There was a very interesting podcast that went into all the details of the AI supply chain shortage [1]
The key takeaway for smartphones isn't so much that iphones will cost $150-200 more, which apple customers have shown they can stomach. But that cheap $200 chinese smartphones will need have to hike prices by about the same amount, which will decimate that market.
Forget hyper-optimizing, how about we just stop throwing away gigabytes for no reward? If we get there, then we can start thinking about maybe actually optimizing anything
browser tabs are the perfect examples, period. These things were being done with native widget toolkits twenty years go. Or going back even further, TUI forms. Rich text with straightforward inline graphics is nice, but we're paying an extremely heavy price for it.
Personally I might not even mind so much about the memory except the latency from the garbage collection, swapping, etc absolutely kills interactive performance. My TI-85 had a snappier interactive experience than my "modern" phone.
I think a large part of the problem, at least on the embedded side, is that people really just don't have standards for these things should feel. When I tried out the first gen Nest in a store, my first thought was it was a joke and who would actually buy it with 100ms+ jittery UI lag. But lo and behold, people did.
I would personally love it if efficiency actually became a priority again, but I don't see it happening. Instead we'll get an even more K shaped economy where people with enough money absorb the extra cost without much care, but everyone else will be materially worse off with a slower more limited phone.
Apple has a long history of not caring about budget-concious consumers. I doubt the wealthy decision makers at Apple and other companies are suddenly going to start caring about them now.
Why does it need to be Android? Make a phone that will send text messages and run a web browser and all the people who just need a phone will buy it to save $200.
Also, when software is poorly optimized that implies it is possible to optimize it.
Web browsing is the most resource intensive task given how bloated modern websites are. It’s easer to imagine a cheap phone with a set of optimised native apps but the problem is tech giants are not interested in reducing footprint of their apps at the same time actively hostile to 3rd party clients.
> given how bloated modern websites are. It’s easer to imagine a cheap phone with a set of optimised native apps
The age old truism in tech is that it's easier to hyper-optimize a single chokepoint (i.e. the platform) than trust distributed actors to each optimize their own thing (i.e. app developers).
Because optimization takes money. Sometimes lots. And distributed non-platform actors have their own priorities like features.
That's why you get enormous success stories like x86, TCP/IP, HTTPx, and Javascript engines providing increased performance, but the "developers as a whole self-optimize" dream remains a perpetual mirage.
(Outside of gaming console hardware, and even there arguably true before middleware)
As already pointed out, your awareness is very geographically limited. In my country (and in a few others I’m familiar with), what I most need a smartphone for is as the obligatory second factor for strong authentication to all kinds of services both governmental and private. That’s done through a bank app that only runs on Android. Elsewhere, people might find that their local public transportation or similar things can only be paid using an app.
> Why does it need to be Android? Make a phone that will send text messages and run a web browser
I think we're quite a ways past the point where most people would be satisfied with phones that only do voice, text, and web browsing. People have become quite accustomed to phones that can run arbitrary applications and games. There's quite a sizable population for whom phones are their only computing device.
There is nothing stopping it from running arbitrary applications, those applications just wouldn't be Android apps. Which is just as well because 99% of Android apps are just a bloated skin over a web page anyway.
I can't actually think of the last time that I wanted to (rather than was forced to) use a non-messaging non-browser app on my phone.
Because you need these apps to do almost anything.
I went to a music festival last weekend, ticket has to be on the ticketmaster app which is android or iOS, the official app for the festival has timings and updates for the event which are very important else you will miss stuff that is announced, even safety warnings.
My train tickets were on the app, I needed it to book the Uber as well.
20% off drinks and food if you use the paypal app. You just can't do things without Android or iOS.
Thousands of people parked in random fields, parked in daylight, need to find car at night = Airtag/ map.
Everything is an app these days. It's a lot harder to do everything without such things. You wouldn't have been able to attend without such a device.
For a start, most of the world does not use text messages. They use WhatsApp. (Apart from a few countries where WeChat, Telegram or Line are more popular.) As far as I know the US is the only country that still uses SMS/RCS.
I don't use WhatsApp, I use Signal, Messenger, iMessage and Snapchat (yes I know but these things have inertia). I'm not exactly alone here. You'd need to write third-party clients for all those apps as well.
I was about to say this already exists, but Meta discontinued the KaiOS client a year ago.
For all the EU does right, it's amazing that a reviled United States conglomerate owns their entire social sphere. I hope they can change that and show the world a model of how to do so, especially given how high the stakes are.
Unfortunately that EU WhatsApp interoperation thing isn't really what we wanted. I assumed it would mean that you would be able to communicate with WhatsApp contacts using a non-WhatsApp app (kind of like Pidgin back in the day).
Meta obviously don't want that and they've done a sneaky thing to make it useless: if you connect a third party app to WhatsApp, from that third party app you can only chat with other WhatsApp contacts that have also connected the same third party app to WhatsApp. So if you write your own WhatsApp client that runs on this low power phone it will be completely useless because to chat with your friends they would all have to manually connect their WhatsApps to your client, which of course they won't do.
That’s pretty screwed up. So even if I setup e.g. Telegram as an allowed app in my WhatsApp account, I can’t communicate with friends on Telegram because they haven’t (why would they, they don’t even have WhatsApp) configured their WhatsApp to use Telegram?
Moore's lesser known cousin predicted this as Leslie's Law. Accounting for cost, Moore's law has practically jumped backwards in time over 15 years in the past six months.
>The Alchian–Allen effect was described in 1964 by Armen Alchian and William R Allen in the book University Economics (now called Exchange and Production[1]). It states that when the prices of two substitute goods, such as high and low grades of the same product, are both increased by a fixed per-unit amount such as a transportation cost or a lump-sum tax, consumption will shift toward the higher-grade product. This is because the added per-unit amount decreases the relative price of the higher-grade product.
I'd expect the iPhone price hikes to be less even in absolute $ than with the cheap phones. iPhones already had relatively large margins (as a %) for the newly increased costs to partially eat into.
Why would you expect Apple to give up their margin? The DRAM price hikes affect every smartphone vendor, even Samsung through opportunity cost. That means the competition will also need to hike their prices. And the competition has lower margin, so they have less choice here.
Because Apple's main competition is themselves a few years ago, when they sold an iPhone or whatever to a happy customer who might return for an upgrade even though it still works. Not many people are switching platforms nowadays.
That's if iPhone costs go up and there are no other changes. As the parent said, competitors' products are also going up in price. I just don't consider the products interchangeable enough. Apple has its margins for a reason.
Also even if they had pure competitors, demand for high-end smartphones is pretty elastic. People will really just buy fewer phones if they get more expensive.
Apple has services and the App Store that still collects 30%. I don’t think they will raise iPhones prices by much but rumors say the iPhone Foldable is coming and that will be $2K+. People will pay it and that will subsidize the other models.
There's a limit to what even a wealthy customer can stomach. They need to consider what costs them more, Apple eating $50-$100 of the cost, or people holding on to an iPhone one year longer than usual.
These announcements have another effect of boosting sales now. Summer is usually a sales slump so selling more now is probably good for Apple.
The schedule is predictable now but in case you forget, you can always tell when the new iPhone is right around the corner because AT&T starts spamming your email and SMS with 'reminders' that you can get an iPhone 17 right now! Or for Father's Day! Or because you're eligible for an upgrade! Or...!
Gotta get rid of as much of that stock as possible, but keep collecting 16s to harvest for repair (not that I object to improving repairability ,per se)!
> But that cheap $200 chinese smartphones will need have to hike prices by about the same amount, which will decimate that market.
