> I wonder whether we’ll see a secondary effect in the resale market.

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.

We already are. Check eBay at the component level, which is showing it quite clearly. Look for secondary/reclaimed/refurbished components to backfill the gaps too.

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.

One of my trend-following and easily-influenced sisters was quite locked into the Apple ecosystem (iPhones, MacBooks) with her young family, but just over Christmas last year, I spotted them with a refurbished ThinkPad (T490 or thereabouts), with a plan to buy another refurbished ThinkPad.

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?