• TheMurphy
    link
    fedilink
    English
    3236 months ago

    Samsung has decreased its output by 50% since September, though the market has already seen price bumps due to inventory being cleared out.

    So they artificially create a shortage to hike up the prices. Nice.

        • @WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          68
          edit-2
          6 months ago

          Yes, capitalism will always choose the most efficient path to acquiring capital, which is evidently acquisition + mergers until they can artificially limit supply, then exploit and extort society wholesale; regardless of the consequences.

          Yep… Doesn’t matter if the answer is war, famine, mass incarceration, crippling debt, homelessness, mental illness, pollution, climate change, ecocide, or genocide — capitalists will always find the most efficient path to the acquisition of capital.

        • @Aceticon@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          9
          edit-2
          6 months ago

          The only higher Return On Investment than creating yourself or finding and securinb a monopoly position and squeezing costumers is, maybe, buying politicians and having laws written to favour you, so naturally people guided only by the personal upside maximization idology will engage in both if they think they can get away withnit (or the penalties if caught are less than the profits).

          It is absolutelly natural in Capitalism for companies to seek and even create monopoly positions and then squeeze customers, and to corrupt those who make the laws and regulations as well as those who enforce them, and often these things are combined: notice for example how the artifical monopoly which is Copyright has been repeatedly extended in duration to well beyond the point were there is an upside for Society, and now none of us will ever see the works created during our lifetime become Public Works.

    • @fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      466 months ago

      To be fair they did far over produce them which is why they’ve been so dirt cheap lately.

      But companies did learn over Covid that if you just don’t make something you can charge whatever you want for it and people will pay it.

    • @akrot@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      96 months ago

      There are plenty of other players on the SSD marker. Crucial, WD, etc. I predict that their prediction will be wrong

      • the post of tom joad
        link
        fedilink
        English
        416 months ago

        We cynics predict the other players will follow suit, acting as a cartel. The prices will remain inflated, and media covering the price rise will blithely repeat industry talking points as fact. A few keyboard warriors will be convinced enough to point to these articles in online arguments. Someone somewhere types “supply and demand” unironically.

        Maybe a few years down the line there will be an investigation when a whistleblower forces some government in europe to appear as if they’re doing something. The trial will last longer than the media coverage of it.

        After that, we predict a settlement that costs less than the profits they made colluding to inflate prices. Someone somewhere types “cost of doing business”

      • @afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        66 months ago

        Yeah but they probably have all the same suppliers and even if one keeps their prices low for now eventually someone there is going to wonder why they are doing the same work as everyone else but getting paid less for it.

        This is why you need a healthy market. You need lots of competitions selling a lot of different products. Not 4 companies all seeing the same crap.

    • @Lojcs@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      26 months ago

      From today’s prices, an increase of 40% will reportedly get these companies back to breaking even, and a rise of 50% will mean profits instead of the losses that threatened bankruptcies earlier this year.

    • @roofuskit@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      416 months ago

      They all cut way back on manufacturing last year due to the price drops from significantly reduced demand. So it’s 100% expected that prices will go up because they’ve created a reduced supply.

        • @roofuskit@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          9
          edit-2
          6 months ago

          There’s an unofficial open for everything these days, food, medicine, computer components, etc… there’s a handful of companies that corner the market for everything now and they all are perfectly happy matching supply and pricing.

      • @trafficnab@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        5
        edit-2
        6 months ago

        They’re reducing supply because they can’t make any money with this supply/demand mismatch, Micron for example didn’t have a single profitable quarter and lost something like $6B total over the course of 2023

        The only reason SSD prices have been this low is because we’ve been paying less than the cost to produce them as they try to recoup some of their losses and shed inventory

      • @4lan@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        56 months ago

        so they are treating computer parts like diamonds now? Faking supply shortages to increase demand, therefore prices?

        Capitalism is so efficient.

        • @roofuskit@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          16 months ago

          The graphics card market the last few years has really shown how much money there is to be made doing that. If they all reduce supply together or there simply isn’t anyone setup to compete with them, they can make a killing.

      • @scottywh@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        16 months ago

        I think they’re underestimating how long reduced demand can continue… Especially when they make things even less affordable.

  • Altima NEO
    link
    fedilink
    English
    696 months ago

    Well that’s not great… They’re already pretty expensive as it is.

      • Lath
        link
        fedilink
        486 months ago

        Unregulated capitalism some would say, I say cheap production costs with little to no consequence whatsoever for them doing this kind of thing.