Hmm. Even if iPhone users can theoretically stomach the increase, they have many other options available, whereas if the cheap $200 phones are the bottom of the market, there's no other real options.
I'm in the ~$450 USD Pixel range atm, and never buy the current flagship or anything. If that increases by $200, I'll look to the used market for the same phone. I really don't care that much about it, and it mostly acts as a fancy 5g modem for tethering. Plenty of younger people are already reverting to more primitive phones or physical media, and I wonder if it's just older addicted richer millenials that'll keep buying at even more than the already idiotic prices.
> Plenty of younger people are already reverting to more primitive phones
That's an effect that has always been claimed (younger generations rejecting new tech and going offline/low-tech/anti-...) but it's never been more than a minor very temporary fad. In the mid to long term, younger people are always at the forefront of tech adoption and it would be very surprising if it was different this time.
Frankly I don't think I've ever heard of this being claimed for prior generations at a scale that any other generation would notice. There was always that kid who kept their CD collection or their dumbphone longer than most, but it was more of a niche thing to do. That said, I don't wholly disagree that it's a fad, time will tell.
Considering there hasn't really been (to my knowledge) other instances where involvement of media and technology has been remotely as intense as now from day one in a kid's life, it doesn't seem like any prior time period would be as likely to produce a sense of repulsion as now. Sure, I didn't carry my Gen X relative's obsession with television into my adult life, but something like that I'd consider to be a bit of a tenuous comparison to make to the breadth of insidious mind-altering media delivery conduits we're constantly exposed to now.
For the average consumer, I'd argue that any phone made in the past 10+ years would be absolutely fine.
It issues are: battery life/battery replacement, lack of updates, developers targeting newer devices only.
In Apples case a good solution would be to rollback at least part of the liquid glass UI updates, as it severely affects older devices. Then announce upfront that every Apple phone will be supported for no less than 10 years after the device was removed from the market. That would be good for everyone, except Apple shareholders.
I understand that Apple pricing, compared to inflation haven't changed that much since the first iPhone, but for many of us it really does push the limit. I simply do not get enough value to justify purchasing a new iPhone, or in many cases a second hand one. My perceived value peaked around the iPhone 7 era, everything after is pointless. Apple doesn't really cater to my needs, and that's their choice, I just feel a bit stuck.
I do use an iPhone 6S. The hardware is fine, but I basically can't install apps because they all target newer OSes that can't be installed on it, and the older versions of those apps available are broken.
I think that's the unfortunate cycle of iOS and iPadOS. Their hardware more or less served its purpose eons ago and there's little reason why it couldn't still, aside from OS compatibility. Even as a mac user, I've only ever purchased on iOS product, and that was the iPad 3. No subsequent iPad seems to have introduced anything more compelling than what the iPad 3 was capable of (which wasn't much), so as the software compatibility story has degraded over time, it still sits here serving as an occasional epub reader. It would feel bizarre to spend thousands on a new one to effectively be able to do what I did with it in ~2012.
My android phones eventually run their course due to excessive physical damage, theft, etc.. but since I've never paid much for them, it's usually not so disruptive to just pay a few hundred and get something used or basic to replace it, or order a new screen and repair it.
It's about what role tech plays in life. The claim that young people are increasingly detoxing and embracing offline life is just not true. More than any earlier generation, being online to stay in touch with friends and the general happenings of the world is integral to most young folks life. The same thing will happen with AI chats.
My grandma rarely uses google in her life. My mom uses it rather often. To my generation it's the portal to knowledge background for most of what I do. (Substitute any search engine for google if you must.) Similar with instagram, instant messanging etc. AI chatbots will go that way too and so will the next trend.
The point was that if there was a time when people who'd otherwise be buying the latest smartphones for relatively mundane purposes—spending arbitrary amounts of money for them—would balk at the idea, that time could be now. Nothing to do with chatbots.
Money is tight, jobs are scarce; for many people on their way into college or even in the middle of what would be their career, there isn't a clear answer to the question of whether the current tech landscape is anything but a threat to one's future or their mental health.
Seems like kind of an anecdote vs anecdote situation where I see people cutting back severely on their exposure and being more frugal or retro, and you don't, which is fine, but I'm not doing anything more than speculating at hypothetical future behavior based on real world conditions and what I've seen.
There's simply not much required from a hardware standpoint to facilitate multi-modal communication patterns if someone's practicing a limited-exposure relationship with tech.
Not enough to have stopped the iPhone 17 Pro line from being a runaway success that even Apple—famously excellent at projecting demand and already invested in selling as many as possible given its the flagship model line of their flagship product line—completely underestimated the demand at launch.
I’d love to know how much “plenty” in the parent’s perspective stacks up against just this one individual model line and whether it is at all distinguishable from noise.
Surprising amount of hostility to what was a speculative anecdotal observation. I'd be surprised if many people under the age of 17 would be buying a $2000+ phone anyway, but given tough economic situations, decreasing opportunity, and decreasing stability, the likelihood seems low that significantly increased prices for effectively the same (boring) product would be absorbed by anyone other than the richest or older established crowd. Whether it holds true at global level, or in your social circle, I don't know.
If the smartphone is not economically viable, it will go away
Apple’s margin targets aside, the prices are rational
Trendy teens and 20 something’s still have iPhones, many just also have point and shoot cameras. This is more of a desire to be present in some contexts alongside aesthetics (of the photos and the gear), than a rejection of having 2 teraflops in their pocket.
We'll see what happens but I wouldn't be shocked or offended if China obliges the state-sponsored memory makers to support other local industry, beyond AI. The consumer electronics world shutting down would be immensely bad, for China, and for many: someone steering us all away from this path seems highly advisable for everyone.
Apple sure is lucky that the supply chains for those low end Chinese phones are in a country that is notoriously bad at building new manufacturing capacity and prioritizing their own industry </s>
Of course they were, not even Apple has infinite stock.
What they have are sweet margins and deals in place that helped them to take some time until the inevitable came to be.
In the other hand maybe all these prices drive folks to program like we used to, conscious of the hardware limitations, without extra slots to rescue from bad programming.
Lot of astroturfers, no doubt. Its irritating, its like, no, how about they change their behavior and people stop expecting you to treat their computers as computers, which should be personalizable on your side, not just theirs
There is another reason - if the cheap phones necessarily go up in price, but Apple eats the cost increase since they can afford it, then the cheap phones suddenly will cost about as much as an iPhone. That is a big ick.
A big selling point for iPhones is that they are much more expensive than the Other phones, so it is absolutely necessary for Apple to make sure it's phones keep a 50% price luxury bonus, or many will stop buying them.
TL;DR - ultra-expensive iPhones are a feature, not a bug, like ultra-expensive watches
> In the other hand maybe all these prices drive folks to program like we used to, conscious of the hardware limitations, without extra slots to rescue from bad programming.
I don’t understand why this comes up on all of these topics.
Dire need will compel a naked woman to learn to weave her own clothes, but there is no weaving machine for just making more efficient software. (American) Software developers are expensive, now I guess compute will either be expensive, more centralized, or have much more demand from competing interests (vibe coders who are implementing their own bespoke software or abandonware-for-one), and compute-for-code (GenAI) is a whole emergent engineering problem.
Then we hunker down and listen to or read a piece by Muratori, I guess, just practice some of those principles? But what seems to keep happening is that we get stuck by constraints that go beyond just writing more efficient code as a solo contributor on a solo project. That you can predict the efficiency of the code by the application domain suggests that there is a whole big system (of people and processes) above our heads that is not simple for any person or group of people to untangle.
