Smartphone market forecast to decline this year due to memory shortage
idc.com
idc.com
A lot of software has been squandering the massive hardware gains that have been made. I hope this changes when it becomes a lot harder to throw hardware at the problem.
I also wonder what this means for smartphone-esque devices like the Switch 2. If this goes on long enough I won't be surprised if they release a 'lite' model with less RAM/Storage and bifurcate their console capabilities, worse than what they did with 3DS > 2DS .
Back in the day with PHP things were much more understandable, it's somehow gotten objectively worse. And now, most desktop apps are their own contained browser. Somehow worse than Windows 98 .hta apps, too; where at least the system browser served a local app up, now we have ten copies of Electron running, bringing my relatively new Macbook to a crawl. Everything sucks and is way less fun than it used to be.
We have many, many examples of GUI toolkits that are extremely fast and lightweight. Isn't it time to throw the browser away, stop abusing HTML to make applications, and design something fit for purpose?
It's not "the web" or HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. That's all instant in vanilla form. Any media in today's quality will of course take time to download but, once cached, is also instant. None of the UX "requires" the crap that makes it slow, certainly not thousands of lines to make a table sortable and filterable. I could do that in IE6 without breaking a sweat. It's way easier, and faster, now. It's just people being lazy in how they do it, Apparetnly now just accepting whatever claude gave them as "best in show".
Not going to happen until gui frameworks are as comfortable and easy to set up and use as html. Entry barrier and ergonomics are among the biggest deciding factors of winning technologies.
You can do the core functionality of your product as cross platform, to some extend, but once you hit the interaction with the OS and especially the UI libraries of the OS, I think you'd get better software if you just accept that you'll need to write multiple application.
We see this on mobile, there's just two target platform really, yet companies don't even want to do that.
The choice isn't surprising, in a world where companies are more concerned with saving and branding, compared to creating good products.
ImGUI is the single exception that has been simple to set up, trivial to deploy (there is nothing to deploy, including it is all that's needed), and nice to use.
We had Flash for exactly that purpose. For all its flaws, it was our best hope. A shame Apple and later Adobe decided to kill it in favor of HTML5.
The second best bet was Java Applets, but the technology came too early and was dead before it could fly off.
Some may mention WebAssembly, but I just don't see that as a viable alternative to the web mess that we already have.
Great. How do you get all the hardware and OS vendors to deploy it for free and without applying their own "vetting" or inserting themselves into the billing?
I wouldn't say that. The web had done way more good than harm overall. What I would say is that embedding the internet (and its tracking and spyware and dark patterns that have gain prominence) into every single application that we use is what is at fault.
The web browser that we built in 1990 was all on-premise obviously. And it had a very different architecture than HTTP. There were two processes. One used TCP/IP to mirror the plant computers model into memory on the workstation. The other painted the infographics and handled the user navigating to different screens. The two processes used shared memory to communicate. It was my first job out of university.
You know, or something.
I know that Chrome pulling the plug on XSLT in the browser is imminent - so how are you refactoring?
I agree we need in built-in controls, reasonably sophisticated, properly style-able with CSS. We also need typed JS in the browser, etc
Instead it's just piling on a dozen layers of dependencies. Webassembly feels like the only real glimmer of what the "next generation" could have been like.
Just use jquery and this plugin, 7kB minified:
https://github.com/myspace-nu/jquery.fancyTable/blob/master/...
what's not great are the complexity merchants, due to money & other incentives etc that ship to the web.
there's better web frameworks that are lighter, faster than react - but due to hype etc you know how that goes
My 17 year old core 2 duo should not feel faster on a lean linux distro than modern hardware and yet it does. Wild to see and somewhat depressing.
I see old videos (Computer chronicles a good example) of what could be done on a 486 for instance. While you can see the difference in overall experience, it isnt that extreme of a difference, the 486 being released 37 years ago...
