it's an overall market number and RAM goes lots of places other than PCs, servers and high-end mobile (depending on how you segment, 25% overall could be in the neighborhood of doubling PC, server, high-end mobile demand).
Above that range analyst estimates diverge. Some are more bullish, and a few are much more bullish. But everyone's error bars get much wider when the numbers go over 30% overall. It's hard to tease out exactly how much of the current demand bubble will persist in the long-run. Clearly, the current market is distorted by short-term dynamics but which part is base demand and which distortion?
How much consumer AI compute will be on-device vs aggregated in load-balanced clouds? How much RAM will that kind of compute require? Will the market find it's more efficient to consolidate around two or three mega-datacenters or will each frontier lab (and geopolitical block) continue drag racing each other to tie-up future RAM (as much to keep it away from competitors as for their own needs). I don't know. I've been watching this game as an interested bystander for several decades and I wouldn't bet too much of my own money on the most bullish estimates.
I'm concerned that the regular Joe/Jane won't be getting a GPU or a system upgrade for some time. And then you have people in Africa and elsewhere who can't afford new phones.
There probably is some distortion in that the top spenders aren't terribly against cornering the RAM market and forcing everyone to pay more for local AI due to higher RAM, GPU and CPU costs while squeezing people through their APIs to access AI services, but that's an expensive gambit that depends on local models not getting good enough and frontier models to continue to get better while requiring large swaths of memory and compute, keeping consumers demanding the latest models from the APIs. But if the supply increases and people have more access to RAM, GPUs and CPUs, we'll likely see more local model usage and people doing all sorts of creative work, even training their own models.
I'm bullish, not so much of an overzealousness as having witnessed so many of these computing explosions to not doubt it much anymore. We'll collectively find all sorts of creative uses for these wafers and tech. If I were to bet on it, I'd simply buy a basket of stocks and hold, riding out the noise - nothing too surprising there.
Lately consumers are told capitalism is cheap TVs, phones, and computers while housing, healthcare, education, energy, and food climbed further out of reach. The "bread" part of bread and circuses has shrunk dramatically, "but at least you're getting cheaper circuses" is what they've been saying.
Now you're saying only a heavily state-directed Chinese model is still willing to aggressively finance new fabs and meet demand to provide that? "Capitalism demands we don't expand capacity and don't meet demand' is kinda a tough sell after capitalism has been sold as expanding access. "Consolidation, maximal extraction, shareholder preservation, and AI" isn't going to be a winner. I get it makes business sense and wouldn't be a big deal in the past, but the rapidly changing dynamics hitting nearly every part of daily life across the entire economy feels destabilizing.
We're down to wearing dystopian sci-fi level cheap clothes, can't afford chips/sodas, candy/sweet treats have been enshitified to no longer be fulfilling, we can't afford to call an ambulance. Media is polarizing instead of mass media calming. Heck thrift stores are becoming unaffordable to the low end as the middle now resorts to them.
"You don't have the foods you are used to, decent clothing, shelter, health, or social cohesion but you have a sweet 6 year old phone and flock cameras keeping you safe". Jesus it feels... not good. Even cyberpunk dystopia understood you needed to at least jack people into something.
Who says this? The latter are heavily regulated and not exposed to market forces, which is why they didn’t get cheaper, unlike TVs etc.
Also, from the article:
> In other words: you can buy a computer thousands of times more powerful than the best consumer device from 40 years ago, for something like 0.3 percent of the price. No other good in history has experienced a decline in cost on that scale: poor people can now carry around in their pockets computers many orders of magnitude more powerful than what the richest slice of the world’s population could afford a few decades ago.
That extreme level of efficiency increase is something very specific to computers and not something translatable to other areas of the economy.
Cato https://www.cato.org/publications/trade-buys-goods-services-...
Cato “One of the big reasons Americans’ inflation-adjusted wages have climbed in recent decades is that the exorbitant prices of things such as housing, health care, and education have been offset by significant declines for tradable goods such as toys, clothing, and consumer electronics.” https://www.cato.org/commentary/cheap-talk-cheap-stuff
The Adam Smith types: https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/economics/economic-nonsense-2... "Many consumer goods follow the same trajectory; most recently smartphones have done so. Far from being left behind, the poor are pulled along by the progress that initially caters for the rich."
This also describes the U.S.A. steel industry. "Heavy state backing" and "not allowed to go bankrupt" often result in particularly terribly-performing industries. If anything, it's notable that China seems to buck that particular trend.
Okay, you got me. I was reflecting the prudent way long-term players generally interpret the market. But from time to time external macro-economic and/or geopolitical factors may shift. Those changes may persist over time or eventually swing back like tides. Other times someone thinks they've got a new angle or a new technology (the RDRAM format was a notable attempt). Occasionally, the people who always say "But this time it's different" are lucky enough to actually say it one of the rare times it IS different.
Time will tell if CXMT's gambit will pay off. Even if it doesn't maybe their state sponsors will absorb the losses for other strategic reasons.
That one was caused by manipulation by politicians, not market forces. Micron started a price war with Japanese memory manufacturers, the Japanese cut prices to compete, Micron sued them for "dumping". The saga ended with the 1986 U.S.–Japan Semiconductor Agreement, which, among other things, created production controls that limited the total dram supply. The level was set based on then current demand, and due to the rapid growth of demand at the time it almost instantly caused a massive global supply deficit.
The agreement also caused the rise of the South Korean memory industry, because the Japanese companies offloaded their now surplus equipment for cheap.
Funny how you then go on to explain it was market _actors_ that drove the politicians to act, but that this is nevertheless totally not an example of market _forces_.
Here it's useful to point out that free markets can't exist without an external force keeping them in check.
256K bytes of RAM that way made us $128 in sales. I earned $3.35 an hour. Any inventory I accumulated went out the door next morning.
It was a brief moment, but it makes me wonder if we'll see refurbished memory in fashion next year.
