• TheMurphy@lemmy.world
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    11 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
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          11 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.

        • Croquette@sh.itjust.works
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          11 months ago

          Monopolies are the natural, direct result of unbrindled capitalism. So yeah, capitalism at work.

        • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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          11 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
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      11 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
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      11 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@sh.itjust.works
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        11 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
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        11 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
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      11 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.

  • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Spreading rumors of price hikes, to justify later price hikes and quell customer outrage over it.

    Capitalism 101.

    • roofuskit@lemmy.world
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      11 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
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          11 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
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        11 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
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        11 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
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          11 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
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        11 months ago

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

    • _number8_@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      yeah i thought 4TB would be like $50 now. whatever happened to moore’s law

      • Lath@kbin.social
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        11 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
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          11 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
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        11 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
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          11 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
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            11 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
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              11 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
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        11 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.

      • NoRodent@lemmy.world
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        11 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.

    • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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      11 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
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    11 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
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    11 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
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    11 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