[1] Why Aren’t Operating Systems Getting Faster As Fast as Hardware? https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/papers/osfaster.pdf
It's not though, is it? Even browsers are capable of painting most pages at over 60 FPS. It's all the other crappy code making everything janky.
Anyways I wanted to say I also have a pixel 8 but with stock OS and my battery typically lasts a full day with average usage. My iPhone 8 previously even with a replacement battery was lucky if it lasted more then 5 hours. I had to charge that thing multiple times a day.
(I have the exact same issue)
Considering how many people are so averse to programming that they use LLMs to generate code for them? Not very likely IMO. I would like to see it happen, but people seem allergic to actually trying to be good at the craft these days.
(I'm looking at you, Liquid Glass. I would love to get back to a vintage, "flat" UI. I'll allow for anti-aliasing, Porter-Duff compositing, but that's where I draw the line.)
Imagine you are Apple and can just set an LLM loose on the codebase for a weekend with the task to reduce RAM usage of every component by 50%...
Also, what happens to the stability and security of my phone after they let an LLM loose on the entire code base for a weekend?
There are 1.5 billion iPhones out there. It’s not a place to play fast and loose with bleeding edge tech known for hallucinations and poor architecture.
They are trained on everything, and as a result write code like the Internet average developer.
If you direct it to do a specific task to find memory and cpu optimization points, based on perf metrics, then it’s a completely different world.
A handwritten c implementation would most likely be better, but there is so much to gain from just slaughtering the abstraction bloat it does not really matter.
Big name apps like Facebook, YouTube, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts seem totally disinterred in preserving my place.
YouTube being the worst where I often stack a bunch of videos in queue, pause to do something else for a while and when I return to the app the queue has been purged.
Why??
Case in point — Youtube background play doesn’t pause when Siri makes an announcement, so if you’re listening to something you get two voices over each other.
I gave it the benefit of the doubt and figure it must be some kind of iOS thing, until I was listening to Audible one day and it paused automatically. So it’s just a google thing, not a third-party apps thing.
i have the same issue with the Youtube queue — this is something that could easily be persisted, but they just choose not to.
If you switched off the app while looking at a certain post or watching a certain video, that's a negative engagement indicator, so the app wants to throw you back into the algorithmic feed to show you something new instead.
[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/SwiftUI/restoring-...
It's all gone to $hit, efficiency is gone it's just slop on top of more slop.
Is it too much to ask for me to manage my own background processes on my phone? I don't want the OS arbitrarily deciding what to pause & kill. If it actually does OOM, give me a dialog like macOS and ask me what to kill. Then again, if a phone is going OOM with 12GB of RAM there's a serious optimization problem going on with mobile apps.
Android does all sorts of wacky stuff with background tasks too... Although I don't feel like my 6 GB Android is low memory, so maybe there's something there, but I also don't run a lot of apps, and I regularly close Firefox tabs. Android apps do mostly seem well prepared for background shenanigans, cause they happen all the time. There's the AOSP/Google Play background app controls, but also most of the OEMs do some stuff, and sometimes it's very hard to get stuff you want to run in the background to stay running.
I dunno about watches, but Airpods work fine with Android, as long as you disconnect them from FindMy cause there's no way to make them not think they're lost (he says authoritatively, hoping to be corrected).
Apple seemingly wants all apps to be static jpegs that never need to connect to any data local or remote, and never do any processing. If you want to do something in the background so that your user can multitask, too damn bad.
You can run in the background, for a non-deterministic amount of time. If you do that, iOS nags your user to make it stop. If you access radios, iOS nags your user to disable it.
It's honestly insane. I don't know why or how anyone develops for this platform.
Not to mention the fact that you have to spend $5k minimum just to put hello world on the screen. I can't believe that apple gets away with forcing you to buy a goddamn Mac to complile a program.
People develop for iOS because iOS users spend more money. End of story.
It's inconvenient that apps can't do long-running operations in the background outside of a few areas, but that's a design feature of the platform. Users of iOS are choosing to give up the ability to run torrent clients or whatever in exchange for knowing that an app isn't going to destroy their battery life in the background.