BTW the company, OEM Parts, was one of the last great surplus shops, surviving until just recently. Probably there were still cardboard bins with my handwriting for all the TTL chips that weren't in demand.
We are not launching our product this year. We can scrape together enough memory for shareholder and show floor demo units, but we have tens of thousands of people on the waiting list and we simply can't get that much memory at any price. What we can get would mean a $400 price bump.
What the hell do you even do?
Apple’s not exactly famous for their low pricing on spec upgrades nor competing based on being the price leader…
Personally, I think there's no way memory heavy inference moves on-device (vs cloud) due to the economics, but it's not impossible technology + platforms go that way for currently unforeseeable reasons.
My non-tech friends and family would probably be served perfectly fine by local models today, if they had a working web search tool. Their queries are often “soft” and don’t have an exact answer. My mom and aunt used it to pick a hairstyle, my mom used it to get an image of what a room would look like with particular drapes in it, etc. Stuff I think mid-sized local models like Gemma or smaller Qwens could do without issue. They just don’t have a device that will run them.
Businesses won’t move. They need a huge context so they can stuff a bunch of Confluence pages in it and 300 tools and it needs to read an entire codebase and yada yada. The hardware depreciation and electricity will probably make it a net zero or even cost more than paying for API access.
But maybe that hardware becomes so commoditized that it's not difficult to obtain / stuff in a box.
In that world, a) we are already at or close to having enough memory in local devices to do inference locally, and b) that memory isn't inference-specific and can be utilized for other things. Most devices come with enough memory to do some level of inference, and some come with plenty (eg a gaming desktop probably has 32GB+ of RAM in it).
You aren't going to run Kimi on it, but I think the reality for a lot of consumer inference is that it doesn't need to be. It's going to be a lot of things that are soft, and easily answered by a search API, so the LLM really just needs to be able to skim and summarize. Going a step further, we may even see some kind of hybrid approach where a local OpenRouter kind of thing decides whether the task is soft enough to do locally with models that fit in RAM or if it needs to be farmed out to a PaaS provider.
One of the reasons Intel fell behind is that they couldn't give access to their competitors for business reasons, and therefore could never scale as high as TSMC could.
There are many other reasons, but accounting is a huge one. Unless there is a huge ROI or something else we don't otherwise know, I don't see Apple adding such expensive deprecating assets onto their books as chip fabs.
They make a strategic investment in the DRAM maker. It's the same idea as buying an equity stake or entering a JV with a flat-panel maker. Or deploying cash to provide the latest EUV tooling to TSMC.
Large famous-brand computer maker has no expertise in running a fab.
I could punch holes in this idea right away. But it seems better than "tilting up your own fab".
If Apple could go back in time 3.5 years and decide to build their own factory, that would put them in a great position today. But deciding to do it now won't increase their supply 3.5 years from now more than just increasing their long-term orders with existing suppliers. Those suppliers will start building new factories based on Apple's increased orders and they'll do it faster and cheaper than Apple can because they don't have to build some factories in the U.S. for political reasons or worry as much about environmental regulation, permitting and ensuring Apple employees in Penang get benefits similar to employees in Cupertino.
You're talking about the "best" things Apple could do with their money, in terms of investment returns, but I think that misses the point that Apple literally can't buy enough memory at any price.
They can't buy enough today. I think I already explained this as well as I can in my second paragraph above. You seem to not be appreciating that every decision in this business has a 3.5+ year latency. And 3.5 years ago when Apple made the decisions they're living with now, Micron was selling their furniture (euphemistically speaking). Sinking billions into building RAM fabs would not only have gotten you laughed out of the boardroom, Apple shareholders would have rioted (for all the logical reasons I laid out in my prior two posts). The only scenario where the prudently balanced decision Apple made to not vertically integrate RAM manufacturing looks bad is the very unlikely scenario that actually happened this one time - but that 'bad look' is only temporary because the situation will probably look different 12 months from now (which is less than a third-of-a-fab-decision away)).
Back when I first became a strategist for a public F500 tech company whose products you probably use often, a very wise man took me to dinner and counseled me to never post mortem my decisions on the outcomes, but only on the decision process. In other words, knowing what I knew when I made the decision, did I choose the option most statistically likely to get the desired result - regardless if it worked or failed that time? In highly uncertain games, some bets don't pay off. In my work, if 60% of my decisions came out positively, I'd have been the greatest of all time (they weren't that quite that high). If strategists don't think this way we end up leading our companies to doom by "chasing black swans" (aka unlikely outlier outcomes).
> memory manufacturers leave demand unmet
That's not their plan or desire - it's just the inevitable result of trying to predict both future demand and future capacities of unbuilt fabs on new nodes (every new node is an adventure). Both are rough estimates with bell-curve probabilities and wide error bars. You might imagine the Chief RAM Strategist drags the center of the bell curve so the big bump in the middle is right over their best guess of what the fab yields and market demand will actually be three years from now - perfectly slicing the odds in the probabilistic middle. But they don't. Instead, being a smart, experienced strategist, they slide the bell curve a little bit to the low-side - because very profitably selling everything you can possibly make and regretting the 5 or 10% of demand you left unmet is a far, FAR better (and more survivable) problem to have than sitting on 5 or 10% unsold excess capacity from expensive fab space you paid to build but can't monetize. That extra capacity will often force you to take lower margins on ALL your capacity to ensure you sell through the extra 10%. This is how you speed run becoming an ex-strategist, sometimes of an ex-company.
In short, being wrong on the low side is the best kind of wrong you can be. But being wrong on the high side is the worst kind of wrong, and it's not linear. Every extra percent you go over costs significantly more than the last. If they do their job perfectly, it looks to consumers like "manufacturers leave demand unmet." If they do their job less than perfectly but pretty well, it looks like "RAM's too damn expensive and the idiots created a shortage - what were those morons thinking?" If they do their job catastrophically it looks to consumers like "Woohoo, RAMs dirt cheap. Look at me! I've got so many sticks I'm bathing in them like Scrooge McDuck!"
