alt Hacker NewsIsn’t this just inflation? We are in a highly inflationary environment. Everything is going up in nominal terms.
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DOES 400% SOUND NOMINAL TO YOU?
no, inflation is the cost of goods rising because money is worth less.
This is capitalism, as demand increases, so does price, regardless of the cogs.
Inflation is a few percent a year roughly. Prices for hardware have skyrocketed. Ram has jumped anywhere from 2-4x in cost. NVMe drives are still going for 2-3x what they cost about 2 years ago. Just go look at one of the amazon price trackers to see how bad it is.
TSMC, plus flash and memory manufacturers with their own facilities, have dramatically cut production of almost anything that isn't in demand for AI, plus Macs were just about the only way to get more than 16GB of 'VRAM' without spending multiple thousands of dollars, so Mac Minis and Studios with more than about 24GB of ram have been under months-long backorders, which is unprecedented. Tim Apple made is name in supply chain logistics. Even he can't logistic his way out of this. Making things worse, the RAM that Macs use is really fast stuff, nearly the speed of high end desktop GPUs.
Supply for anything that isn't exactly what NVIDIA, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, and MS want has pretty much evaporated. And even that stuff has skyrocketed in cost because, essentially, the race has turned into who can hoard the most of TSMC's and NVIDIA's production capacity in a particular year.
The pathetic thing is that it isn't even actual purchases in some cases. In some cases, it's OpenAI or Anthropic merely "promising" they will buy X% of a memory manufacturer's capacity.
I can't wait for all of this to come crashing down.For all this hardware that is useless for anything else because of its density and power consumption - to absolutely crater in price and become e-waste.
lmfao ... inflation. are you trolling sir?
I think their point is that computers used to defy inflation. Across the decades, computers were getting cheaper in an absolute sense (i.e. not factoring in inflation) and astonishingly cheaper in terms of dollars per unit of performance.
Even when the cost of the cheapest computers bottomed out, it likely had more to do with lower prices not making sense. At a certain point, the cost of things that encapsulate the computer and I/O (like the enclosure and screen) end up overwhelming the cost of the actual compute.