These are features, because we can't trust developers to be smart about how they implement these. In fact, we can't even trust them not to be malicious about it. User nags keep the dveloper honest on a device where battery life and all-day availability is arguably of utmost importance.
> you have to spend $5k minimum just to put hello world on the screen.
Now that's just nonsense.
Hardware is pretty useless if the software that drives it is useless. I don't know it probably works better in China all I know is that I went back to good old Samsung.
The market demands must be different there. I've disabled "battery optimisation" for all the apps I need to stay open (and some apps even prompt me to disable it!), and I don't have any issues in daily use.
[1] https://source.android.com/docs/core/perf/cached-apps-freeze...
if you run out of smartphone battery you are in much bigger trouble in China than in west since it's necessary to function almost everywhere, which is why they have rental powerbanks stand literally in every restaurant and every small grocery shop, you are never further than like 5 minutes walk from one in urban area
btw you can always put app to protected/not optimized list which usually solve problems with most of the western apps on Chinese phones (essential Chinese apps like WeChat are on the list by default)
That's social engineering to get themselves more background network activity. I wouldn't trust such an app.
Hard to tell if it something I am doing or not. I will say with all these phones and everything google turned off I typically get 3-4 days per charge but that really depends on what your usage is.
I remember on Android I dont recall the app name specifically, but it would let me download any website for offline browsing or something, would use it when I knew I might have no internet like a cruise.
Heck there used to be an iOS client for HN that was defunct after some time, but it would let you cache comments and articles for offline reading.
That being said, there's no reason the Safari context shouldn't be able to suspend the JS and simply resume when the context is brought back to the foregrown. It's already sandboxed, just stop scheduling JS execution for that sandbox.
I coded an extension that adds a context menu for opening videos in embed mode. https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/youtube-open-as-...
Safari suspends backgrounded tabs. I think that's what we're observing here rather than strictly memory pressure.
Spotted the German lol
The general problem is that many people don't bother testing their apps outside of their office wifi with low latency, low jitter, low packet loss and high bandwidth. Something like persisting the state when the OOM/battery-save killer comes knocking onto some cloud endpoint? Perfectly fine on wifi... but on a mobile connection that might just be EDGE, cut entirely because the user is just getting a phone call and the carrier does not do VoLTE, or be of an absurd latency? Whoops. Process killer knocks a -9 and that's it, state be gone.
Side note: Anyone know of a way to prevent the iPhone hotspot from disassociating with a MacBook when the phone loses network connectivity? It's darn annoying, I counted having to reconnect twenty times on a train ride less than an hour.
App battery usage is unrestricted, so it's not that.
That's almost a decade ago.
Phones RAM progression has stagnated for a LONG time, during that time I doubt that webpages have become lighter, so yeah I'm not surprised by what you are saying.
Although, for a $450 device that doesn’t need to make much of a profit on its own, I also don’t think they’re heavy on memory in the first place (12GB). You can buy top quality Chinese Android handhelds with more RAM and better Qualcomm processors than the Switch 2 for about the same price, and those companies are making $0 in software royalties (e.g., AYN Thor Max is $450 with a 16GB/1TB configuration).
Every version of the Switch 1 had 4GB of RAM, they didn't cut that on the Lite. Going back and patching every game to ensure it ran on less RAM it was originally designed for would have been a nightmare.
> (e.g., AYN Thor Max is $450 with a 16GB/1TB configuration).
AYN just announced that the Thor will get a price increase soon for obvious reasons.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SBCGaming/comments/1rf5gxq/to_thor_...
Of course the Thor Max will have a price increase, but also, obviously 16GB/1TB is a massively bigger bill of materials than the Switch 2’s 12GB/256GB configuration.
And I forgot to mention that Nintendo has far more pricing leverage in terms of their volume.