There’s probably a big marketing opportunity for anyone who can make more memory-efficient alternatives to some of the bloated apps that have normalized the need for >16GB RAM in a desktop computer.
Alongside dark mode, apps should have a “slim mode” that turns off some of the more wasteful features in order to run on older/smaller hardware.
I feel like the market of apps and websites has usually been irrational about bloat because developers tend to have beefy machines. It required a beefy machine just to use Twitter without lag, and now X is the same. In the 2000s it was excessive Flash instead, or Java for apps.
Some sites like Google were able to measure the user-engagement cost of slowness and chose to optimize, but they're exceptional. I doubt most businesses know the cost.
I don’t think it’d be the worst idea to require devs to regularly test against something like a late era Core 2 Duo or i5-2500 machine with 4-8GB of RAM on the equivalent of a 3G connection. A lot of improvement could be netted from that alone.
It'd help, but leadership would have to commit to actually caring about those metrics, which would only work if dev envs are portable enough to run on the slow test machines before it's launch day. Otherwise the only real way is to give devs slow machines.
Same for phone. I don't think anyone tests their websites on older devices anymore. Many sites have become useless, because it assumes that you have a massive screen, a modern GPU and plenty of memory. There's no point in having a video as a background, or load an excessive amount of Javascript, just to show me a news feed.
No one cares anymore, and I doubt that any hardware supply bottlenecks will improve that. It's not something that anyone care to measure.
They might be finding that there's more engagement on phone apps than phone website. That could just be because the phone website sucks, but idk, maybe people are really used to downloading apps. Someone on HN mentioned they went all-in on a PWA then realized nobody wanted it.
It's called native applications and has been around since before the days of web app wrappers. Just stop using Electron and you're halfway there already.
Only point is to get access to native APIs and a distribution channel. Tauri is far better than Electron if you want to ship a web front-end as either desktop/mobile.
I doubt there's any kind of a set of features that can be turned off to reduce the memory footprint by any significant amount when most of the memory bloat comes from the application running its own instance of Google Chrome.
"Please hire a $100,000/year native developer for each of my three preferred ecosystems" is usually the good intention that paves the road to Electron.
Apple RAM prices always had quite a bit of margin though, I think they charged around 4x the going market rate per GB (that said you can't fully compare their RAM to a loose DIMM stick). I was planning to pick up a new Mac Studio this autumn, now I'll have to see if I can afford it, though I have been spending 1,000 USD on LLM subscriptions in some months so I guess even a 10,000 USD Studio Mac amortizes quite fast if it allows me to run coding models locally.
I would wait until the next Mac Studio. Rumors are it will have 768GB max memory and with the M6 Max chip, even faster prefill. I feel like it’s the endgame.
Probably will be but I have a feeling the days of $20 and $100 coding plans are winding down. Now that people are so used to using agents, they will raise prices and tighten their grip. At $20k, I might be tempted.
IIRC modern Apple devices integrate the memory into the whole SoC instead of making it separate on the board and replaceable. It's definitely not swappable like a DIMM or CAMM module would be. Can't find a photo of a decapped M4 chip to prove it, though...
I read somewhere (don’t recall where) that Apple typically enters into contracts for RAM on a six-monthly basis and avoids longer term ones. Even in the current situation since last year, it has avoided getting into multi-year contracts like the AI companies have.
It’s certainly possible that the AI companies and their prospects may get a true reality check and then memory prices could cool down in a year or two. If that happens (I personally believe there is a good enough probability), then Apple will come out looking prescient for not getting locked into long term costly contracts.
It remains to be seen for how long the investors in the AI companies are willing to wait for total market capture and/or growing profits.
> I read somewhere (don’t recall where) that Apple typically enters into contracts for RAM on a six-monthly basis and avoids longer term ones. Even in the current situation since last year, it has avoided getting into multi-year contracts like the AI companies have.
* when interest rates are declining, that’s a feature not a defect
* when interest rates are rising, that’s a defect not a feature
Southwest Airlines built its business on these kinds of bets.
Tbf, this current era of capitalism really is a lot where absolutely no one wants to enter the market and take advantage of a clear overpricing of memory for consumers but simply wants to charge the same amount as everyone else. So much for "efficient markets."
Everyone always wants to charge as much as they possibly can, and if SK Hynix would be the only manufacturer prices would be 10x of what they are today. Especially new incumbents will not ruin the market prices as they have the highest upfront cost and their calculation of entering the market is probably based on the high prices that can be achieved. In the long run, more competition is still good as everyone ramps up production to profit more from the high prices and at some point supply will outpace demand and prices will fall (assuming no cartel / price fixing is involved).
> Aren’t prices sky rocketing precisely because of excess demand?
Not exactly. The RAM crisis was sparked by OpenAI contracting with multiple vendors to take vast quantities of raw, unfinished wafers off the market. Wafers which OpenAI had no use for -- they just wanted to starve competitors.
This is different from an "AI is so popular that manufacturers can't keep up with demand" story.
OpenAI and Anthropic are the sleaziest companies that have come out of Silicon Valley in a long time, and that's really saying something.
i don't have much to contribute except to say i'm surprised this kind of thing is legal, especially at the scale of what's happening; its extremely damaging to basically everything
I think you are splitting hairs. Both arguments boil down to 'AI companies are taking all the chips'. It doesnt really matter why, the result and reasons are the same.
Sorry, that was a tangent unrelated to the original point. Seeing people chalk this situation up to “high demand” when anticompetitive sabotage was the cause just makes my eye twitch.
It basically Silver Thursday all over again but with RAM. I wish they crash and burn like the Hunt brothers did, Altman goes the way of Sam Bankman-Fried and Micron gets bought by the Chinese. That's what they all deserve.
It all depends on the particular situation as to whether there is elasticity of supply or demand.
In this particular situation there is a bit of inelasticity of supply because it takes a long time to spin up a DRAM factory and if people believe it is temporary they won’t make the investment
US is stopping China to increase their DRAM and flash production as they would, by forbidding everybody to sell modern semiconductor manufacturing equipment and consumables to China.
China is increasing their production of DDR5 and SSDs, but much more slowly than it would have been possible in a free market.
The current prices for DRAM and SSDs would have never happened if USA had not started to sabotage the Chinese memory industry a few years ago, presumably because Micron wanted to eliminate their competition.
The US sanctions against memory producers have started exactly when Apple was considering the use of Chinese memories in their smartphones, so Apple had to cancel their plans.
The claims that the sanctions against the Chinese memory producers have anything to do with US "national security" or with military applications are just a big shameless lie.
Military applications are content with older memories, which China can produce in sufficient amounts. The SOTA DRAM modules and SSDs are more important for consumer products and the US "sanctions" have the only purpose of maintaining artificially high prices for the consumer products, which steals money from millions of people all over the world.
You don't want to build a huge factory if you believe the market might deflate suddently.
A lot of industries got bitten by greed and the sudden deflation of demand and huge unsold inventory post COVID. The reality is the market was overly and abnormaly inflated and consumers who bought the stuff during COVID period were equipped for the next ~10 years in stuff like sporting goods and had no reason to buy new items in the subsequent years.
I do believe we will always need more RAM even if there is a market correction or AI bubble burst whatever you want to call it. It will not destroy AI completely, just cleanup the market. But how much will we need? I guess the chip makers makes their own guesses but don't want to make their company in peril either.
> Cherrypicked dates? But I'd like to hear analysis comparing the Nixon shock to the covid shock since one was monetary and one was supply and demand.
Of course!
