I’ve already started buying cheap old business PCs just in case I’ll ever need to have simple barebones machines to run things on.
By the time you can have a slow death of personal computing, capacity will improve and prices will improve.
In the shorter term sitting on an old computer or regressing a couple years on specs or paying an extra $100/$200 for 8GB/16GB works.
> Even internet resources like servers will be hoarded by the hyperscalers that are the only ones who can afford to order years of compute hardware in advance.
I don't see why hyperscalers would be so much better at handling price increases.
For some average business paying a week's wages for the computer you use, they can afford that doubling to two weeks just fine.
For all the normal server rental companies, okay the guy on the $10 plan either pays $16 now or cuts their resource allocation and keeps paying $10. That's not going to cause a sea change. And higher end hosting isn't that much different.
Maybe if they're locking in long enough to fund new fab construction? But in that case after a few years a ton of capacity will come online so they're actually helping solve the problem.
I love this baseless optimism. Reminds me of the economic theory (forgot who put it forward): Everything will be fine in the long run.
...and it's rebuked by Maynard Keynes: "We're all dead in the long run".
Yes, by the time capacity & prices will improve, we'll be all dead.
> I don't see why hyperscalers would be so much better at handling price increases.
I'm pretty sure that you don't know how much discount they can get when they order "I'll buy the whole production in Y2027". When first generation EPYC was launched, it didn't reach academic or local datacenters, because AMD sold all production to Hyperscalers and Dropbox back in the day.
Money is always more valuable today than tomorrow, so if you can pay today, you'll get massive discounts.
The trouble with Keynes is that it's only fully true on the time scale of the heat death of the universe, and in that context it's fully nihilistic. Whereas most economic theories do operate on timescales where the finding out comes within the lifetime of the people fucking around. And to the extent that it doesn't, it generally comes within the lifetime of their kids. Meanwhile that quote is used to justify every piece of short-term thinking that screws the next generation to juice this year's numbers.
> When first generation EPYC was launched, it didn't reach academic or local datacenters, because AMD sold all production to Hyperscalers and Dropbox back in the day.
When first generation EPYC was launched, it broke Intel's effective monopoly on performant servers that everyone was eager to get out from under, but the first generation was being fabbed by Global Foundries using the decaying infrastructure being sustained only by the few uncompetitive Opterons nobody had really wanted in years.
It's the example of the thing you're saying doesn't happen. The following generations were fabbed by TSMC who has dramatically more capacity than GF and expanded it even more since EPYC launched, to the point that AMD's share in servers this year is almost 50%, up from ~0% the year before EPYC launched.
> Money is always more valuable today than tomorrow, so if you can pay today, you'll get massive discounts.
The real issue here is capacity planning. It costs billions of dollars to build more fabs so they only do it if they're confident the demand isn't going to crash. But cash-rich customers willing to pay in advance are a good way to do that. You give them a contract that says they pay you now and agree not to dump the hardware into the market if the bubble pops (e.g. customer agrees to maintain possession of the hardware for 3 years after delivery and use only for AI) and then the AI companies are the ones taking the risk instead of the hardware companies, which makes the hardware companies willing to build more fabs. Which in turn is what gets the price back to something ordinary people can afford.
You got this completely backwards: Keynes argument is that economic policies cannot just rely on the fact that things are going to be fine “in the long run”, because the “long run” may be something we never see. He was in fact arguing against economic theories that are “only fully true on the time scale of the heat death of the universe”, not the other way around.
And there are no valid theories that are only true if you wait until the heat death of the universe, because by then everyone is dead and there is no one to constitute an economy. There are, however, many theories that could be valid even though they take decades or more to shake out, and that quote is used especially against those to rationalize exactly the short-term thinking that lets people ignore that even when they are dead, we, i.e. humanity and its future generations, will be holding the long-term consequences of whatever we choose to do right now.
And I tend to agree with /u/bayindirh that the original optimism of /u/Dylan16807 is baseless. We don't know have things will turn out, but it's absolutely not guaranteed that we'll ever return to “normal” (“normal” being what happened in a very narrow time period where computing power was so cheap it was available for the masses to own).
And the entire time, better manufacturing pushed prices down at least every few years. Including RAM going up multiple times. We would have to buck that entire trend on top of having a failure of supply and demand to end up with the current prices being permanent.
(And don't be dramatic. Even at current prices, computers are available for the masses.)