Maybe, but I have terrible news for you about how much easier it just became to throw software at a problem
Enable debug with:
$ defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeInternalDebugMenu -bool YES
AO3 HTML downloads have the story in one long HTML file. When reading that on iPad that stupid refresh can move you to the top which is pretty damned annoying.
For that very particular situation I do have a workaround, but it involved adding some JavaScript to the download HTML. If anyone else is reading downloaded AO3 HTML and would like this I've put it on pastebin.com. Get saveplace.js [1] and ao3book.css [2] and add this at the end of the head of your AO3 download:
<script type="text/javascript" src="saveplace.js"></script>
<link rel="StyleSheet" href="ao3book.css" type="text/css"/>
First, to address the tab refresh problem, whenever you change your position in the story it waits until you've stopped at a new position for a bit and then records the new position in parameters on the URL. After a refresh happens it looks for those parameters and restores the last saved position.
Second, to make the story easier to read it hides all but the first chapter, adds buttons to move forward and back by chapter, and adds a dropdown to select chapters. It also adds a button to switch between night and day mode. The day/night mode setting is saved in local storage.
Feel free to use this in anything of your own. The chapter navigation stuff is tied to AO3's HTML, but that would be easy to delete leaving just the position saving/restoring. This is in the public domain in places where it is possible to put things in the public domain. If one of us is somewhere that isn't possible you can use it under the MIT No Attribution license (MIT-0).
“Save webpages to read later in Safari on iPhone” https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/save-pages-to-a-readi...
My understanding was that market research showed a lot of users were turning off the 3D stuff anyway, so it seemed reasonable to offer a model at lower cost without the associated hardware.
It was also because young children weren't supposed to use the 3D screen due to fears of it affecting vision development. You could always lock it out via parental controls on the original, but still that was cited as a reason for adding the 2DS to the lineup.
https://www.ign.com/articles/2013/08/28/nintendo-announces-2...
> Fils-Aime said. “And so with the Nintendo 3DS, we were clear to parents that, ‘hey, we recommend that your children be seven and older to utilize this device.’ So clearly that creates an opportunity for five-year-olds, six-year-olds, that first-time handheld gaming consumer."
The devices themselves are fast enough to run everything, you just can't update and eventually apps stop being available to the old iOS version they run.
It happened a lot on my previous phone with only 4GB ram though
I know this because I still get some of my web pages refreshed even if the browser is literally the only app that is running.
That and using SPAs for static sites.
There is a strong argument modern mobile goes too far for this.
I don't work at that kind of level, so I dunno if the juice would be worth the squeeze (sleep with DRAM refresh is already very low power on phone scales), but it seems doable.
There's a reason why we say unused RAM is wasted RAM.
I have to use a Macbook M4 at work with 24GB, I have an AMD Lenovo Ryzen7 with 32GB running Linux Mint Cinnamon. It is infuriating how slow this Macbook is, even to shut it down is slow asf.
macOS is not different than Windows, I cannot wait for COB to get back to my Linux laptop.
Companies install so many invasive shit in the name of security theater and employee control that there is lots of waste going on.
Sure, but otherwise, the competition will be first to market, and the exec may lose their bonus. So, the exec keeps their bonus, and when the tech debt collapses, the exec will either have departed long ago or will be let go with a golden parachute, and in the worst case an entire product line goes down the drain, if not the entire company.
The financialization and stonkmarketization of everything is killing our society.
I wouldn't call it an idealist position as much as a fools one. Companies don't give a shit about software security or sustainable software as long as they can ship faster and pump stocks higher.
With that contract being eroded, I think the sloppiness of testing, validation, and even architecture in many organizations is going to be exposed.
That trend might reverse if porting to a best practice native App becomes trivial.
Nintendo can't realistically take memory budget away from developers after the fact. The 2DS cut the 3D feature from the 3DS, but all games were required to be playable in 2D from day 1, so no existing games broke on the cost-reduced 2DS.
The just announced pixel is the same phone as last year. I know it sounds like a usual complaint, but look at the actual specs, it literally is the same phone with differences so small that hey might have passed as regional variance.