* In 1971 and 2019, the M2 money supply was flooded. In 1971 by the Nixon Shock, in 2019 by Covid: The amount of US dollars that existed between 1961 and 1971 increased by 100%, the amount of US dollars that existed between 1971 and 1981 increased by 253%. Assets are denominated in dollars and the flood of money that the Nixon Shock caused led to the inflation of the late 70s and 80s. The flood of money that Covid caused led to the inflation of the last six years, 2022 in particular.
* The other factor that contributed was the lack of oil supply. In the 1970s, it was caused by a war in the Middle east. Will we see history repeat again? My bet is yes.
Note that the Fed data is difficult to read in the 70s, you'll want to play around with the length of the time window. It's difficult to read because the supply of money has grown so much.
But they are building huge datacenters for AI. The investment appetite is there. So there must be some worse bottleneck when it comes to memory itself.
The one building the datacenters aren't the ones making the chips. A construction of a datacenter can be halted suddently and an order of chips cancelled. We might assume that the chip makers are ready to supply said datacenters, just they don't necessarily feel necessary to build new factories for the consumer market which itself might not be ready to spend the same amount of money on RAM chips. And building factories do not magically create price reduction, quite the contrary. The consumers buying $150-200 smartphones aren't necessarily ready to buy $400 ones. Most would just buy on the second hand market and replace less often their phones instead.
Whales being whales, they will pay the highest end iphone at any price, no question. But the market is not made entirely of whales.
No, this is not Capitalism working as intended, because there is an entity, the US government, whose purpose is to sabotage those who are willing to increase production to satisfy the extra demand and decrease the prices.
So the market is not free at all, the lack of competition is maintained by force.
Already for many years, the prices of various products like smartphones, SSDs and memory modules have been kept artificially high by the anticompetitive measures called "US sanctions".
Ohhh look, the companies that started the problem have to raise the price! sure yes, I will not buy any product, untill price goes down. And others should do, but each on their own.
Price hikes on my food, home and now tech. I have a pocket and a voice, and I will stop buying any product.
The iPhone is also a vehicle to hook people into the Apple ecosystem, where Services like the App Store bring in 40% of all gross profit with margins of 75%.
It could be that too. But just seeing Apple not raise prices on the face of it, that could be purely from taking lower margins. I'd have to dig into the last earnings call.
Apple hasn't had many models constrained by supply instil recently (Neo, Mini and possibly studio). The ram shortage doesn't seem have have hit them until quite recently. Existing agreements? They pay more to be prioritised?
Do we have any estimates on how much the price might increase? I was waiting for the MacBook Pro with the M6 Max and 128 GB of RAM, especially since there are rumors that it will come with a design refresh
I'm not sure how much of it is just an unintentional side-effect of greed from promises of international capital based in NY, and Dubai, and how much was intentional malicious behavior to destroy home compute to force people to pay for openai subscriptions, but the role of a functioning government typically is to keep corporations from doing exactly this.
Regardless of which one it is, I absolutely despise the cartel that is running the US government right now, that created this situation for their crony big tech buddies.
It is part of the global trend to "rent everything, own nothing".
High inequality means that everybody wants to sell to the hyper-rich individuals and corporations. And selling products and services to the working class is a losing money endebour.
So, money accumulation means asset accumulation, that means more renting, that means more money...
Well no one gets a free pass for too long. If prices rise consumers hold politicians responsible. Its just that the feedback loop plays out at different rates for the corps, cronies, politicians.
There was a very interesting podcast that went into all the details of the AI supply chain shortage [1]
The key takeaway for smartphones isn't so much that iphones will cost $150-200 more, which apple customers have shown they can stomach. But that cheap $200 chinese smartphones will need have to hike prices by about the same amount, which will decimate that market.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDG_Hx3BSUE
Or they'll start making cheap phones with <=2GB of RAM again and people will have to write software that uses memory efficiently (the horror).
This is low-key a dream of mine. That we _start_ hyper-optimizing code to use less RAM and resources overall.
Forget hyper-optimizing, how about we just stop throwing away gigabytes for no reward? If we get there, then we can start thinking about maybe actually optimizing anything
browser tabs are the perfect examples, period. These things were being done with native widget toolkits twenty years go. Or going back even further, TUI forms. Rich text with straightforward inline graphics is nice, but we're paying an extremely heavy price for it.
Personally I might not even mind so much about the memory except the latency from the garbage collection, swapping, etc absolutely kills interactive performance. My TI-85 had a snappier interactive experience than my "modern" phone.
I think a large part of the problem, at least on the embedded side, is that people really just don't have standards for these things should feel. When I tried out the first gen Nest in a store, my first thought was it was a joke and who would actually buy it with 100ms+ jittery UI lag. But lo and behold, people did.
I would personally love it if efficiency actually became a priority again, but I don't see it happening. Instead we'll get an even more K shaped economy where people with enough money absorb the extra cost without much care, but everyone else will be materially worse off with a slower more limited phone.
Apple has a long history of not caring about budget-concious consumers. I doubt the wealthy decision makers at Apple and other companies are suddenly going to start caring about them now.
You underestimate how poorly optimized Android (both the OS and ecosystem) is.
Why does it need to be Android? Make a phone that will send text messages and run a web browser and all the people who just need a phone will buy it to save $200.
Also, when software is poorly optimized that implies it is possible to optimize it.
Web browsing is the most resource intensive task given how bloated modern websites are. It’s easer to imagine a cheap phone with a set of optimised native apps but the problem is tech giants are not interested in reducing footprint of their apps at the same time actively hostile to 3rd party clients.
> given how bloated modern websites are. It’s easer to imagine a cheap phone with a set of optimised native apps
The age old truism in tech is that it's easier to hyper-optimize a single chokepoint (i.e. the platform) than trust distributed actors to each optimize their own thing (i.e. app developers).
Because optimization takes money. Sometimes lots. And distributed non-platform actors have their own priorities like features.
That's why you get enormous success stories like x86, TCP/IP, HTTPx, and Javascript engines providing increased performance, but the "developers as a whole self-optimize" dream remains a perpetual mirage.
(Outside of gaming console hardware, and even there arguably true before middleware)
As already pointed out, your awareness is very geographically limited. In my country (and in a few others I’m familiar with), what I most need a smartphone for is as the obligatory second factor for strong authentication to all kinds of services both governmental and private. That’s done through a bank app that only runs on Android. Elsewhere, people might find that their local public transportation or similar things can only be paid using an app.
> Why does it need to be Android? Make a phone that will send text messages and run a web browser
I think we're quite a ways past the point where most people would be satisfied with phones that only do voice, text, and web browsing. People have become quite accustomed to phones that can run arbitrary applications and games. There's quite a sizable population for whom phones are their only computing device.
There is nothing stopping it from running arbitrary applications, those applications just wouldn't be Android apps. Which is just as well because 99% of Android apps are just a bloated skin over a web page anyway.
I can't actually think of the last time that I wanted to (rather than was forced to) use a non-messaging non-browser app on my phone.
Because you need these apps to do almost anything.
I went to a music festival last weekend, ticket has to be on the ticketmaster app which is android or iOS, the official app for the festival has timings and updates for the event which are very important else you will miss stuff that is announced, even safety warnings.
My train tickets were on the app, I needed it to book the Uber as well.
20% off drinks and food if you use the paypal app. You just can't do things without Android or iOS.
Thousands of people parked in random fields, parked in daylight, need to find car at night = Airtag/ map.
Everything is an app these days. It's a lot harder to do everything without such things. You wouldn't have been able to attend without such a device.
Are you sure you can't do those thing through websites? You can definitely order an Uber with the browser on your phone, for instance.