What I did say is that in a hypothetical world where Apple did invest in their own fabs, they'd have much better access to memory and could be selling machines with vastly more memory than their competitors today. Should they be doing this? I'm making no statement either way.
> a very wise man took me to dinner and counseled me to never post mortem my decisions on the outcomes, but only on the decision process
I appreciate this wisdom on one hand, but on the other it's comically misguided. You have no way to evaluate the decision process if the outcomes are not considered. Don't post mortem your decisions in a way that leads to self-blame or paralysis, but certainly post mortem them to see whether the process was suboptimal.
In this case, any board laughing at the idea of investment in memory 3.5 years ago should instead have been looking more closely at likely memory needs over the then-near-future, given the quite obvious upcoming demand for GPU memory. There's no magic bullet and they wouldn't have been able to make perfect decisions regardless, but clearly the process they followed at that time was suboptimal.
Okay, I understand your point. I've always taken it as given that vertically integrating DRAM fabs was one of many options available to any very large manufacturer with sufficient cash flow. However, I think your point was inaccurate. If Apple invested in their own fabs, they would not have better access to memory today, unless they ALSO did something quite irrational and overbuilt their fab's capacity by a factor of 2X or more. In terms of greater capacity, at Apple's massive scale of consuming more than a "one fab" amount of output, owning their own fabs vs ordering from fabs owned by others still requires pre-ordering their expected RAM needs ~3.5 years in advance. Regardless who owns the fab, no fab can make significantly more chips without that long lead time. The difference in lead time, total capacity and margin between a self-owned fab you started building 3.5 years ago and "pre-buying most of a fab's output 3.5 years in advance" is minimal enough to be virtually immaterial. This entire area of strategic analysis is broadly called "Build vs Buy", but it has more to do with financial and tax metrics around cash on hand, capex, amortization and return on capital. The problem we're focused on here is lead-time or supply elasticity (eg how quickly can we get a lot more DRAM than we thought we'd need and at what cost delta). And, at this scale, those dynamics aren't fundamentally changed whether you Build or Buy.
> Should they be doing this? I'm making no statement either way.
Given the dynamics, I assumed you weren't just stating that acting irrationally is always an option, but that doing so was a rational option strategically. But it's not. Even in your scenario it wouldn't have changed anything UNLESS you imagine Apple of 3.5 yrs ago was psychic and built two fabs for every one they actually expected to need - but that would have been insane. And if they were that insane, they could have accomplished very nearly the same thing by pre-buying 2X their expected RAM needs from their 3rd party suppliers. At Apple's scale, 3rd party suppliers are what we call 'virtually captive'. You're such a large customer, you're practically funding the supplier's capex. This is a serious strategic problem for such suppliers (but great for Apple).
> I appreciate this wisdom on one hand, but on the other it's comically misguided. You have no way to evaluate the decision process if the outcomes are not considered.
Yes, of course you consider the outcome as one data point. But I said you don't assess by the outcome, meaning we don't judge the decision process's ultimate validity only (or even mostly) by the outcome. It's just one element. The reason is that for highly uncertain decision spaces with unknowable key externals, you can have NOT just: 1. Optimal decision-making / successful outcome, and 2. Sub-optimal decision-making / failed outcome but ALSO: 3. Optimal decision-making / failed outcome, and 4. Sub-optimal decision-making / successful outcome. Understanding the ramifications of this matrix is crucial - especially the last two.
A key example, is the hypothetical where a crazy strategist consults an astrologer, pre-commits to 2X the projected need for fab output (whether by building/owning fabs directly or just indirectly by pre-buying one or more fab's entire output in advance). If the astrologer says "build 2X what you think you'll need" and there's an unforeseeable confluence of events 3 years later that causes a worldwide shortage of RAM, then if you overweight the outcome in assessing if your strategic planning process is optimal, you'd always just do what the astrologer says. In short, in high-risk domains, sometimes a sub-optimal decision-making process can randomly result in a successful outcome - but that's a spurious signal.
If I'm the Apple VP responsible for DRAM supply chain strategy, the question I might ask my demand-side forecasting team is to run a post mortem study of whether any data sources might have existed at the time we locked in our DRAM capacity commit which could have predicted the DRAM bubble with sufficient certainty that we would have made a different decision back then. However, I'm virtually certain the answer is "No". At Apple's scale and longevity, their teams on this are already very good. If the answer was "Yes", they'd already have done it. I understand you think "this AI thing was knowable 3.5 years ago" but hindsight is always 20/20. If you haven't done such rigorous forecasting and post mortem analysis in complex, high-risk domains with thousands of variables, not just 'known unknowns' but many 'unknown unknowns', with billions of dollars at stake - it's difficult to appreciate the full scope of the challenge. The trick is the question is not just a true/false binary of "AI will cause a run on DRAM." The real question is multiple choice and the choices are numbered 1 through 5,000 (at least). And "AI will cause a run on DRAM" is just 'possible future scenario' #3,462.
Hell, an 8GB hard drive was unfathomable when I was a kid in the 90s. I remember getting a 30 megabyte drive for our Mac LC.
My childhood best friend and neighbour had the same kind of computer except they only had something like 384K of memory and I tried to convince them their computer was broken when it didn't count up all the way.
Mine had 4K of RAM and an 800 KHz CPU - and I was living in the future, man. No way I could use that much memory. After all I had to type in whatever program I wanted to run every time I turned it on. Then I got a manual audio cassette recorder and thought "Woah, I don't think it gets better than this!"