As for the Samsung, the screen can darken when looked from the side for privacy. That’s pretty much it. Price increased though.
Coupled with the current iOS situation it seems like things are… rotting. Everything in decline.
It's eyebrow raising for me in other ways.
I have a Pixel 9a and it's been quite good with really solid battery life. It's barely 6 months old and I got it new straight from Google.
A few days ago I noticed the battery started to drain much faster than usual. I also noticed at the same time Google is pushing the 10a.
Nothing changed on my end. I barely use the phone in my day to day. In 10 hours today I sent 3 text messages with Whatsapp and lost 60% of my battery in that time frame. Up until a few days ago, 60% would last me 3 days.
I find it weirdly coincidental that the battery life went from amazing to worse than a 5 year old device I had prior to this just as they are releasing new phones. I've powered it down and given it a full discharge / charge too. It's still draining at an alarming rate.
I wish there were better options for phones. It's absolutely crazy to me that a phone can be perfectly working one day and then it starts getting issues like this out of the blue.
It makes it completely undependable. All I want is a phone I can trust traveling with where I'm not going to wake up the next day and then the phone starts draining 3-4x faster than it normally does.
There hasn't even been a system update for almost 3 weeks, so it wasn't an update that busted things.
They mentioned people complaining on Reddit about battery drain since the last update, but I haven’t personally seen the threads so take it with a grain of salt.
What you probably see is Google toggling on some new AI feature, which is now doing some initial on-device computation. It will usually calm down after a few days.
I'm not sure.
Last year they ruined my Pixel 4a by pushing that battery patch to everyone (even to end of life devices).
Their official repair center replaced the battery as per Google's guidelines and offer but during the battery swap they managed to physically break other parts of the phone over the course of multiple visits. Each visit broke a new component.
Google support didn't do anything in the end, eventually ignoring me. This went on for almost 6 months with an email chain over 100+ replies.
Eventually the repair center gave me enough credit towards a new phone (this 9a) but only after I mentioned I was going to small claims court since they left me with a device that didn't function in the way it used to function before I visited them.
Battery life, RAM usage, Performance, all suffer immensely from being leaky abstractions instead of creating hard faults.
The entire point of his statement, is that the broken code is on purpose.
Otherwise I'd still be rocking my S9.
I'm also using a pixel 2 for Android development and Google play billing isn't supported on it.
The hardware is fine but they make it obsolete with software.
I'm guessing they'll soon move to a subscription pricing for phones.
It might last until 4G is turned off.
I can’t really imagine needing greater bandwidth than I have now but I still use the phone like it’s 2010.
Just "commoditizing". Last years microwave ovens were basically the same as 2024's also, and no one cares. You still need them and people still buy them and use them as much as ever, but at a replacement rate and not because of fashion or innovation.
That is a good thing. It means the economy is doing what it's supposed to do and bringing maximal value to consumers so we can spend our resources more efficiently (on other fashion-driven junk in different market segments), making us richer.
It's only bad news if your business is selling "phones" and not innovative products more generally. Which, yeah, is pretty much AAPL's trap. But that's on them, not us. We're winning.
Richer… so we can buy more stuff I guess?
Anyway a good microwave can last you 30 years not even joking.
They may not match your particular tastes, but people with inflexible taste are always the last-resort market for manufacturers of commoditized products. People still buy from Hermès even though Shein completely dwarfs them in revenue, etc... That's the way it will always be with Apple too.
Jony Ive at OpenAI is rumored to have smart speaker, pendant, pen and bone-conducting headset in the launch pipeline. Audio interfaces, no screens,
Meta is selling millions of smart glasses, with Apple and others following.
If the memory market was not distorted, home AI + agents + open models could have a bigger role via AMD Strix Halo. Instead, they will be reserved for those who can afford to spend five figures on 512GB or 1TB unified memory on Mac Studio Ultra devices.