        • @fartsparkles@sh.itjust.works
          link
          fedilink
          English
          27
          edit-2
          6 months ago

          Exactly, if forced scarcity was regulated, we’d be in an entirely different situation. For instance diamonds would be practically worthless.

      • @TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        8
        edit-2
        6 months ago

        Moore’s law has been dead for a long long time.

        E: if you’re downvoting this it’s because you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. Moore’s law was the observation that transistor density would double every ~2 years. That’s not happening and hasn’t for a long time.

        • @neclimdul@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          66 months ago

          No need to downvote this. It’s an insidery technically correct statement. We’ve redefined how we measure Moore’s law several times to make it “keep working” and some people designing chips, not selling them, think it’s not only outlined it’s usefulness but also not true anymore.

          • @TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            46 months ago

            In my experience, a lot of people incorrectly conflate Moore’s Law with “computers get faster”

            So when you say Moore’s Law is dead and it’s unrealistic to expect it not to be, they get upset and jump to the conclusion that you’re defending tech companies for giving paltry upgrades, which obviously isn’t what I’m doing.

            There are other things to PCs getting faster in a post Moore’s Law world. Architecture improvements, hardware acceleration, advanced packaging such as AMD’s chiplet technology, etc - these are all commonplace and have replaced the idea of “let’s just double transistor counts every two years”

            • @neclimdul@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              2
              edit-2
              6 months ago

              We’ve gone through die size, clock speed, instructions and operations, the transistors count. All are stand-ins for “complexity” which is why some people question if the law ever existed.

              That said, regardless of the “real” law, until recently the colloquial usage has always been a stand in for how “quick” a processor is. In that sense, you really need to do some hand waving around core counts and even then it doesn’t really work.

              Maybe more importantly, one of the most important processor markets are mobile and servers which are largely focused on less complex more efficient processors like arm.

              So outside of marketing, it’s very easy to see why a lot of people think Moore’s law is dead and we’re all better for it. We can continually make better processors without trying to meet some arbitrary metric that didn’t really mean anything useful to start with.

              E: aggressively agreeing

      • @fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        46 months ago

        As tech shrinks it’s only getting more and more expensive per mm. Unless we get some major improvement we’re kinda at the limit for the moment.

      • Altima NEO
        link
        fedilink
        English
        36 months ago

        Yeah, spend $200 on a 4tb m.2 gen4, or $200 on a 18tb hdd

      • @NoRodent@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        1
        edit-2
        6 months ago

        Right? SATA III SSDs currently cost the same as HDDs of the same capacity, at least where I live. If it stays like that, it will no longer make any sense to buy HDDs. Finally.

        I still remember buying my first SSD some 10 years ago which at the time cost 20 times more per GB of what it costs now.

  • Ghostalmedia
    link
    fedilink
    English
    386 months ago

    Maybe this will encourage devs not to make games over 100GB.

    • @Aceticon@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      26 months ago

      If what people go for are AAA games with hyperdetailed graphics and massive playing spaces, the tendency is for games to grow in size (all those highly detailed textures and masses of data for terrain and object placement really add up) and the only alternatives for trying to deliver some of that using less data, such as No Man’s Sky and their heavy use of generation, end up with results that quickly feel repetitive after some playing and an inferior experience on the adventure side than a carefully crafted gamespace with carefully crafted chracters and encounters.

      There are plenty of smaller games from indies which focus mostly on engaging game mechanics and hence are much smaller datawise, but if all you’re going for is something like GTA or Fallout, don’t be surprised when the tens of thousands of highly detailed objects and characters, days worth of voice data and hundreds of square kilometers of gameplay area translate into more than 100GB.

      Mind you, the industry uses tons of generation in game making (nobody is going around making, say, the various maps in a chainmail texture by hand) but it’s all vetted and costumized by actual people and the best results end up properly fitted to the models and stored as mainly static stuff in the game data files so big and varied gameplay ares will add up to lots of data even if a lot of it was done with the help of generative tools.

      So far and from what I’ve seen, unsupervised AI can’t really deliver good results in a lot of that, so whilst it will probably be a massive leap foward in the area of generative tools for game making, you will still end up with massive game data files containing the output of the AI generation, carefully curated and even customised by actual humans.

  • @Smacks@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    86 months ago

    PC part prices are already extremely high, how in the hell can anyone build or buy anything with prices so high?

  • @yamanii@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    76 months ago

    I wonder if it’s gonna be a fire or a flood this year. They always make stuff up to raise it.

  • @Squizzy@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    66 months ago

    I was on crucial last night half interested in an M2 drive but they’re a little out of range, guess I won’t be getting one for the time being