Glad I’m stocked on memory cards that should last me for a while.
There is, however, a bigger problem that’s not addressed - manufacturers seemingly only playing nice to big corporations while screwing the end customer.
Manufacturers only have a limited capacity of production and want to make money. It’s a much better business to sell all your production’s capability for a few months to one customer for a fixed price, instead of selling to thousands of small customers for a highly volatile price. In the worst case you produce stuff, you can’t sell or have to sell at a loss. A factory standing still and not producing is also expensive.
A factory with all machines running, all people working, all product selling at a good price is the ideal state for a manufacturer to be in.
Big customers bring stability and predictable profits.
Production capacity for in demand products will increase over time. Likely these same manufacturers‘ profits will be invested in more production capacity, optimizations, cost savings, etc.
In a few years this will result in cheaper and available consumer products.
General purpose computers have been fast enough and had enough memory for a decade now. I bought a quad core (8 threads) laptop with 16 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD, 2 GB VRAM twelve years ago. Around the same time I built a NAS with an HP Gen8 microserver, also with 16 GB of RAM for ZFS. That one I recently upgraded with a better CPU for 20 €. Both of these machines still perform really well for most tasks. I haven’t upgraded my phone in 5 years, and my tablet in 8 years. These start to show their age because of the small amount of RAM built in. Last week I bought high end EIZO monitors from 8 years ago for 50 €. These are fine!
Ask yourself, are you even doing things that are limited by your hardware? If you are limited by hardware, could buying a last generation high end machine fill your needs? If you need vast amounts of computing power, renting cloud computing might be a solution as well.
If you actually make serious money with your work computer, then paying 8k for a machine will pay for itself over a few months.
A lot of people seem to think
I’mwe’re crazy for not getting a new phone every year or two. Previous one lasted 7 years, this one is at a bit over 5 years… It’s fine.True enough, my previous phone I kept until my banking app stopped working (my very, very old version of android was no longer supported) and my current phone is from 2019. I don’t think people need new phones/tablets/computers every year.
However… eventually I’m going to be needing a new computer. My desktop is about 6 years old now. And if it broke down right now, I don’t even know if I could afford to build a new one, unless I build one that’s worse than the one I currently own - and probably way more expensive than it was years ago (the RAM price alone is insane already).
And my phone won’t last another 6 years either. Although, who knows, it might. It seems indestructible so far, lol.
I’ve been dreading the new computer as well. I built the original incarnation of my current one in … holy shit, late 2013. I was thinking 2016 but I just looked up the order and it was 2013. I did it pretty damn “top of the line” because I wanted it to last ages. I have occasionally upgraded or replaced drives, GPU, RAM, power supply, but I’m still on the original board+CPU.
It’s still great… running Linux and occasionally gaming.
Wow, yours is a bit older than mine. Hopefully mine will keep functioning that long as well! I don’t honestly think it’ll break down any day now, but you never know. Things are known to happen, and when they do happen it’s always at the most inconvenient of times! Also, my computer is very heavily used, every day. Lots of games too.
I was surprised about my phone. I don’t even know how many times I dropped it already and the battery is still good enough to survive an entire day. Truly, I dread getting a new one. I always hate having to figure out the settings, downloading and installing every thing, and configuring the thing exactly the way I want to. If it were up to me I’d keep using the same one forever, but I doubt even my stubborn phone will outlast me. ;)
It’s mask off time for capitalism. Business to person sales are no longer lucrative. All the money is in company to company now. See AI companies buying out entire present and future stock of PC parts until 2030. Regular people are no longer needed in this form of society. That’s why the market goes up while job numbers and employment go down. The economy can now support itself without anyone else.
Except that it seems a lot of these trades are on-paper, and not involving the actual transfer of goods. The data centres aren’t getting built. The servers aren’t going in them. The power isn’t being supplied. The tokens are not being generated. At least… It’s only a fraction of what they are all saying.
Some auditor is going to have a field day.
Yes but who actually cares? If society tolerates no actual real physical transfer of goods and leaves it all speculative, it doesn’t matter. The deals are made, financial institutions accept this, realistically it doesn’t matter that none of this is “real”. If society decides that it’s real, it’s real. Just like how paper money has zero real tangible worth. It’s all an agreed upon concept. The same is happening here.