> users [could] interact with Siri and future Apple devices without speaking out loud.. AI systems capable of interpreting facial expressions and subtle muscle movements to understand so-called “silent speech.”
So we are talking about a HomePod with a screen, or like one of those Meta "Portal" things?
Apple is developing a tabletop robot as the centerpiece of its artificial intelligence strategy, with plans to launch the device in 2027.. The robot resembles an iPad mounted on a movable limb that can swivel to follow users around a room..The company is also exploring other robotics concepts, including a mobile bot with wheels similar to Amazon’s Astro, and has discussed humanoid models..Hmmm, so they traded always-on audio recording for always-on video recording. Not sure this is an improvement.
Perhaps this could give room for physical design changes instead. I'm sick of phones that are just a slab of glass. I remember fun, weird, fashionable designs! Buttons and keyboards, phones felt like an individual choice, not just this boring black mirror. I'd take ten years of stagnation on hardware development in phones in exchange for ten years of exciting form factors with improving software. Let's face it: the spec is high enough for anything we need to be doing, by now. The software is the real problem, and there's room here for massive improvement.
same with Amazfit Bip from like 2018, you can't buy small THIN <10mm watch with battery requiring charging once a month and always readable MIP display (the more sunlight the better)
The IDC article says that DRAM prices are not expected to come down again. "While memory prices are projected to stabilize by mid-2027, they are unlikely to return to previous level — making the sub-$100 segment (171 million devices) permanently uneconomical." Before, they always came back down in the next RAM glut, when everybody built too much capacity. Why is that not going to happen next time?
[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/Storage-crisis-Playstation-6-co...
Here we're facing different forces-- unprecedented demand for DRAM that may be durable. But it also looks like the pace of supply changes may be decreased as process improvements get smaller and the industry stops moving so much in lockstep.
It still matters what happens to the demand function, though. If enough AI startups blow up that there's a lot of secondhand SDRAM in the market, and demand for new SDRAM is impacted, too, that will push things down.
Sort of like what happened with the glut of telecom equipment after
Because this shortage isn't natural, it's the result of OpenAI flexing monopsony power to deprive everyone else for its strategic gain. Unlike an organic shortage, there is no compelling reason for otherwise excess capacity to be built, since this artificial shortage can end as arbitrarily as it started.
No reason the same can't happen now - especially for something as expensive and faily easily re-sellable as a datacenter & the hardware insite. Just rip it all out and sell it for parts where they are actually needed.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/shareholders-sue-...
Sure thing. I'd take a look at IDC & similar firms' forecasting history before worrying too much about what they say.
There is an AI boom right now. There will be a consolidation cycle at some point. When that happens half the players, if not more, will disappear. The huge hardware budgets will go with them.
We also can't be certain that the DRAM makers aren't capitalizing on this opportunity because they can. Remember: all of them are convicted monopolists. As in actual prison time convicted. And fined. And lost civil lawsuits. Multiple times.
I just can't see AI paying enough of a premium on HBM to justify the DRAM spikes. Frankly I can't see the volume either. Wafer starts on DRAM are dramatically bigger than you are probably imagining. DRAM is in practically everything these days. AI servers is but a drop in the bucket. 10% of the market? Yeah right, if its 4% I'd be shocked. And you are telling me a shift of 4% of wafers to HBM is driving these prices and shortages?
I humbly suggest if you look at the numbers something smells funny.
Disclaimer: none of us has access to the actual data, a lot of it is inferred by industry players. Some are well connected and usually accurate but that is not evidence. Therefore it is possible this is a genuine market action and nothing nefarious is going on.
Of course given the dynamics of business these days and how financialized these companies are it wouldn't surprise me if this is also just a result of refusal to invest capex in expansion. So long as the other 2-5 players in the market do the same there's no benefit to expanding or lowering prices. We all just sit on our hands and let market forces raise prices (and profit) for us.
Whatever the case it seems capitalism has gone off the rails in multiple ways.
https://www.androidpolice.com/google-pixel-10-3-5-gb-ai-only...