For a start, most of the world does not use text messages. They use WhatsApp. (Apart from a few countries where WeChat, Telegram or Line are more popular.) As far as I know the US is the only country that still uses SMS/RCS.
So write a WhatsApp client for your phone and convince the EU to make them interoperate with you.
I don't use WhatsApp, I use Signal, Messenger, iMessage and Snapchat (yes I know but these things have inertia). I'm not exactly alone here. You'd need to write third-party clients for all those apps as well.
I was about to say this already exists, but Meta discontinued the KaiOS client a year ago.
For all the EU does right, it's amazing that a reviled United States conglomerate owns their entire social sphere. I hope they can change that and show the world a model of how to do so, especially given how high the stakes are.
Meta had a perfectly fine WhatsApp client for KaiOS phones, they disabled it.
Unfortunately that EU WhatsApp interoperation thing isn't really what we wanted. I assumed it would mean that you would be able to communicate with WhatsApp contacts using a non-WhatsApp app (kind of like Pidgin back in the day).
Meta obviously don't want that and they've done a sneaky thing to make it useless: if you connect a third party app to WhatsApp, from that third party app you can only chat with other WhatsApp contacts that have also connected the same third party app to WhatsApp. So if you write your own WhatsApp client that runs on this low power phone it will be completely useless because to chat with your friends they would all have to manually connect their WhatsApps to your client, which of course they won't do.
See https://developers.facebook.com/m/messaging-interoperability... - check the `WhatsApp Messaging Interoperability User Experience - Android`
I guess we'll see if the EU lets this stand but my guess is they will.
That’s pretty screwed up. So even if I setup e.g. Telegram as an allowed app in my WhatsApp account, I can’t communicate with friends on Telegram because they haven’t (why would they, they don’t even have WhatsApp) configured their WhatsApp to use Telegram?
You can communicate with your Telegram friends using WhatsApp. You can't (in practice) communicate with your WhatsApp friends using Telegram.
But haven't you heard, software is solved?
"Make this OS and ecosystem more efficient. Make no mistakes."
Moore's lesser known cousin predicted this as Leslie's Law. Accounting for cost, Moore's law has practically jumped backwards in time over 15 years in the past six months.
> nd people will have to write software that uses memory efficiently (the horror).
Not possible since we all "need" AI in our phones
How much cheaper will a phone with 2gb vs one with 4gb? What changes in the supply chain?
Glad me and my wife both bought a pixel 1 year ago, see you in 6 years! Lol
As the HN saying goes, people who can't afford an iPhone or a MacBook will not be your paying customers anyway, so don't worry about them.
>The Alchian–Allen effect was described in 1964 by Armen Alchian and William R Allen in the book University Economics (now called Exchange and Production[1]). It states that when the prices of two substitute goods, such as high and low grades of the same product, are both increased by a fixed per-unit amount such as a transportation cost or a lump-sum tax, consumption will shift toward the higher-grade product. This is because the added per-unit amount decreases the relative price of the higher-grade product.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alchian%E2%80%93Allen_effect?w...
I'd expect the iPhone price hikes to be less even in absolute $ than with the cheap phones. iPhones already had relatively large margins (as a %) for the newly increased costs to partially eat into.
Why would you expect Apple to give up their margin? The DRAM price hikes affect every smartphone vendor, even Samsung through opportunity cost. That means the competition will also need to hike their prices. And the competition has lower margin, so they have less choice here.
Because Apple's main competition is themselves a few years ago, when they sold an iPhone or whatever to a happy customer who might return for an upgrade even though it still works. Not many people are switching platforms nowadays.
> Why would you expect Apple to give up their margin?
Price go up, demand go down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand#/media/File:...
(The iPhone is only a premium brand, not a Veblen good).
That's if iPhone costs go up and there are no other changes. As the parent said, competitors' products are also going up in price. I just don't consider the products interchangeable enough. Apple has its margins for a reason.
Also even if they had pure competitors, demand for high-end smartphones is pretty elastic. People will really just buy fewer phones if they get more expensive.
Apple has services and the App Store that still collects 30%. I don’t think they will raise iPhones prices by much but rumors say the iPhone Foldable is coming and that will be $2K+. People will pay it and that will subsidize the other models.
There's a limit to what even a wealthy customer can stomach. They need to consider what costs them more, Apple eating $50-$100 of the cost, or people holding on to an iPhone one year longer than usual.
These announcements have another effect of boosting sales now. Summer is usually a sales slump so selling more now is probably good for Apple.
The schedule is predictable now but in case you forget, you can always tell when the new iPhone is right around the corner because AT&T starts spamming your email and SMS with 'reminders' that you can get an iPhone 17 right now! Or for Father's Day! Or because you're eligible for an upgrade! Or...!
Only $1/mo for an iPhone 17 Pro Max! (With eligible trade-in of iPhone 16 Pro Max, on postpaid plan only)
Gotta get rid of as much of that stock as possible, but keep collecting 16s to harvest for repair (not that I object to improving repairability ,per se)!
This is already the case in several African countries (cheap phones are no longer cheap, and sales drop precipitously)
> But that cheap $200 chinese smartphones will need have to hike prices by about the same amount, which will decimate that market.
Hmm. Even if iPhone users can theoretically stomach the increase, they have many other options available, whereas if the cheap $200 phones are the bottom of the market, there's no other real options.
I'm in the ~$450 USD Pixel range atm, and never buy the current flagship or anything. If that increases by $200, I'll look to the used market for the same phone. I really don't care that much about it, and it mostly acts as a fancy 5g modem for tethering. Plenty of younger people are already reverting to more primitive phones or physical media, and I wonder if it's just older addicted richer millenials that'll keep buying at even more than the already idiotic prices.
> Plenty of younger people are already reverting to more primitive phones
That's an effect that has always been claimed (younger generations rejecting new tech and going offline/low-tech/anti-...) but it's never been more than a minor very temporary fad. In the mid to long term, younger people are always at the forefront of tech adoption and it would be very surprising if it was different this time.
Frankly I don't think I've ever heard of this being claimed for prior generations at a scale that any other generation would notice. There was always that kid who kept their CD collection or their dumbphone longer than most, but it was more of a niche thing to do. That said, I don't wholly disagree that it's a fad, time will tell.
Considering there hasn't really been (to my knowledge) other instances where involvement of media and technology has been remotely as intense as now from day one in a kid's life, it doesn't seem like any prior time period would be as likely to produce a sense of repulsion as now. Sure, I didn't carry my Gen X relative's obsession with television into my adult life, but something like that I'd consider to be a bit of a tenuous comparison to make to the breadth of insidious mind-altering media delivery conduits we're constantly exposed to now.
I can't tell the difference between a 5 years old smartphone model and the latest generation.
For the average consumer, I'd argue that any phone made in the past 10+ years would be absolutely fine.
It issues are: battery life/battery replacement, lack of updates, developers targeting newer devices only.
In Apples case a good solution would be to rollback at least part of the liquid glass UI updates, as it severely affects older devices. Then announce upfront that every Apple phone will be supported for no less than 10 years after the device was removed from the market. That would be good for everyone, except Apple shareholders.
I understand that Apple pricing, compared to inflation haven't changed that much since the first iPhone, but for many of us it really does push the limit. I simply do not get enough value to justify purchasing a new iPhone, or in many cases a second hand one. My perceived value peaked around the iPhone 7 era, everything after is pointless. Apple doesn't really cater to my needs, and that's their choice, I just feel a bit stuck.
