Hey, I'm a PC enthusiast and I'm sentimental about Crucial exiting. They made some of the best memory and flash storage, and they didn't market it stupidly -- they were just reliable and dependable and that was it. They also didn't try to hide their components by packaging it into some flashy shell, which I incredibly appreciated. Of course, I've been going more TEAMGROUP lately anyway, but Crucial was tried and true, and now it's dead.

It lives with some of the other things I'm grieving due to the AI boom, like Apple's car project.

If the gaming community is any indication (nvidia, lootboxes and gatcha mechanics, pre-ordering etc.), most people won't care and will be just happy that prices are down again and FOMO will win.

With blackjack and hookers.

In all seriousness, the payoff of a real competitor not in the cartel entering at some time in the next five years would be huge. They would have business through the busts because people would go to them first. The challenge will be fighting corruption every step along the way. They would have to keep a sharp legal team on staff for all the litigating necessary to defend against anti-competitive practices and even then would only succeed in a legal and political environment accepting of anti-corruption enforcement.