These techniques seem not to be widely known. A kagi search turned up only information about some singer.
https://github.com/RikkaApps/Shizuku
And canto not canta (search the play store).
My apologies, I got both last letters wrong!
Now that I think on it maybe I ought to just pay attention to jailbreakable OS version numbers again. If I stuck on one of those OS versions I could just spoof my user agent for the bank website with a jailbroken phone.
It's like saying why should you get a new gaming laptop to replace your 6 year old current gaming laptop, when all you do is office work. If all you do is office work, why buy a gaming laptop at all? Just use a standard okish smartphone or tablet.
I know I'm not speaking to all the people that need to hear it, but used phones are very affordable, and reduce waste. A used iphone 13 is about $200 in the US: https://swappa.com/listings/apple-iphone-13?sort=price_low
Where are the China hawks? The argument for protecting Taiwan was that without their chips the smartphone market would contract, right? Thats whats happening now?!
> By contrast, Apple and Samsung are better positioned to navigate this crisis. As smaller and low-end-positioned Android vendors struggle with rising costs, Apple and Samsung could not only weather the storm but potentially expand market share as the competitive landscape tightens.”
Less phones,computers,consoles,servers,etc sold (and everything that follows this) seems a way larger impact on the economy than a few thousand new ChatGPT Pro memberships...
I am always surprised that when the planet caring, liberal Apple boss shows up on the Big Apple Event stage, he encourages people to ruin the planet by needles purchase of the new hardware, even though the old one can do the same job easily, as now the improvements are barely incremental, if any.
It's that everything has become 20% more expensive in the past year, I'm being taxed to death, fighting with companies trying to money grab me, my electric bill is now $800, and I'm now too broke to buy a new phone every 2 years when most of my income gets eaten by the "system".
I'll wait until either SPY does another 50% run or BTC does another 100% run and then I'll buy a new phone. Google, you want me to buy your new phone? Do something to make SPY or BTC go up and then we'll talk. Until then my current phone works, and the new features aren't a must-have.
If the "system" wants to drive more consumption, it's on the "system" to put more buying power into my hands. Double my salary, reduce my taxes, make BTC do a big run up, something. Otherwise I'm happy staying put.
[1]: https://www.mooreslawisdead.com/post/sam-altman-s-dirty-dram...
Not the person Sam Altman specifically, but AI in general. It was obvious even in 2024 that braindead beancounters were jumping on the hype train, so much so that coal power plants were kept alive to satiate the power hunger [1]. The last time that shit happened, it was the coin craze [2], but unlike cryptocurrencies there was and is an actual product being made...
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/14/ai_datacenters_coal/
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m...
And I'd say if it ends up being shown there even is the slightest hint of impropriety going on, trial him. Up to and including capital punishment for the entire board and C level - what OpenAI already has done, even if legally on paper, IMHO is the biggest market manipulation in history, and it's not just one competitor that is suffering but society as a whole.
I don't have an issue with big companies and their super rich investors engaging in petty bitch fights. By all means, hand me some popcorn and soda. But the RAM situation, with everyone not being super rich and flush with cash from AI crazed investors being screwed royally? That is far beyond acceptable.
We need to send a message: you can't mess around with the world economy at that level without feeling serious repercussions. The lives of the billions are not playthings for the select few.
And if it turns out to be outright market manipulation, engaging in deals he doesn't even have the money committed for by others, much less actually have it on his balance sheet? Then it's time for the pitchforks, not even Madoff was this ruthless.
I'm not as much of a fan these days but I do hope these limitations have the effect of improving best practices.
I'm paying more on ebay for thinkcentre tiny and thinkpads - 12th gen intel and newer.
Refurbished spinny drives have been steadily climbing - up 50% since late last year. That's on top of the 20% mystery jump that happened in the last week of 2024.