The economy we had for the last handful of decades is gone. Speculative economy where only the top percentage trades with itself is where we are at and where we will stay.
It can’t be completely circular. There is an end customer that will expect something for their money eventually. Right now it’s driven by huge amounts of debt, but you can’t be on that forever. At some point it unwinds
It seems that end point is government bailing out banks using taxes, and people are paying more for the same due to inflation, while their salaries do not catch up with the cost of living.
This seemingly happens in US right now.
The rationale for bail out the banks previously was that the retail arms (what you and I use) were so intertwined with the commercial arms that allowing the commercial part to fail caused the loss of everyone’s money. Regulation was introduced (at least in the UK. I don’t know about elsewhere) that ring fenced the two from each other, making future bailouts unnecessary. The commercial arm would shoulder the risk of its own investments.
Doesn’t stop corrupt politicians bailing them out though.
Oh oh…shit. That’s going to hit photography hard.
So photographers get hit double… First being replaced by AI and then forced to increase their prices because of… Again AI. What a great world we live in
I don’t like having eyeballs anymore 😭.
I gotta spoon . . ?
Imagine how expensive they would price the vita memory card if it came out right now 🤣
Dw guys, you can all just sit at home and watch as your world is scrapped for parts. Just… Keep protesting, I’m sure your gov will start listening to you any second now. Ah it’s just memory cards, why get into a stink about the ramifications of that…
You are talking about going against a cartel of oligopolies that have locked down the technology sector with the IP they control and who have cutthroat control over where the latest technology is deployed. What we at home can do is playact “It’s back to the 90s!” and go back to the technology we had several decades ago, which is more viable than it sounds.
If they want to act like cartels with the greatest and latest, nothing is forcing people to use it. Unfortunately, the technological divide will still be there. Tech minimalism, go human, recycle old tech, we have a lot of crap we’ve disposed off over the years that would otherwise still run fine. To create competition, there needs to be the breeding grounds for it, and if that means having to do with what the lunar lander did, then do so and exercise that brain in the process too.
Thank you for a much more constructive comment than doom and gloompants back there.
I didn’t hear an alternative~
go back to the 90s
I’m ready. I’m a tech hoarder and still have ISA cards and the boards that use them 🫡
Damn. Our global economy is teetering on just in time supply chains.
Decades of nice safe cooperation and suddenly everythings fucked and now we can’t trust eachother.
Its what happens when you let the mob run a country and it runs around smashing everything
Nah. It happens when you let an idiot run things.
Mobsters are still organized businessmen. Just criminal ones. They’d do a much better job.
Why are people making it out like the direction the US has gone started with Trump?
Trade and inter-country cooperation and commerce weren’t being shaken down as hard before Trump.
Oh right, that’s the surprise. Not the warmongering and murder for capital gains. My bad for misunderstanding.
Commerce doesn’t give a shit. The article is about commerce. Don’t be pissed at me for the way the world works.
It’s okay we just need to build community fabs. Anyone know how to build a fab?
I want to get off Mr. Huang’s Wild Ride.
Sorry, you can’t. However, you can look at his ever increasingly shiny leather jackets!
If you turn on DLSS5 you can clearly see his clown shoes.
This isn’t sustainable. Almost all of our infrastructure runs on computers and eventually it will reach a point where you have a computer in charge of vital infrastructure that won’t be able to buy replacement part and it’ll just fail.
nah all of the datacenters they build for AI, will come to use then.
they will say"Need computing? Don’t worry, just rent from us, for an ever increasing and enshittifying subscription"
We can’t even get them to upgrade our infrastructure to the 21st century in some cases so good luck with that. We still got shit running on Windows 7 or even Windows XP.
You can’t interact with a computer in the cloud though without some kind of computer in front of you.
We’ll just return to terminals. Just a screen, and input devices connected to a server :(
Right but surely you still need a CPU and RAM at the very least to process the Remote Desktop connection.
I bit of ram, but then I’d imagine you only need some purpose built chip for the connection, input and display logic. Effectively you’d need little more than a chrome cast-like device.