And when I upgraded from tapes to the 1541 floppy drive (5.25" floppies), it was like "thats it - I have INFINITE possibilities now"
Simpler times :)
Ah, the legendary 1541. We used to joke it was the only floppy drive on any 8-bit micro that was actually slower than some dial-up modems. It wasn't actually slower, but it was really slow compared to most other 8-bit computer's drives (unless you added after-market accelerators).
Who knew :)
That's not how I remember it. By the time we got data cassettes, we knew very well that floppies were the future.
The same world where a classic Mac came with 128KB of RAM.
We might someday live in a world where entry-level is 256TB of RAM.
RAM doesn’t seem like something where simply owning the manufacturing could lead to a disproportionate competitive edge. It would just be a vertical efficiency gamble that may or may not pay off. Of course that could simply be a failure of my imagination.
Frankly it’s ridiculous how we (the West) dropped renewables like a hot potato because it became synonymous with subsidizing China’s dominance in the field.
Even if you were nowhere near state of the art, being able to produce millions of your own cards every year at cost would save you a lot of money.
Nvidia sells all the stock, prices for GPUs moved up not down.
Companies like Apple don't want to be in every industry. Its risk, its cost, its expertise you need.
And sure you can throw money at it but you need people. Alone hiring all the experts is probalby not that easy. Who knows how to setup a DRam Factory?
It takes years to build this up
A lot of that is “weird money” created by the act of passing it around between the entities or “Holywood accounting” style money that exists when convenient and will vanish the instant it might be taxed or need to be extracted from the cycle to pay for something tangible. Trying to use a large amount of that money for tangible long-term building projects risks piercing the vail.
Huge gamble - If they pull it off I wouldn't be surprised if other companies follow
>but it seems they'd be a prime candidate to spin up their own memory fab.
They will be the prime candidate to work with memory makers for additional capacity. Not to start their own one. Here is a $20B cheque and 5 years guarantee of orders. Go and make me some memory for his price.
I mean this is the same story for iPod and NAND. It seems we are repeating what we should have learned.
When you’re Apple and can build it with cash, and ram is currently so insane it saves you a decade of memory price gouging in a single year, the math changes quickly.
Apple is not paying the same insane price most people / other players are paying.
It's one of the early moves Tim Cook made after joining Apple to lock down enough flash memory supply to move iPods from hard drives to flash.
If the Big 3 had been more prudent, they could have kept profits lower and avoided this, but now they've probably dug their own grave and will see massive decline in profits starting from 2027/2028 when Chinese capacity really comes online.
regardless, this industry goes through such cycles (which have killed weaker companies and made the situation worse). high time for the memory "OPEC" to disband.
So, that's another way we are financing the LLM machine and the trillion-dollar valuations of those corporate behemoths.
The Iran war is spiking the price of oil and will likely cause shortages of pretty much everything if it isn't ended.
The Ukraine war is helping with that by destroying Russian refining capacity.
The memory shortage is set to do the same to consumer electronics, which are absolutely essential to the modern economy.
Meanwhile the AI fad is seeing huge layoffs. At the same time as the AI Big Cos are beginning to show signs of ending the subsidised free lunch phase and moving to a utility model, which will raise prices for every company that is hooked on AI.
Also tariffs. Although I'm not sure if anyone knows what's happening there.
And farms are failing. Climate change will accelerate that, so there will be food shortages within a few years.
If it's not cynical and deliberate, it's an astounding confluence of (literally) catastrophic mismanagement.
It’s all such a clown show.
Unless of course the farmers are themselves working for a huge vertically-integrated corpo.
The imported stuff you bought retail unfortunately won't be refunded (unless one of the current ongoing class action lawsuit will win).
This is really the only point I disagree with. Layoffs are being blamed on AI, but they are really a hangover of the covid hiring boom, and subsequent bust.
All the tech money is going into building data centres (and the gas turbines that power data centres), and it turns out that programmers don’t have the relevant skills to build gas turbines.
Jobs at GE in Schenectady may not be what those developers are looking for even if they were qualified.
The world's most convenient virus.
If I did so when I first thought about it, I would be broke by now.
With Ukraine we saw it. It was incredibly obvious. Hilariously the Ukrainians themselves saw the huge army on their border and told everyone it wasn’t going to happen and refused to build any defences. Taiwan will be the same. But the satellites will give everyone enough warning.
In terms of gaining political support, being a victim in the modern world is very advantageous. The more of your civilians die unjustly, the more the media will portray you as a great and brave leader. There is nothing hilarious about this, only cynicism of the leaders of the country.
You're going to have to cite that, because Ukraine was already in the low-intensity Donbass conflict when the most recent invasion happened.
But yes, you can't hide an invasion fleet. The Chinese navy only has three aircraft carriers. They've recently had high level purges in the PLA. Invading now would be a disaster for them. But you never know when a disaster is going to get ordered for political reasons.
Not the full truth. Leadership said publicly that there was nothing to worry about, but the AFU dispersed assets, distributed suppiles and ammunition, and took a defensive stance before the invasion happened.
I’ve overweighted EU weapons manufacturers because a Taiwan war will be coupled with an expansion of the war in Europe. With the US busy trying to fight China, Russia will for sure make a bigger move in Europe. European defense budgets will 10x.
This is the key one to watch out for. Prior food-based conflicts have sparked revolutions and civil wars. People can tolerate not having electricity, people can tolerate not having internet, people can tolerate not having gas.
But a lack of food, due to a wheat shortage which in turn was sparked by Siberian wildfires destroying a whole year's wheat crop in Russia, precipitated the Arab Spring and the subsequent civil wars, as well as the ascendancy of ISIS.
The climate is changing in a positive direction for farming. Farming is easier now than ever before. There's literally no chance of food shortages. Unless, of course, there's another attempt at building socialism.
Step 1) Instigate price increases for temporary reasons, leading to noticeable price increases.
Step 2) As temporary reasons go away, increase money supply. Prices stay the same, you get to blame the causes from step (1) while not mentioning that the prices could have gone down when the problem went away, or blaming greedy companies for not lowering the prices.