I do use an iPhone 6S. The hardware is fine, but I basically can't install apps because they all target newer OSes that can't be installed on it, and the older versions of those apps available are broken.
I think that's the unfortunate cycle of iOS and iPadOS. Their hardware more or less served its purpose eons ago and there's little reason why it couldn't still, aside from OS compatibility. Even as a mac user, I've only ever purchased on iOS product, and that was the iPad 3. No subsequent iPad seems to have introduced anything more compelling than what the iPad 3 was capable of (which wasn't much), so as the software compatibility story has degraded over time, it still sits here serving as an occasional epub reader. It would feel bizarre to spend thousands on a new one to effectively be able to do what I did with it in ~2012.
My android phones eventually run their course due to excessive physical damage, theft, etc.. but since I've never paid much for them, it's usually not so disruptive to just pay a few hundred and get something used or basic to replace it, or order a new screen and repair it.
I'm with you on that, but that's not the point.
It's about what role tech plays in life. The claim that young people are increasingly detoxing and embracing offline life is just not true. More than any earlier generation, being online to stay in touch with friends and the general happenings of the world is integral to most young folks life. The same thing will happen with AI chats.
My grandma rarely uses google in her life. My mom uses it rather often. To my generation it's the portal to knowledge background for most of what I do. (Substitute any search engine for google if you must.) Similar with instagram, instant messanging etc. AI chatbots will go that way too and so will the next trend.
> I'm with you on that, but that's not the point.
The point was that if there was a time when people who'd otherwise be buying the latest smartphones for relatively mundane purposes—spending arbitrary amounts of money for them—would balk at the idea, that time could be now. Nothing to do with chatbots.
Money is tight, jobs are scarce; for many people on their way into college or even in the middle of what would be their career, there isn't a clear answer to the question of whether the current tech landscape is anything but a threat to one's future or their mental health.
Seems like kind of an anecdote vs anecdote situation where I see people cutting back severely on their exposure and being more frugal or retro, and you don't, which is fine, but I'm not doing anything more than speculating at hypothetical future behavior based on real world conditions and what I've seen.
There's simply not much required from a hardware standpoint to facilitate multi-modal communication patterns if someone's practicing a limited-exposure relationship with tech.
That's why Apple changed the lense layout and introduced new colours in latest iPhone!
>Plenty of younger people are already reverting to more primitive phones or physical media
Id love to know how many of em
Not enough to have stopped the iPhone 17 Pro line from being a runaway success that even Apple—famously excellent at projecting demand and already invested in selling as many as possible given its the flagship model line of their flagship product line—completely underestimated the demand at launch.
I’d love to know how much “plenty” in the parent’s perspective stacks up against just this one individual model line and whether it is at all distinguishable from noise.
Surprising amount of hostility to what was a speculative anecdotal observation. I'd be surprised if many people under the age of 17 would be buying a $2000+ phone anyway, but given tough economic situations, decreasing opportunity, and decreasing stability, the likelihood seems low that significantly increased prices for effectively the same (boring) product would be absorbed by anyone other than the richest or older established crowd. Whether it holds true at global level, or in your social circle, I don't know.
It's a a marginal trend, mainly for the gram.
I'd be curious as well.
If the smartphone is not economically viable, it will go away
Apple’s margin targets aside, the prices are rational
Trendy teens and 20 something’s still have iPhones, many just also have point and shoot cameras. This is more of a desire to be present in some contexts alongside aesthetics (of the photos and the gear), than a rejection of having 2 teraflops in their pocket.
It’s important to understand the why
We'll see what happens but I wouldn't be shocked or offended if China obliges the state-sponsored memory makers to support other local industry, beyond AI. The consumer electronics world shutting down would be immensely bad, for China, and for many: someone steering us all away from this path seems highly advisable for everyone.
Toms Hardware just put out an article talking about this, although they focused more on ssd and memory stick makers. The principle ought apply quite broadly though. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ssds/chinese-make...
Apple sure is lucky that the supply chains for those low end Chinese phones are in a country that is notoriously bad at building new manufacturing capacity and prioritizing their own industry </s>
Of course they were, not even Apple has infinite stock.
What they have are sweet margins and deals in place that helped them to take some time until the inevitable came to be.
In the other hand maybe all these prices drive folks to program like we used to, conscious of the hardware limitations, without extra slots to rescue from bad programming.
Hasn't Apple's dev environment for iOS and its non-macos relatives always been about working with as little memory as possible?
It seems like Apple, of all companies has been about doing more with less memory.
That would seem to have helped in the % of BOM getting wrecked by the supply chain and discipline of developers in its ecosystem.
Where do people get these goofy ideas about how Apple functions? Is there like a mythology section of the Wikipedia?
Lot of astroturfers, no doubt. Its irritating, its like, no, how about they change their behavior and people stop expecting you to treat their computers as computers, which should be personalizable on your side, not just theirs
Not really, they just don't support pagination, which is another matter, plenty of GB on those devices for Cordova, React Native, Webviews in general.
There is another reason - if the cheap phones necessarily go up in price, but Apple eats the cost increase since they can afford it, then the cheap phones suddenly will cost about as much as an iPhone. That is a big ick.
A big selling point for iPhones is that they are much more expensive than the Other phones, so it is absolutely necessary for Apple to make sure it's phones keep a 50% price luxury bonus, or many will stop buying them.
TL;DR - ultra-expensive iPhones are a feature, not a bug, like ultra-expensive watches
> In the other hand maybe all these prices drive folks to program like we used to, conscious of the hardware limitations, without extra slots to rescue from bad programming.
I don’t understand why this comes up on all of these topics.
Dire need will compel a naked woman to learn to weave her own clothes, but there is no weaving machine for just making more efficient software. (American) Software developers are expensive, now I guess compute will either be expensive, more centralized, or have much more demand from competing interests (vibe coders who are implementing their own bespoke software or abandonware-for-one), and compute-for-code (GenAI) is a whole emergent engineering problem.
Then we hunker down and listen to or read a piece by Muratori, I guess, just practice some of those principles? But what seems to keep happening is that we get stuck by constraints that go beyond just writing more efficient code as a solo contributor on a solo project. That you can predict the efficiency of the code by the application domain suggests that there is a whole big system (of people and processes) above our heads that is not simple for any person or group of people to untangle.
Because the pendulum went too far writing garbage applications in Electron and friends.
Yes, Casey and friends are 100% spot on.
Your comment doesn’t address my points about the structural issues.
There’s probably a big marketing opportunity for anyone who can make more memory-efficient alternatives to some of the bloated apps that have normalized the need for >16GB RAM in a desktop computer.
Alongside dark mode, apps should have a “slim mode” that turns off some of the more wasteful features in order to run on older/smaller hardware.
I feel like the market of apps and websites has usually been irrational about bloat because developers tend to have beefy machines. It required a beefy machine just to use Twitter without lag, and now X is the same. In the 2000s it was excessive Flash instead, or Java for apps.
Some sites like Google were able to measure the user-engagement cost of slowness and chose to optimize, but they're exceptional. I doubt most businesses know the cost.
I don’t think it’d be the worst idea to require devs to regularly test against something like a late era Core 2 Duo or i5-2500 machine with 4-8GB of RAM on the equivalent of a 3G connection. A lot of improvement could be netted from that alone.
It'd help, but leadership would have to commit to actually caring about those metrics, which would only work if dev envs are portable enough to run on the slow test machines before it's launch day. Otherwise the only real way is to give devs slow machines.
Same for phone. I don't think anyone tests their websites on older devices anymore. Many sites have become useless, because it assumes that you have a massive screen, a modern GPU and plenty of memory. There's no point in having a video as a background, or load an excessive amount of Javascript, just to show me a news feed.