The “personal computing for the mass” era hadn't even started when I was born, and I don't even consider myself old yet.
> And the entire time, better manufacturing pushed prices down at least every few years.
It's not because something happened before that it will necessarily happen again.
> Even at current prices, computers are available for the masses.
Computers are still available, but for the first time they are significantly less affordable than just a year ago. And nobody's saying the personal computer era is over yet, we're arguing that it's a possibility in the near future, and you won't convince me otherwise by saying “but it has always been like that” because it's not how it works, and because I'm just old enough to know it hasn't.
The “personal computer” has already been mostly replaced by locked-in terminals in the general public, so it's not like this worry is coming out of nowhere.
And the manufacturing improvement and price drop ramp has been going for 65 years. It's not guaranteed but better lithography machines keep being built and it's still happening with CPUs and GPUs.
RAM at this level of profit is unstable.
It isn't a misunderstanding. Even in the original context, the proposal is to be impatient with something that takes time even if it eventually works. (It's also not even the best critique of the gold standard, which has plenty of problems not solved no matter how long you wait.) Worse, the quip has memetic fitness (people think it sounds edgy) even though it expresses no limiting principle and can thereby be used in service of every incitement to do something stupid immediately because the smarter thing takes a minute.
It's sometimes true that acting quickly is the better option, but by giving no indication as to which times that is, it's an ambiguous statement masquerading as a conclusive determination and an invitation to do the wrong thing in the common case.
If the quotation is misused that is hardly the fault of Keynes:
> The Tract is the source of Keynes's famous remark, "in the long run we are all dead." This occurs in the context of noting that price level should vary in direct proportion to money quantity if other variables return to their former values, but the short-term dynamics of this process have practical importance.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tract_on_Monetary_Reform#Leg...
The economic pain that Britain was experiencing in the 1920s due to its ill-conceived idea of sticking with the Gold Standard, especially at the wrong level, could have been solved through policy tools that the Bank of England had at the time rather than waiting for this to stabilize 'in the long-run'. I.e., he did not want to wait for eventual stabilization, he wanted to alleviate people's suffering now: it's no use to you if things stabilize when you're dead.
A longer extract:
> In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.
This is the same guy who said it's better to give people jobs digging holes and filling them back in than to have them be unemployed, thereby giving every fool with a bad plan cover to ignore the false dichotomy and thereby the opportunity costs of doing something wasteful instead of something more efficient or productive.
Keynes said that when somebody complained that his theories didn't work in the long run. And the true rebuke is, we're now in the long run and Keynes is dead
Seems accurate though, I've already noticed no-name Chinese manufacturers stepping it up, throwing caution and capital to the wind and leaning in as hard they can. Following the typical Chinese model of how they get involved in markets, we're just a couple years away from memory being a market with skyrocketing prices and limited availability to a market where various nations are considering bailouts and tariffs to protect their local manufacturers from dirt-cheap Chinese exports to keep their memory producers from going through what domestic solar panel producers went through (a near extinction level event).
I specifically didn't say disk mfg as well only because I haven't yet noticed a new big spinning HDD Chinese brand. But they're definitely active in the lower end of the DDR5 market.
For proper long term cold storage, you want tape.
There's a niche in between where hard drives are good on their technical merits, but it's not a huge niche.
As others noted, only the Chinese sector has a chance to fill the space for consumers in this nightmare scenario.
I just hope my top shelf 2020-era desktop doesn’t die on me because it would get very expensive to get a new build these days.
I could probably sell my gaming rig (12900K, 64GB of DDR5, 4TB NVME, RTX 3090) for more today than what I built it for about 4 years ago, it's absurd. I won't, of course, because it's still glorious for 4K gaming even today. In retrospect, $5000 very well spent.
After winter, I started playing with various other GPU loads until LLMs and SD became easy enough to use. Now it's my experimentation machine.
It's already paid for itself, so anything I sell it for would be profit, but it is still super nice for running local LLMs that power various projects "for free".
Small Dell Optiplexes are good for desktop computers.
IF IT LASTS, capacity will increase.
But it won't last. The AI boom is in exponential growth but it's based on heavy speculation about future value and the bubble will absolutely pop, how agressively depends on how dumb people are about now. The current growth may or may not be entirely justified but it's not sustainable, the free investor money does run out. These back and forth self-dealing deals where companies that own big pieces of each other announce "partnerships" where companies are selling resources essentially to themselves and counting the revenue several times... those are a sign of the approaching peak.