Oops, sorry, wrongthink, I mean "due to the war in the Middle East", even though a large majority of gas in the UK comes from elsewhere (gas and electricity prices in the UK are supposedly very tightly coupled ?)
90% of acreage could be slashed this way, either for rewilding or for development.
Soylent Green, but veritable, not old people
If a dominant buyer locks up most of the supply chain through exclusive contracts, it prevents rival companies from getting the materials they need to survive, which violates laws like Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act.Many of them orchestrated the situation.
the second part of the word just means purchase (in a weird ancient Greek tense). there's no relation to fish whatsoever.
(I'm Greek)
As other commenters have pointed out but I might have missed in the article, compute maturation is amplifying memory constraints right now and making it worse. Device upgrade cycles are getting longer because most compute-based products have matured, with CPUs not seeing substantial gains and memory usage really only expanding at the absolute top end of workloads pre-LLMs (3D and HPC in particular). An iPhone 14 still has almost all the features of the iPhone 17, because the compute capabilities are remarkably similar; Geekbench shows a performance delta of ~25-30% between the 14 and 17 Pro Max models, which is pretty paltry considering the devices are separated by four years of manufacturing improvements. This extends into desktops, laptops, tablets, STBs, and more, with only VR devices and larger ARM/RISC-based kit seeing more substantial uplifts as general designs improve.
So with compute stagnating and memory constrained, my money is on vendors taking this as an opportunity to gradually shift away from a yearly release cadence and slow down to a biennial cycle that alternates between budget and flagship launches every other year. Even if LLMs fail spectacularly and all that memory capacity becomes available, HBM memory likely isn't to find its way into many consumer devices (just ask AMD how it worked out for them on consumer GCN GPUs).
The name of the game, especially for consumers, is efficiency - "potato builds", as I've been calling them. Software and services optimized for lower power, smaller-specced devices of increasing age instead of pandering to flagship devices with poorly optimized code or engines for the sake of new shinies (like Raytracing). Between the memory shortage, shifting geopolitics, rising costs, and stagnant wages, consumer purchasing power is going to be squeezed like a vice for the foreseeable future, and businesses will need to adapt around that reality.
So with compute stagnating and memory constrained, my money is on vendors taking this as an opportunity to gradually shift away from a yearly release cadence and slow down to a biennial cycle that alternates between budget and flagship launches every other year.
For example, Apple might make fewer iPhone 18 and let it sell out frequently. They’ll use their RAM supplies mostly for the Pro phones.
I don’t think Apple will stop releasing new iPhone Pros every year. The business is too big.
There's a lot of 'ifs' there to be sure, but they'd be fools not to at least discuss the possibility internally and understand their options.
Apple has a second option that may not be open to most other vendors - as they've just demonstrated with the MacBook Neo, they could cut the RAM in half on the budget models. One good cycle of optimising the hell out of their (almost entirely native) software stack, and iOS would once again sing on a 4GB SKU.
I don't necessarily expect them to cut memory on the existing models, but I could well see a 4GB iPhone e/mini showing up to shore up the bottom of the lineup, as the pro models get price increases.
Haven't they already proven to be extremely useful? In some areas they are definitely here to stay, coding/software and search (retrieve and summarize information). There's a bunch of places where they are surely shoehorned in, overhyped, and don't belong, but there's also equally many places where they might still be transformative but aren't used yet.
But overall I think the technology is well proven.
Besides, the marketplace is still in its infancy for LLMs, with a lot of unanswered questions. A lot of those questions surround the commercial viability of frontier models on bespoke hyperscaler data centers with limited usage outside of LLMs specifically should those economics be non-viable. Since that's where the memory is being tied up into, that means it's a critical question to answer in order to determine long-term investment needs into further memory fabrication.
Most certainly not. The accuracy issues mean that they can't really be used effectively for coding or search, the two things you mentioned.
What about the RAM consumption trend of the last 10 years? I think it is very feasible to produce phones with the same amount of RAM as was the norm 10 years ago. The only compromise would be using older algorithms and features that consume less of it, and to take a bit of effort on keeping an eye on memory consumption in the development phase. There's a lot of opportunity. We can even leverage AI these days to optimize existing software for RAM usage.
Think of desktop, browser and electron applications. No way one can comfortable run modern software on 2015 machine. Maybe Linux could help, but anyway
RAM isn't the only reason to upgrade. CPU's are more efficient, screens are significantly better and support variable-refresh-rates (and high refresh rates), battery technology has not stood still: even if they didn't degrade over 10 years.
There's plenty of reasons to upgrade to a new system even if it has the same memory capacity on paper. The memory will probably be faster and lower voltage too.
I think it’s AV that makes the difference. The modern smartphone does a ton of processing on the image sensor, and the modern laptop is expected to output multiple 4k video signals (zoom camera + desktop sharing) while accepting multiple video signals, without dropping below 120hz.
My personal laptop is a ULV 6th gen i5 with 8GB of RAM. Gets the job done, slowly but usably. That's about 9 years old. It runs Ubuntu. A dozen or so Firefox tabs, Kicad, VS Code, Slack. Computer things.
I'm of the opinion that application developers should be given middle-tier consumer systems as work machines. The whole notion of "dogfooding" is "dog-something else" if your devs experience the product using different hardware from the customer.
Whatever you say mate.
MS Teams uses around 1000MB of RAM to do exactly the same things that Microsoft Messenger could do in 8MB.
It's haaard to do state machines.
If they knew how to do a state machine, a glorified chat app needs how many threads? Maybe 4: UI, network, audio, video. And the last 2 are only needed during calls.
They have 12 just because they don't know to do better.
Btw with teams (the application) off there's a com.microsoft.teams2.agent there anyway. What's it for, spyware?
Thankfully my colleagues saw the value in what I was doing. I smuggled the optimization into my PR with their approval. Anecdotal, but there are still people who care about efficiency out there.