No one cares anymore, and I doubt that any hardware supply bottlenecks will improve that. It's not something that anyone care to measure.
They might be finding that there's more engagement on phone apps than phone website. That could just be because the phone website sucks, but idk, maybe people are really used to downloading apps. Someone on HN mentioned they went all-in on a PWA then realized nobody wanted it.
It's called native applications and has been around since before the days of web app wrappers. Just stop using Electron and you're halfway there already.
Still dont see the point of using electron for mobile apps. Just make a webapp and be done with it without having to jump through the app store hoops.
Only point is to get access to native APIs and a distribution channel. Tauri is far better than Electron if you want to ship a web front-end as either desktop/mobile.
Yeah it's worst of both worlds really.
this used to be a thing right? social media apps used to have a 'lite' edition, facebook, tiktok, something else
and when android go was thing there were (are?) lighter apps targeting that like google maps go even
I doubt there's any kind of a set of features that can be turned off to reduce the memory footprint by any significant amount when most of the memory bloat comes from the application running its own instance of Google Chrome.
Yeah, so don’t do that.
"Please hire a $100,000/year native developer for each of my three preferred ecosystems" is usually the good intention that paves the road to Electron.
Apple RAM prices always had quite a bit of margin though, I think they charged around 4x the going market rate per GB (that said you can't fully compare their RAM to a loose DIMM stick). I was planning to pick up a new Mac Studio this autumn, now I'll have to see if I can afford it, though I have been spending 1,000 USD on LLM subscriptions in some months so I guess even a 10,000 USD Studio Mac amortizes quite fast if it allows me to run coding models locally.
The funny thing is that currently Apple's RAM upgrades are cheaper than the loose dimm sticks.
I've just got a new MBP this month, because I expect the prices to rise significantly with the new macbooks in the fall.
I would wait until the next Mac Studio. Rumors are it will have 768GB max memory and with the M6 Max chip, even faster prefill. I feel like it’s the endgame.
Yeah for like $25,000+
Probably will be but I have a feeling the days of $20 and $100 coding plans are winding down. Now that people are so used to using agents, they will raise prices and tighten their grip. At $20k, I might be tempted.
That's an expensive looking 'if'.
> you can't fully compare their RAM to a loose DIMM stick
Why?
https://macmagazine.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/18-tea...
This image shows it best.
The memory is on the same package as the SoC. (It's not on the motherboard.)
IIRC modern Apple devices integrate the memory into the whole SoC instead of making it separate on the board and replaceable. It's definitely not swappable like a DIMM or CAMM module would be. Can't find a photo of a decapped M4 chip to prove it, though...
Check my sibling comment for a photo link (M1); or here:
https://macmagazine.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/18-tea...
Its not integrated to the SoC, it is soldered to the mainboard though.
The memory is not integrated into the SoC die itself, but it is packaged alongside the SoC rather than being separately mounted.
At Apple scale I would have thought that makes it cheaper, not more expensive.
there's no local AI model that comes even close to the ones you get access to by paying 1000 USD per month
The large models are really close in my experience. Just slower.
I read somewhere (don’t recall where) that Apple typically enters into contracts for RAM on a six-monthly basis and avoids longer term ones. Even in the current situation since last year, it has avoided getting into multi-year contracts like the AI companies have.
It’s certainly possible that the AI companies and their prospects may get a true reality check and then memory prices could cool down in a year or two. If that happens (I personally believe there is a good enough probability), then Apple will come out looking prescient for not getting locked into long term costly contracts.
It remains to be seen for how long the investors in the AI companies are willing to wait for total market capture and/or growing profits.
> I read somewhere (don’t recall where) that Apple typically enters into contracts for RAM on a six-monthly basis and avoids longer term ones. Even in the current situation since last year, it has avoided getting into multi-year contracts like the AI companies have.
* when interest rates are declining, that’s a feature not a defect
* when interest rates are rising, that’s a defect not a feature
Southwest Airlines built its business on these kinds of bets.
Enough of this.
It is time to activate the Chinese.
Seriously let ASML sell to CXMT etc.
CXMT will sell their RAM.... to the AI labs
They will sell and keep selling until the price is too low to justify production. And then some more to gain market share.
Except, that won’t help. By the time a new fab is up and running, we will probably have a massive surplus.
You assume demand for AI stays flat.
> You assume demand for AI stays flat.
RAM has become an asset class, like real estate, or orange juice, or cattle, or collectible cars.
It’s wild to see.
I don’t know if there is an options market or a futures market for RAM.
But it seems inevitable.
Imagine the United States hoarding RAM the way that nations of old hoarded gold.
$DRAM calls
Tbf, this current era of capitalism really is a lot where absolutely no one wants to enter the market and take advantage of a clear overpricing of memory for consumers but simply wants to charge the same amount as everyone else. So much for "efficient markets."
Everyone always wants to charge as much as they possibly can, and if SK Hynix would be the only manufacturer prices would be 10x of what they are today. Especially new incumbents will not ruin the market prices as they have the highest upfront cost and their calculation of entering the market is probably based on the high prices that can be achieved. In the long run, more competition is still good as everyone ramps up production to profit more from the high prices and at some point supply will outpace demand and prices will fall (assuming no cartel / price fixing is involved).
Could you please expand on this?
Aren’t prices sky rocketing precisely because of excess demand? And they’d collapse in turn if demand disappeared.
My understanding of economics is entry level so please forgive my ignorance. I’m just curious what you mean.
> Aren’t prices sky rocketing precisely because of excess demand?
Not exactly. The RAM crisis was sparked by OpenAI contracting with multiple vendors to take vast quantities of raw, unfinished wafers off the market. Wafers which OpenAI had no use for -- they just wanted to starve competitors.
This is different from an "AI is so popular that manufacturers can't keep up with demand" story.
OpenAI and Anthropic are the sleaziest companies that have come out of Silicon Valley in a long time, and that's really saying something.
I think you are splitting hairs. Both arguments boil down to 'AI companies are taking all the chips'. It doesnt really matter why, the result and reasons are the same.
Sorry, that was a tangent unrelated to the original point. Seeing people chalk this situation up to “high demand” when anticompetitive sabotage was the cause just makes my eye twitch.
It basically Silver Thursday all over again but with RAM. I wish they crash and burn like the Hunt brothers did, Altman goes the way of Sam Bankman-Fried and Micron gets bought by the Chinese. That's what they all deserve.
The usual argument is that as prices rise, demand will shrink and supply will rise to take advantage of the increased price.
It all depends on the particular situation as to whether there is elasticity of supply or demand.
In this particular situation there is a bit of inelasticity of supply because it takes a long time to spin up a DRAM factory and if people believe it is temporary they won’t make the investment
Yes, it will. It's just delayed because fab buildout takes several years.
Nobody's stopping you from taking advantage of that shortage :) Just don't forget to turn your garage EUV machine on and off if it starts glitching.
US is stopping China to increase their DRAM and flash production as they would, by forbidding everybody to sell modern semiconductor manufacturing equipment and consumables to China.
China is increasing their production of DDR5 and SSDs, but much more slowly than it would have been possible in a free market.
The current prices for DRAM and SSDs would have never happened if USA had not started to sabotage the Chinese memory industry a few years ago, presumably because Micron wanted to eliminate their competition.
The US sanctions against memory producers have started exactly when Apple was considering the use of Chinese memories in their smartphones, so Apple had to cancel their plans.
The claims that the sanctions against the Chinese memory producers have anything to do with US "national security" or with military applications are just a big shameless lie.
