ok so what stocks to buy?
Just trying to kill the DIY PC market. You will buy the Paystation, Xbox, and Steam machine and like it. No user upgradable hardware. Only upgradable models. All non-console GPUs, CPUs, and DRAM are for AI alone.
That implies there’s some thought behind this. Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.
Never attribute to profit?
Sure… but I don’t think there’s any particular malice towards people that build PCs. Just greed and incompetence. Gotta buy up GPUs that there isn’t enough electricity to run to drive up the share prices!
But when the bubble bursts and hardware gets cheap, is that something we’d considered to be goodwill towards people building PCs? Or will it just be a side-benefit of incompetence?
Just ebbs and flows of incompetence to me.
I figure I would just stop at greed. I don’t think there’s incompetence, they know what they’re doing to maximize profit. Our concerns being DIY PC builders are pretty low on their radar.
I am trying to decide whether to buy a chassis, because I am not sure if this style would be around when DDR6 is released. The Thor Rosewill V2 went extinct, so I might buy the Thor NAS.
I wish that there was a Thor V3.
CPU cooler, as in, cheap-ass fans and a slab of metal with fins? Is that hard to come by too? Or is it professional grifters at work…
This is why we can’t have nice things.
(I know radiators are more than metal slabs, fans can be quite elaborate, and there can be liquid in the mix, but seriously)
This has nothing to do with needing semiconductor and micro controller factories though. You can build these from any electronics fabrication company on earth pretty much, so I expect that a bunch of people will fill in the gap if the prices start going up like crazy.
This timeline sucks
This is a pretty big tell that it has nothing to do with AI, it’s just price gouging for price gouging sake’s. Data center setups don’t use consumer level PSUs and CPU coolers. If anything, their price should be going down given that the rise in RAM, SSDs, and GPUs are leading to people building less PCs and waiting longer to do so. The supply for these components should be going up due to excess supply.
At this rate, my PC will be in service into the 2030’s. Crazy considering I built it like 8 years ago.
PC will be
ina service into the 2030’sI think this is the main goal, otherwise you can’t fully enslave consumers/citizens.
i guess i will finally be forced to go through my steam backlog.
So glad I built mine last year. I still wish I had gotten a bit more ram but I didn’t realize that the price gouging I was fighting at the time was just the beginning.
Are you all ready for subscription based PCs? Because they are going to make sure that’s the only way you can afford decent hardware.
Nvidia already does this with their game streaming service. Buy cheap hardware for yourself, then play games as if you’re running a 5090.
But eventually you won’t have a choice. They will make they hardware entirely unaffordable.
And NVidia are ramping up their subsciption prices already…
Im skeptical of this. I think the opposite might happen, at least in terms of supply. Ramm/GPU price hikes are all supply driven. If no one is building/buying a computer due to increased ramm/GPU prices, then I bet a lot of PSUs/coolers/cases and other consumer gear that isn’t used in the datacenter will be overstocked.
Basic economics is understamding supply-demand. Advanced economics is knowing when it’s being manipulated.
When theres increased demand, companies raise prices because of scarcity. When theres decreased demand, they raise prices so they can make their profits over fewer units sold.
This works in a vacuum, but falls apart once you have competition to drive prices down. That said, the world is falling into cartels that price fix anyway.
Companies (e.g. HP, Dell, Lenovo) will still buy PCs. The individual like you and me will be a drop in a bucket as big as the whole ocean.
True, but the coolers/psus/cases in OEMs are dog shit by comparison. Very different markets.
I have to agree. I mean come on, cpu coolers? There’s nothing proprietary about them, nothing particularly high tech or difficult to produce, it’s a heat sink and a fan… Fancy ones may have a coolant loop, but still… I just can’t see any reason that prices would go up noticeably for such easy to manufacturer, commodity parts.
I’m just saying, it seems a little early to start screaming “the sky is falling”.
They still have to be made from something, and it just so happens that ‘something’ overlaps with stuff datacenters currently vacuum out of the market
Copper? Is there really a copper shortage?
I mean, the supply is pretty large for that. You’d think that electrical grid rollout in developing nations would have a higher impact than all the ram in the world.
Apparently yeah
Are there notable constraints for ‘just making more’ of these items?
Like I know short term shortages are possible for everything, but what components of a PSU or Cooler are difficult to source or manufacture? Combined with consumer versions of these not typically having a lot of direct overlap with their datacenter counterparts, do we really think this is going to be a major issue?
It says in the article.
The reason given is rising raw materials costs, i.e. metals, and the price increases they’re talking about are on the order of around 10% which is obviously a slap in the face along with everything else that’s going on in the hardware world, but by the same token pretty minimal compared to said selfsame everything else.
I think I paid $40 for my CPU cooler. So, if I ever need to buy a another one for some reason and now it’s $44, well, I guess I’ll live.
This increase is due to the cost of copper and tin shooting up. Copper is up 45% over the past year. Coolers are basically nothing but copper. Copper is hitting record highs due to much larger economic pressures too large for a Lemmy comment. So like if you want to find untapped copper vein and start a mining company then yeah you can lower the price but that’s about the only way right now.
I looked around a bit more after this site wouldn’t load and it seems like you are ahead of me, you hit the real reason.
Raw material costs seems to be the primary problem.
Most coolers are aluminium actually.
Heatsink fins are aluminum. Heatpipes are usually copper. I’m sure we’ll start seeing even less copper and more aluminum.
The machinery. Takes years to make and has to be maintained and only had a certain output. It’s been this way for 100s of years.
And the market waves means that companies don’t want to buy machines so they can’t use them once the price goes back down.
Yeah, but these are not exactly complex parts, especially compared to RAM/etc. RAM fabrication is orders of magnitude more difficult than the parts we’re looking at here.
I’m not saying it’s something someone could get going tomorrow, but beyond the PCB for the PSU everything else is fairly standard and mostly interchangeable. People have made PSUs in their basements. And, for CPU coolers, it’s effectively a piece of metal with a fan attached. If we’ve lost the capability to machine more aluminum and copper I feel like our problems have evolved beyond computer hardware.
For any mass produced item the amount of factory machinery available is a very “notable constraint”
Biggest and probably current constraint is the time it takes to create new manufacturing facilities. With how bad things are, I would imagine they have already maxed the output of the available production lines.
From what I’ve seen working in manufacturing and production facilities, it takes a handful of years to set up new production lines and many more to set up while new production facilities.
