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Comment by bluescrn | Hacker News Reader

Prices are never going down, even if the shortage eases.

The era of cheap high-end computing is likely over. And it'll be used to pressure people into switching to thin clients and ever-more subscriptions

High-end desktops were already a niche market, with many home users just using phones+tablets as their main devices.

The entire games industry is already in a big crash too, and with consoles approaching $1k for 6yr-old hardware (Xbox just had another price hike) it might not bounce back this time. A new generation of consoles isn't going to find such a huge market with 4-figure price tags, especially when there won't be a giant leap in visuals/capability.

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Prices have gone down for the entire history of computing reliably with the past year being an extremely notable deviation from that trend line.

I'm pretty sure prices are going down. Maybe not complete builds in nominal dollars, but $/gb for things like RAM and SSDs will be lower in 5 years than it is today almost certainly.

Or in a few years time memory chip production will meet demand, and prices will decrease.

Or the winners of the AI race will make enough money to buy up the majority of global production indefinitely...

But even if things recover in a few years, Apple makes a lot of money from massive markups on RAM and storage and not allowing upgrades. If their customers keep paying, and I suspect they will, there'll be no incentive to bring prices down, not for the higher-end devices at least.

You can build new production, a chip monopoly will have incredibly profits for anyone bold enough to startup a new competitor. This is HN for gods sake

That's like saying you can build a competing railway network or a competing power grid.

Natural monopolies are a thing, and chip production has become pretty close to one with the vast resources and timescales required to attempt to compete.

> Prices are never going down, even if the shortage eases.

Why would this be the case? I don't see a fundamental market failure.

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