That being said, unless your manager is John Carmack, or you work in embedded systems, time spent on reducing memory footprints is seen as wasteful by the business.
I think that there is a way to change that.
If an application runs significantly better on lower end hardware while delivering the same results, the customers should prefer it. It is just a matter of promoting it that way.
He had Claude essentially create a 300MB json file and was doing all of the data processing on that data directly.
It never occurred to him, or Claude, that there were other ways to operate on that data. It took me less than 10 minutes to get that processing time down to under a minute.
These are the type of issues that worry me about vibe coding.
Now, he makes small apps that scratch his own itches, while everything is fresh in his mind and he can clarify or learn “hmm, that’s not actually what I want” and the cost is some tokens and the occasional job that runs in 3 hours instead of not existing at all.
I think it is great that he now has this capability, but a total ignorance of software engineering is going to continually bite this type of user. Instead of questioning Claude's solution, my friend thought he just needed a faster computer.
He was also using very sketchy Python imports when much safer, more mature options are available. Not knowing that you shouldn't use just any random Python package is a ticking time bomb... especially when his machine is connected directly to his corporate intranet.
Another contributing factor to rising consumer electronics prices due to vibed up coding is just what we needed.
Don't worry, I'm sure IT would never give this manager priveleged access to systems permissions.
You could have done it with Claude in 1 minute :) It probably never occurred to the VP to ask Claude for performance optimizations
"The reason why RAM has become four times more expensive is that a huge amount of RAM that has not yet been produced was purchased with non-existent money to be installed in GPUs that also have not yet been produced, in order to place them in data centers that have not yet been built, powered by infrastructure that may never appear, to satisfy demand that does not actually exist and to obtain profit that is mathematically impossible."
You could literally rewrite the quote to be about iron and about building railroads for trains and passengers that don't exist yet. See how silly that would be?
Except the "profit that is mathematically impossible" part. That's just made up and false. It's entirely possible that we are actually underestimating demand, and there is going to be tons of profit. Nobody knows for sure, but profit is very, very, very possible.
JP Morgan says $650 billion in annual revenue required to deliver mere 10% return on AI buildout is equivalent to $35 payment from every iPhone user, or $180 from every Netflix subscriber 'in perpetuity.'
Very, very, very unlikely it makes profit, which why AI keeps getting overhyped by CEOs.
If the demand is real and the company just sucked, their users and infrastructure will end up at a competitor: the value for that one company is bigger, but the overall per-user bill remains about the same.
If the demand is fake the infrastructure will be sold off at a big loss, allowing new companies to enter the market with far smaller investment costs, allowing them to undercut the competition, driving down the price users expect to pay for compute, resulting in a race to the bottom between the remaining AI companies in an attempt to attract enough users that their hardware won't sit idle - which in turn makes it far less likely that they'll be able to hit those revenue figures. And a bunch of investors just lost a few billion dollars, of course.
What a giant waste of resources that are missing elsewhere
I mean I love simplicity, and if economy could be simplified to a big money printer machine directly printing the money to a burner, then it would be so simple, that even a short context window could comprehend the economic cycle finally!
When you run the numbers, $65/mo turns AI investment into a a 5-7 ROI, which is totally within normal bounds.
Considering there are over a billion unique weekly active users for the major labs, and demand has been relentless, it's a pretty easy sell to get investors on board.
"You pay internet, you pay phone, you pay AI".
Even $100 per month per employee will likely turn out to be quite reasonable, if it can make employees more productive by several hundred dollars per month.
Was your point that owning the steel companies is the path to riches even when most of the railroads fail?
Who buys anything made by AI if he could do it by AI themselves?
Who can afford AI if their customers do with AI what they do?
Who creates the next man made code needed as training data to prevent model collapse?
Couldn't possibly happen with railroads!
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2016/02/crisis...
Just because some companies made bad decisions doesn't mean the railroad industry as a whole was some kind of mirage or mistake. Laying down tracks for trains and passengers that didn't exist yet is still necessary.
It happened with the Internet, too, and the Internet is pretty useful I think.
The current crunch and constrain in compute is great time to show once again some ingenuity. The lowest level of smartphones from couple of years ago have more computing power than XBOX 360. That should be enough to run Whatsapp smoothly.
Maybe it is time not just shrink transistors but also software bundles. I can see decades of possible progress hiding in plain sight behind a browser screen.
Making user space applications more memory efficient is not even going to be a rounding error on memory demand.
I am with you that it needs to happen, but it's not going to solve a memory shortage.
https://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Neo_Freerunner https://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Applications https://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/QtMoko
Before that Linux ran on the Zaurus too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_Zaurus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenZaurus
If the new memory is needed for AI data centers, it doesn't matter if your existing MacBook doesn't need as much memory anymore.
That does not help the demand side for AI data centers - which is the vast majority of the market...
It has been a disturbing trend on TikTok to see all the livestreamers in the united states showing how to recover gold and metals from e-waste... it used to be an exceptionally dirty and low margin business only done by the world's poorest. Now it has become valuable enough, and the economic situation in the usa has deteriorated enough, that americans are doing it in their homes and backyards.
I'm not one of those people who chases all the new great things. I wait until things wear out or become completely obsolete before upgrading. I just get comfortable doing things the same way every day and see no reason to waste money on SaaS shit or anything else wastes my time or money.
I think the memory shortage will present opportunities for those willing to take advantage of the situation. A lot of DRAM is going into GPUs for data centers in AI work. Those units have a limited lifetime online and they will be rotated out and replaced with new units as performance degrades. I think this will be a lot like Li-ion batteries in that many of these GPUs will be perfectly fine for home pcs or small business workstations or for other less intensive use cases and the RAM will be performant enough that a viable recycling industry should arise from this AI buildout.
