If it's defective aren't you entitled to a free replacement?
this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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Oh they'll sell them all. Big corporations are buying them in mass bulk. No thought put into if it's a good idea.
And yes, the bubble will pop, but those stones will long be sold. It will be the corporations problem then.
And everybody thinks that these companies will have a huge fire sale of used stones, that were never used, after the bubble pops.
But what do you think is more likely? The companies will try to enter the used sales market? Or will they instead trash all of them, and write them off in their taxes?
There's precedent too for this exact situation. There's a landfill will thousands of E.T. Atari cartridges, because some genius took a terrible game that nobody wanted, and produced a number of cartridges that exceeded the number of consoles by 4 to 1. For a game that was never going to have even a 1:1 ratio, much less 4:1.
So now they're in a landfill. Just like all the ~~ram~~ stones will be.
A lot of corporations sell their used or otherwise no longer needed tech products. It’s not unreasonable to expect a lot of RAM to sell that way.
However, there is a concern a lot of it will be in the form of RAM soldered to the boards of AI accelerator cards which are basically GPUs without the actual graphics specific features. That won’t be very useful to the average consumer.
The stones made for the avians are not compatible with wands. Anything made for avians will be useless landfill after the bubble pops.
But nobody wanted ET so there was no market. We want ram, ssds, and gpus so there is still a market.
Worse than actually buying, they pre-ordered. The hardware hasn't even been made for it to be sold as "used", and even if it was, i doubt its readily usable for consumer hardware
But that also means that if the bubble popped soon enough they could still go back on those pre-orders and then there would be supply back on the market, wouldn't it?
Look, I think you're right to be cautious about the fire sale idea, but ET is not a good example to go to here. You're talking about a very specific product; a single video game for a single system. There was no way to repurpose or reuse those cartridges (the data was permanently burned onto the ROM chips in them), and basically no one wanted to buy them at any price. You might as well compare to New Coke or Zima. It's not really analogous at all.
However, I do agree with the general thrust of your argument. RAM isn't expensive because they're selling consumer DIMMs to data centres. It's expensive because they're using the chips that would go into consumer DIMMs to make server RAM. So, best case scenario, server RAM prices crash while consumer prices stay sky high for a while. Same with GPUs; the cards Nvidia are building with those chips are in no way suitable for gaming. And those hard drives are probably being built with SAS connectors, not SATA.
So, IMO, there potentially could be a fire sale, especially as a lot of data centres go bankrupt and their assets get seized and sold off by the banks and bankruptcy courts (the former because these companies are using their compute hardware as collateral on their loans), but it'll only affect server hardware, not consumer hardware. We all still get fucked.
At least the hard drives can be plausibly used. SAS controllers aren't exactly cheap but might be worth it for a home server if a slew of used datacenter HDDs show up on the market.
Those GPUs are going to be useless, though.
Yeah, I'm gonna be keeping an eye out for a sudden drop in SAS drive prices on the off chance. Like you say, a dedicated SAS controller might just be worth it.
Can we have Onion Futures Act 2: Electric Boogaloo?