Also be aware that this stuff whipsaws, if OpenAI actually takes posession of that memory and decides they can't use it and dumps, we're going to see a crash. Likewise if they back out of the deals with the memory fabs (or fail and default). There's some scary volatility on the horizon.
I /hope/ to see the slowdown in the new phones market affecting the pumped-up chatbot market. To reference Agent Smith, what good is a chatbot if you can't speak?
The question unnerves Neo and suddenly he feels his phone vibrate as it unexpectedly reboots. The standing Agents snicker.
After all this churn subsides there is a chance entry level Windows laptops will start at 32GB RAM and maybe 8-12GB VRAM?
Which could end up being about 5-10-15 years of progress packed into 2-3-4.
The shortage is manufactured, I have my doubts it will "end" in a conventional sense. I'm more skeptical and feel like this is yet another consolidation of wealth and a means of taking away compute power from people, which prevents startup competition. This way the hyperscalers are the only ones that can offer any meaningful compute.
But I'm betting on their shortsightedness, greed and general stupidity which will cause a crash. Leading to oversupply/huge leftover stocks.
This feels like an antitrust kind of situation.
Companies have reduced staff prematurely on the promise of productivity improvements that have not occurred and lost customers to terrible customer service and declining product quality.
Many hardware launches are going to be delayed or not meet expectations which really is the tip of the iceberg.
The US/SK memory cartel understandably sold out for a massive short term windfall but they their long term decisions to limit supply have created a huge opportunity for China. I wouldn't be surprised if this will go down in the history books as the start of the exit for US/SK from the industry and the start of Chinese dominance.
The smart phone industry is likely to respond with an increasingly hostile anti-consumer approach as they try and lock customers into the cabins of the sinking ship. I expect cheap and cheerful Chinese budget phones aren't going anywhere.
I am happy for ram, cpu and storage to stall. I want a more robust and open phone which can take a fall and be updated long after the vendor loses interest. I expect to uninstall most of my apps rather than install new ones as I increasingly disconnect from an ever more distracting and worthless medium. I have cancelled nearly every subscription service in the last 12 months. And I have been deleting a lot of free accounts and apps. Its like doing a big cleanup. Surprisingly rewarding.
HN has felt like more than 50% AI industry promoting blog spam of little interest to me as a reader for some time. I am setting a budget of ten, no make it five, more posts here. Then I am out for good. Account deletion and no looking back.
Companies have reduced staff because of the impact of tariffs, because of low consumer confidence and spending, or as a ploy to pump share prices. Then they claim it’s AI, because it sounds a lot better to say that you’re reducing headcount because of AI than it does to admit that you’re cutting costs because of falling revenue.
Question is, is it really impossible for businesses to fund themselves with bank loans now? John Kay wrote about this years ago arguing the finance sector is no longer a good thing for society but has become more of a leech: taxing the money supply but not supporting new businesses. I feel like it's only become worse now. Even insurance is barely really insurance any more. It's more like a savings account that you might be able to withdraw from when you need it, but not necessarily.
In some ways it's pretty interesting to watch the entire world mobilize production for AI; some folks like to call this "hyperstition" as the future AGI reaches backwards in time to compel its own creation. Wild, but when trillions of dollars - i.e. millions of people's entire life output of work - are being put into something, it's truly an effort on a scale that no societal project has ever been before. There's no leader, nobody is in control, nobody has the grand vision other than "build the thing and get rich in the process". Amazing times to live in. The best use of our time and resources and coordination? Probably not... as we look around our broken cities, stepping over our poor and hopeless...
They are not curtailing themselves in a market as lucrative as the current one; they probably boost their marginal work planning impacts to productivity via predictive maintenance like actions to err on the side of more productivity due to the immense profit each Gigabit they can deliver this year makes them. Literally like over half of what a consumer pays today at best buy could be expected to be just profit of the factory based off of the non-artificial supply limits and the huge AI demand pushing out all but the wealthiest home-PC demand...
Such phone exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librem_5
Would love to know what sectors you would say are obviously under invested. Sounds like an opportunity.