Funny enough, one day the local AI noise-making, power-wasting, water-wasting data centers will be the best places to score high-tech components and many of us will have one right down the road. That should set a lot of people up as recyclers redistributing reconditioned components to those who build their own systems.
For anyone who doesn’t follow the market closely, this is about a good a primer as you could hope for.
The people responsible for throwing the consumer segment under the bus will see no repercussions for this - nobody is going to jail, consumers get screwed.
The memory prices will never return to the pre-shortage prices. They’ll use this as an excuse to subtly increase the base prices and the orgs that sell the devices will also do a similar increase, also past what the BOM changed by.
Any prediction on when it'll end? Can Chinese companies scale up to scare the big 3 into increasing capacity or lose price control?
The demand for AI simply doesn't exist at the real prices. It barely exists at the current subsidized rates - Microsoft, Google, Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI are spending hundreds of billions to make mere billions.
And then these data centers will be worthless, future ones won't get built, memory demand will evaporate on the spot.
And ram producers are betting on it, they will just milk the AI companies until they collapse.
But instead, all we get is known liars going on podcasts and repeating "stylized facts" that aren't literally true about their supposed profitability on inference, from companies losing billions per year in a situation where they don't have to tell the truth.
That is VERY far from a convincing argument that they are profitable. So I can & will safely conclude that the opposite is true.
At the moment you can pay $20/month to do thousands of expensive queries a month (involving file uploads, the Pro model, extended thinking), and evidence suggests that heavy users are not profitable.
I'm arguing that even if inference isn't profitable right now it's not orders of magnitude off. Whatever pricing emerges for models equivalent to current frontier models won't be significantly higher than the current API pricing.
There are already enough small companies without tons of VC money to burn that are serving up nearly-frontier llms at prices lower than the big players are charging. They can't all be subsidising? These are companies without any moat or any IP.
Poco X3 has excellent support for Ubuntu Touch, PostmarmetOS and LineageOS etc.
My 4090 and 12900k are gonna have to last till 2029 at this rate won’t they…
I've heard that is happening for motherboards.
Certain popular AMD SKUS are already 120 days lead time and growing. If a vendor will talk to you at all.
I expect motherboards to get cheap until they get to be really expensive niche products should the current situation last a few more years. At least as we know them today as PC enthusiasts and/or prosumers. I could very much see that market evaporating entirely and moving towards large integrators instead. Gamers and such were already a rather small niche to begin with.
Right now the saving grace is a server board doesn’t look a whole lot different than a consumer board. But that may change significantly faster than anyone predicts should current trends with SoCs and the like continue. You may be in a place soon where you get to choose your CPU/RAM/storage at purchase time like you do with a MacBook today.
I think there's a reason that University of Michigan researcher jumped after that ferroelectric breakthrough.
I am hopeful that some of this massive pressure is going to push us into the next paradigm, which is likely some kind of "true" compute-in-memory system. That may increase performance and efficiency for AI by up to 100 X.
Presumably the supply of 5+ year old used phones that fully work is not enough to meet that demand, which is why these frankenstein Android companies exist.
"Because of all the peripheral circuits and all the vertical channels, a single gigabyte of HBM consumes more than three times the wafer capacity that a gigabyte of DDR or LPDDR does. Every gigabyte of HBM produced is, in effect, three gigabytes of commodity memory not produced."
Is this true or conflating wafer area with process steps?
If the bottleneck isn't process steps but wafer area, you'd expect the semiconductor boule growers to rake in all the profit, not the memory makers themselves (although they would see more revenue). I'm not hearing about Umicore or other semiconductor corps raking in big under a wafer shortage.
Thats why I ask the question if this is actually correct.
If correct, it really makes one wonder what would be more productive for machine learning community X PB of HBM vs 3X PB of conventional (LP)DDR RAM, or somewhere in between. By giving a couple of big players carte blanche financially, has allowed the decision to divide in 3 global memory capacity (in units of terrabytes manufactured per day say)? The singularity that slows itself down?
>In 1985, if you were a reasonably affluent American, the best computer that you could afford was the IBM PC AT. The PC AT would cost you about $6,000—$19,400 in 2026 dollars—and thus represented about a quarter of the median American’s annual income;
In early 1980s a PC AT was SOTA. I guess that if you buy a SOTA computer today it might cost you close to $19,400.
my 2 cents
As a complete know nothing about the fab industry, I am always puzzled by this. Do the fabs need to be seasoned like an iron cast skillet or something?
There's a mysterious fab entity known as "the Recipe" - the product of long iterative dialing in of the fab's operating parameters. Of which there are a great many. A modern fab performs hundreds of manufacturing steps, with thousands of tweakable parameters, and they may interact in non-obvious ways to affect the outcomes. This is what's discovered and adjusted as the fab runs.
The difference between having the Recipe and not having the Recipe is the difference between 96% yield and 12% yield.
Changing the process (i.e. 4nm to 2nm) is the most sure way to lose the Recipe. The fab knowledge you spent months and years of engineering work discovering will no longer apply. But you can also lose the Recipe by replacing fab hardware, by changing the suppliers, by an act of god, and more.
My head annoyingly refuses to accept the non-deterministic outcomes when applied to electronics. In other disciplines, let's say bow or musical instrument making, you need to harvest the wood, age it, dry it, pray to a deity, work with its natural im/perfections etc, but this is "just" bits.
The unfortunate truth is, "bits" sit on a vast foundation of chemistry and physics pushed to their limits. It's a (mostly) deterministic subspace, carved carefully into the non-deterministic world with sheer effort and skill. This is why those fabs are so expensive and complex. Nature defied, reproducibly and at scale. Keeping the Crawling Chaos away one wafer at a time.
If one line is performing well, you can copy its parameters to another, as a starting point. It'll get you some of the way there. How far? Have fun with that. Those two lines, you see, are not the same exact line copied twice. The equipment is the same, but our "the same" is a short for "merely very similar". There are subtle differences. There always are. And some of them matter.