Military applications are content with older memories, which China can produce in sufficient amounts. The SOTA DRAM modules and SSDs are more important for consumer products and the US "sanctions" have the only purpose of maintaining artificially high prices for the consumer products, which steals money from millions of people all over the world.
You don't want to build a huge factory if you believe the market might deflate suddently.
A lot of industries got bitten by greed and the sudden deflation of demand and huge unsold inventory post COVID. The reality is the market was overly and abnormaly inflated and consumers who bought the stuff during COVID period were equipped for the next ~10 years in stuff like sporting goods and had no reason to buy new items in the subsequent years.
I do believe we will always need more RAM even if there is a market correction or AI bubble burst whatever you want to call it. It will not destroy AI completely, just cleanup the market. But how much will we need? I guess the chip makers makes their own guesses but don't want to make their company in peril either.
> A lot of industries got bitten by greed and the sudden deflation of demand and huge unsold inventory post COVID.
I’m betting that the world is about to hit a wall of inflation.
https://i.ibb.co/s9Mm8w2r/IMG-0743.jpg
This is a graph I made.
It shows:
* the inflation rate from 1971 until 1991
* the inflation rate from the start of COVID 19 until today.
Does anyone notice anything interesting about the graph?
> Does anyone notice anything interesting about the graph?
Cherrypicked dates? But I'd like to hear analysis comparing the Nixon shock to the covid shock since one was monetary and one was supply and demand.
> Cherrypicked dates? But I'd like to hear analysis comparing the Nixon shock to the covid shock since one was monetary and one was supply and demand.
Of course!
* In 1971 and 2019, the M2 money supply was flooded. In 1971 by the Nixon Shock, in 2019 by Covid: The amount of US dollars that existed between 1961 and 1971 increased by 100%, the amount of US dollars that existed between 1971 and 1981 increased by 253%. Assets are denominated in dollars and the flood of money that the Nixon Shock caused led to the inflation of the late 70s and 80s. The flood of money that Covid caused led to the inflation of the last six years, 2022 in particular.
* The other factor that contributed was the lack of oil supply. In the 1970s, it was caused by a war in the Middle east. Will we see history repeat again? My bet is yes.
Data: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
Note that the Fed data is difficult to read in the 70s, you'll want to play around with the length of the time window. It's difficult to read because the supply of money has grown so much.
You can tell that a chart is authoritative when it economizes on pixels?
But they are building huge datacenters for AI. The investment appetite is there. So there must be some worse bottleneck when it comes to memory itself.
The one building the datacenters aren't the ones making the chips. A construction of a datacenter can be halted suddently and an order of chips cancelled. We might assume that the chip makers are ready to supply said datacenters, just they don't necessarily feel necessary to build new factories for the consumer market which itself might not be ready to spend the same amount of money on RAM chips. And building factories do not magically create price reduction, quite the contrary. The consumers buying $150-200 smartphones aren't necessarily ready to buy $400 ones. Most would just buy on the second hand market and replace less often their phones instead.
Whales being whales, they will pay the highest end iphone at any price, no question. But the market is not made entirely of whales.
Exactly, and this isn’t the 1st time this happens. Some companies disappeared years ago due to overcapacity when prices went down.
And that’s exactly what it’s going to do because the dependency chain on actually using this RAM is unlikely to succeed.
As if simply entering the market is trivial.
dumping on it certainly is
Looks pretty darn efficient to me:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-comput...
That chart stops in 2023.
Umm… a simpler explanation is that supply takes a lot longer to ramp up than demand.
See analogues in oil booms (then busts).
This is Capitalism working exactly as intended - resources (RAM) are allocated to those which can use them most productively (AI data-centers)
And the AI data-centers are using the RAM so productively, that they are willing to buy them at any price whatsoever.
No, this is not Capitalism working as intended, because there is an entity, the US government, whose purpose is to sabotage those who are willing to increase production to satisfy the extra demand and decrease the prices.
So the market is not free at all, the lack of competition is maintained by force.
Already for many years, the prices of various products like smartphones, SSDs and memory modules have been kept artificially high by the anticompetitive measures called "US sanctions".
Capitalism has no intent beyond allowing private ownership of capital. Markets are a separate concept.
You can offset this cost by investing in memory stocks.
Apple product got $200 more expensive? Well you made $200 speculating on $DRAM.
Lost $200 speculating on $DRAM? Well at least your Apple product got less expensive.
Thanks, AI!
Ohhh look, the companies that started the problem have to raise the price! sure yes, I will not buy any product, untill price goes down. And others should do, but each on their own. Price hikes on my food, home and now tech. I have a pocket and a voice, and I will stop buying any product.
Why did Apple start the problem?
I said "Companies", meaning many companies not just Apple. They worked all together somehow to achieve the shortage and the raise the price.
I don’t think you understand how supply chains work.
perfect time to make smaller phones, simpler UIs, smaller apps, smaller screens. SMALLER EVERYTHING. Affordable, small phones is all most of us need.
Props to them for making it this far into the crisis without raising prices.
It had even led to some anomalies where Apple machines were a better price than similar Windows machines.
> Props to them for making it this far into the crisis without raising prices.
Yeah, it's a laudable miracle that this $4T+ company could survive this long without raising prices on such razor-thin margins.
The iPhone is also a vehicle to hook people into the Apple ecosystem, where Services like the App Store bring in 40% of all gross profit with margins of 75%.
> Services
Wonder if those costs will increase too as storage price is going up.
most of it is near zero marginal cost.
Move from 2TB to 6TB stings tho
> without raising prices.
Because they were already selling memory at crisis prices when it was dirt cheap.
And now they want those crazy margins again.
Their products were so overpriced to begin with they had plenty of buffer to swallow supply price hikes like this for some time.
It's nothing special, high-margin product prices are less sensitive to the costs.
Is that it, or did Apple negotiate long term contracts with suppliers?
Tim Apple has never been one to shy away from squeezing out another dollar.
It could be that too. But just seeing Apple not raise prices on the face of it, that could be purely from taking lower margins. I'd have to dig into the last earnings call.
Apple hasn't had many models constrained by supply instil recently (Neo, Mini and possibly studio). The ram shortage doesn't seem have have hit them until quite recently. Existing agreements? They pay more to be prioritised?
Do we have any estimates on how much the price might increase? I was waiting for the MacBook Pro with the M6 Max and 128 GB of RAM, especially since there are rumors that it will come with a design refresh
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48576901
I'm not sure how much of it is just an unintentional side-effect of greed from promises of international capital based in NY, and Dubai, and how much was intentional malicious behavior to destroy home compute to force people to pay for openai subscriptions, but the role of a functioning government typically is to keep corporations from doing exactly this.
Regardless of which one it is, I absolutely despise the cartel that is running the US government right now, that created this situation for their crony big tech buddies.
> malicious behavior to destroy home compute
It is part of the global trend to "rent everything, own nothing".
High inequality means that everybody wants to sell to the hyper-rich individuals and corporations. And selling products and services to the working class is a losing money endebour.
So, money accumulation means asset accumulation, that means more renting, that means more money...
Well no one gets a free pass for too long. If prices rise consumers hold politicians responsible. Its just that the feedback loop plays out at different rates for the corps, cronies, politicians.
Home compute doesn't matter to them, their advantage is the model. If they're trying to squeeze anyone out, it's the other AI companies.
But the governments had been this way for decades now. It's just that things are accelerating and people notice it more.
Or, considering you're already considerable markup, you could just make a little less money on each one... HAHAHA I'm just fucking with you Apple.