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Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure it doesn't help that people continue to buy things at this price.

Steam Deck had a huge price increase (~40-50%) but it still sold out in 24 hours.

All it would take is for everyone not to pull the trigger on buying things for a little bit and prices would fall but instead enough people are buying things at a crazy markup. If anything that's a signal to sell things at higher prices. Of course AI is amplifying this problem but realistically people are still buying consumer hardware at these prices which lets businesses know people will pay this price.

I'm on a machine built from parts in 2014 and it's all very good for me to do every day development so I'm not posting this from a machine I won't have to touch for another 10 years.

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I believe Steam Deck is a major exception. Given how fast they sold out I also wonder how many Valve produced this batch. Most vendors of PC parts are seeing steep declines. Also after seeing 2-3 price increases in everything (Switch, Playstation, XBOX, etc.) people are likely getting it now because the prices aren't going down anytime soon and will probably just go up again for a couple of years.

I pulled the trigger on an early Ayn Thor because it was obvious this was going to happen. Something I didn't really want to fit into my budget but knew that if I didn't I would regret it later.

> I'm sure it doesn't help that people continue to buy things at this price.

Implicitly, but that's blaming the consumer who has no or few equivalent choices. Purchasing RAM is not like choosing between Coke and Pepsi. A better analogy is that when a hurricane is coming or a natural disaster has already hit, it doesn't help that people will purchase food and fuel at any price.

People can choose to use online services to game or other various ones for compute. The demand is surely more elastic than food and fuel after a natural disaster. The consumer can also forego any purchases.

Instead of buying local hardware, I should give money to data centres? Aren't data centres the ones ramping up prices for everyone else?

A Steam Deck is as vital as food or fuel...?

I feel like a broken record with this sometimes, but things compared in an analogy are generally dissimilar while sharing some similarities. No one claimed what you are asking.

I doubt it helps but this is such a small piece of the pie I'm not sure how much this hurts things either. Steam Deck is kind of a niche in a niche and doesn't sell in huge numbers compared to other players like PC OEMs and phone OEMs that are now all over a barrel as well as OpenAI tries to buy all the RAM so no one else can have it.

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