I've been saying the same thing, but that's why they made the move to IPO, no?
There are only so many trillion dollar IPOs out there. And then what next?
In a few years the second hand market will be flooded
But what you see is a cautious strategy from the existing players. They are hedging against a bubble. They don’t want to pour today tens of billions of dollars in capacity that they will have to sell it to a deflated market
This.
People tend to take things for granted, but the world we've grown up with is not guaranteed to live forever, in twenty years personal computing could look like the personal CD or video tapes collection of the 90s-00s: a thing of the past for most people.
I feel the same. But at the same time the generalization of laptops (with custom motherboard, and soldered parts) and smartphones (custom SoC) means this is already a niche thing. Gamers were the last mass market for upgradeable modular deskops, but a sufficiently long hardware drought would most likely make game editors way more resource conscious, which may kill this niche entirely.
Personal computing in the sense of actually controlling our hardware and software will be killed (or rather degraded) by government regulation and platform oligopolies.
Hmmmm...
That's a bit dramatic. I did buy a few SSDs when RAM prices started going up for I didn't want to be facing a shortage of SSDs but China is already very busy at producing cheap server motherboards: gone are the days where he only option for a server motherboard was a $1000 one. There are ultra cheap, and fully functional, chinese motherboards now.
I'm totally convinced China is not going to sit doing nothing: if RAM prices goes up and there's a business opportunity, China is going to seize it and start producing lots of RAM.
We did see "RAM price quadruple in no time so nobody had time to adapt", that's for sure.
But I'm really not sure it's "RAM prices goes 4x and then the world stays as it is and nobody adapts for decades to come".
Also as to used servers: people ordering years of compute hardware in advance aren't hoarding five years old servers.
Heck, a ten years old Xeon machine is plenty capable and the usual people are buying stocks of those (from companies updating their fleet), refurbishing them and reselling them one by one on the usual marketplace, at the same prices (OK maybe instead of 150 EUR it's now 200 EUR if there's 64 GB of ECC RAM).
My usual seller is doing its business as usual although we're well into the memory craze.
Just to put things into perspective: the "PC sales crash" from 2021 to 2024 saw, what, a 20% drop, 10% of which already recovered. In 4 years more than a billion PCs were produced.
A PC is not a rare thing. We won't run out of PCs, just like we won't run out of cheap used ten years old Xeon servers.
But OK you got me: I may contact my seller and hoard two or three more just in case.
Sheesh is HN full of paranoid people and, darn, is it contagious.
I wish I could say I am disappointed.
Seems kinda hard to believe at this point, no?
There have been SEVERAL crashes that have wiped out the market and it's the reason there are so few players, the rest of them went bankrupt after periods of over-expansion. (in the 80s caused by Japan, in 1997, in 2001ish after the dotcom bust)
You're even calling it a bubble so it's not exactly "hard to believe" it will pop.
Either it's an established vendor with designs and fabs or it's a newcomer that needs to invest a massive pile of cash in designs and fabs. Neither are cheap.
In this context, it takes spending enormous piles of money over the course of at least several years to spin up new semiconductor production.
We do need more capacity to keep up with AI datacenters' usage, yes.
But adding long-term capacity years down the road for a thing that some folks seem to confidently think is a bubble that can pop at any time is risky. And (because capitalism), we have to manage carefully balance our risks and rewards in order to maximize our odds of success.
If there is no bubble and demand stays high long-term, then the payoff for that risk is potentially enormous.
If there is a bubble and it bursts, then the cost of that risk is potentially devastating.
(Capitalism works most-predictably when cheating is possible, such as with Biff's use of the time machine in Back to the Future II. But without cheats, it's always a gamble.)
Insufficient law enforcement. The same memory manufacturers already broke antimonopoly laws in the past, pleaded guilty. Apparently the fines were too small for these companies to care, and the people responsible were promoted instead of being punished. More information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal
Cheapest PR stunt ever.
To show they’re working on reducing the impact of data centres on the environment, and that they’re taking action on e-waste, all while saying their pixel phones are so powerful they can be clustered into servers.
And their announced test with 2000 phones, where one server is 25-50 phones, is only 40-80 servers. Interesting, but hardly hyper scale.