I hate it that we had decades of progress to have computers become a very expensive hobby because some dudes high on fentanyl think some text prediction model that destroys the planet is worth a trillion dollars.
I have a 14900KS, a CPU from 2 years ago and is still amongst the strongest in benchmarks like Cinebench. And 128 GB DDR4 RAM. I feel like I can wait a few more years to upgrade.
I was about to upgrade earlier 2025 but then held off, guess I shoulda just pulled the trigger
From 2008 to around 2015, upgrading every two years could make a meaningful difference. From ~2015 to ~2020 upgrading every three years might be worth considering. I just upgraded my top of the line flagship after nearly six years. And I actually looked for compelling reasons to buy a new phone every year since 2023. There just weren't any.
Frankly, this latest flagship phone is pretty underwhelming. It's slightly faster at a few things. The battery lasts a little longer. The screen can get a little brighter. The camera is supposed to a little better. But those are just the claimed improvements. I haven't actually noticed any of them in daily use because they weren't issues with my 2020 flagship phone either. Otherwise, the new phone is almost exactly the same size, same weight, same resolution, same look and same capabilities. I only upgraded because I was long out of contract and it was a only a couple hundred bucks for a $1400 MSRP phone with a new contract and a trade-in of the old phone.
Second, the article doesn’t focus on phones we buy. There won’t be a shortage of those.
1. High-resolution screen, finally approaching paper (600dpi) 2. High-refresh rate screen, up to 240 fps. Once you see 60 fps, you are already hooked, and 240 is just mind-blowing. 3. High-resolution camera, 50 Mpx means that the camera actually starts to match paper (600dpi) 4. Slo-mo camera (240 fps) to match the screen. 5. Decent memory sizes. On my recent 24 Gb size memory I can actually run multiple apps in parallel, and they are not getting killed. You see, using all available memory is a competitive strategy for app developers -- when they use all the memory, their competitors are evicted from RAM and the user is less likely to receive notifications. 6. Decent sdcard size (1Tb). Same reason for the storage. App manufacturers are trying to use all available space, so that you would delete the competitor's apps in order to keep using theirs. 7. HDMI over USB -- finally you can connect a keyboard and a monitor, and get rid of your laptop, just use one device for everything.
I'm a sample size of one, but I'd rather have 20% better battery life (this would extend the life of a three year battery to roughly four years) than eye candy. Extremely aggressively glued-in batteries turning into hazardous gas packages are the only reason I replace portable computers these days.
And -given the history of such things- lack of care in system design means at year two or three, you'd find that your phone very, very inconsistently delivers 240fps. I think it's pretty widely known that once you get to somewhere around 15 or 30 FPS sudden variation in frame rate is far, far more noticeable and unpleasant than rock-solid "low" frame rate. [0]
[0] That is, a 240 FPS system that janks down to 30 FPS every few seconds is gonna be considered much less pleasant to use than one that always runs at 30 FPS.
> We’re already at the point where marginal buyers in the poor world are getting priced out of the smartphone market. We’re rapidly approaching the point where buyers in the rich world feel the same thing.
So it predicts that phones we buy are next.
Maybe in that vein, one thing I wish phones would do to differentiate themselves is just add more sensors. I want my phone to be the tricorder from star trek. iPhones should have first party support for generating point clouds and measuring distances using lidar. Their microphones are probably already calibrated, why not expose that as a decibel meter. Same for light sensors. Phones used to have IR emitters, why not add those back in?
Also the iPhone still only has 240fps slow motion, I've found samsung's 960fps really useful in capturing transient phenomenon or even measuring mundane things like LED flicker.
Conversely the Pixel seems to be the only one shipping with an IR thermometer, and they'll probably remove it given most people don't seem to care. That's something I would've found useful in ad-hoc situations where I've had to make do with the back of my hand.
Air quality detection (especially pm2.5, CO2, and CO levels) would be great but I don't know if those sensors can be miniaturized enough to fit.
That's the problem with non-Google and non-Apple phones.
I was using an iPad Pro from late 2018 (mostly just for casual web browsing, reading documents and watching video on, I still do all my real work on laptop/desktops) as well until this year, and would have kept using it if I hadn't accidentally dropped it in water. I don't really notice much difference at all between my old one (when it worked) and the new iPad Air I replaced it with, except for the battery being a little better and having a bit more ram being nice (websites in background tabs are less likely to be purged from memory when I come back to them).
China has an advantage here, once domestic DRAM production finally gets going. DRAM policy can be set strategically. China's economic planners may choose to provide DRAM to domestic manufacturers rather than export parts, even if exporting parts would be more profitable in the near term. That's already being done in raw materials. Conversely, if external suppliers have lower prices, there may be a policy decision to buy domestically to keep the domestic manufacturers going. Done with the goal of leveling production, this can work. Done stupidly, it becomes a money drain, of course.
Probably China controls the DRAM market around 2030 or so.
Changxin just became very profitable, due to high DRAM prices. They're planning an IPO. And, of course, building more fabs. Yangtze Memory Technologies isn't as far along, but they're building a new fab and planning an IPO.
Both of these companies were created in 2016 as part of a national effort to become a force in the DRAM industry. It took a while to get the technology working. Now it works, and they can scale up.
[1] https://chinabizinsider.com/how-the-economics-of-the-global-...
Oil always burned provided there's oxygen.
Price of oil was crystal clear how much you'll get for what you're paying.
And nothing else was affected with supply of oil.
No harm in keeping comparisons inline with the subject matter at hand.
I would have thought in the coming years they'll build more chip plants or the AI bubble will crash or some such. If there's an effect it should be greatest now.
Pics:https://duckduckgo.com/?ia=images&origin=funnel_home_website...
Two other underappreciated handset brands are Doogee and Blackview. Gorgeous devices and solidly built. From what I recall they're friendly to root.