Technology

Recent leaks suggest that Sony will either have to sell its upcoming PlayStation 6 console at a minimum of $960 or push the launch date back into 2028 or even beyond that.

I seriously think that they should push it back to 2028.

I think that Valve's making a mistake by not pushing back the Steam Machine to 2028 too, though at least for Valve, a hardware platform flopping isn't a big deal, since they don't rely on it alone to make sales.

Or maybe I'll be wrong, and gamers will be significantly less price sensitive than they have been in the past. But my guess is that they aren't gonna be jumping on consoles with a pricetag that's that high. As I said before, the only console to be successful in the past that cost nearly that much in inflation-adjusted terms was the Atari 2600.

The ‘AI’ angle is purely cover for the manufacturers actively choosing to now behave like the pharmaceutical industry. They’ve identified a window to pull this shit, and coordinated this opportunistic collusion.

The only meaningful response is to create a diverse production base to remove the choke point the current incumbents are leveraging, but that would require a concerted, collaborative effort by parties who can’t see and/or don’t understand the problem.

Thought I could wait to build a new PC, but at this point, it'll be another 5-10 years before things start getting better. After the price of the steam machine, I ordered parts to build my own. Such a bad time to build, but it's just gonna get worse the longer I wait.

The RAM I bought in 2019 for $100 is now over $500. at this rate I'll sell it in a few years to put my daughter through college.

Things are probably going to get worse in the short term, but the AI bubble is going to burst. Magnitude? We'll see, but when investors realize that these companies cannot make a profit, and open source frontier models that allow you to run AI in house are removing vendor lock in, things are going to change. Also, LLMs are a dead end, and have little room to improve.

Newer paradigms are appearing, such as Yann LeCun's JASP, which actually learns, and other approaches, which will make LLMs obsolete, and are way less hardware intensive.

Another factor is the Chinese closing in in consumer grade RAM. If it can be proven that no backdoor or other shenanigans are there, they will balance things somewhat.

While current reality is what it is, there may be a massive social and traditional media manipulation by the big three and other interested parties to fuel fear of rising prices forever, to push people to buy as much as they can at these prices. I have no proof of this, but I don't think it's far fetched.

And let's not forget that for media outlets, fear and tragedy sells. (I think Hearst or some other news mogul said that last century.)

I've come to terms with the fact I'm not going to be buying any new computer-type devices until the bubble pops.

I'm just terrified what happens if one of my existing devices breaks. If a RAM stick goes bad, I might have to mortgage my non-existent house.

it will be ironic when consumers cant afford the end user devices needed to interact with the AI servers. House of cards??

At this rate I'll be able to sell my ddr3 from over a decade ago and make a profit compared to what I paid originally

Time to hit the books, explore the mountains, build a chicken shed, grow something in the garden, buy a plot of land and grow something... Build a house myself idk things like that.

I see this as an opportunity to get invested in non-tech hobbies because there’s nothing else I can do

It'll be ok. Just stop buying shit. They haven't needed new computers for years now they just act like they do. See windows 11 required hardware roll out. You think that is a new tactic? That is just them being overt about a practice that has existed forever.

Type shit that happens to me when I earn my own money

These price gouging assholes should probably be prosecuted along with the "AI" fraudsters.

How long does it take a company already established in the sector to build a RAM factory?

No reference to CXMT’s memory that’s just starting to be sold in western markets now, I’m very curious if/how that’ll affect things. If corsair’s cxmt kit can hold pricing steady, let alone drop it, for a 2x16 6000MHz CL36 kit then it could be huge