Affordable computing is what created the economy. If you take that away people in poorer countries can no longer afford a phone. Without a phone a lot things that we consider a given will not be functional anymore. The gaming industry alone including phones is a whooping $300bn. This will take a significant hit if people have to pay a fortune to build a rig, or if their phones are so under-powered that they can't even play a decent arcade game. Fiber is not universal so that all of this to be transferred to the cloud. We tend to forget that computing is universal and it's not just PCs.

▲ Imustaskforhelp 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I really agree with your statement and people forget, but the reason third world countries are able to buy devices is because they are cheap, increase the ram price and thus every computing device and I think it will impact everyone of us but disproportionately due to power purchasing capacity and other constraints in an economy

I genuinely hope that this ram/chips crisis gets solved ASAP by any party. The implications of this might have a lot of impact too and I feel is already a big enough financial crisis itself if we think about it coupled with all the other major glaring issues.

▲ compounding_it 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Based on the article, demand exceeds supply by 10%. It seems that companies are taking advantage of this gap nothing else. I won't be surprised if the demand is kept this way for a while to extract profits. GPUs saw a similar trend during crypto. Then there were affordable GPUs at one point.

▲ walterbell 11 hours ago | parent [-]

"OMEC" (Organization of Memory Exporting Countries) NAND production quotas lowered by ~10%? https://x.com/jukanlosreve/status/1988505115339436423

  Samsung Electronics has lowered its target for NAND wafer output this year to around 4.72 million sheets, about 7% down from the previous year's 5.07 million. Kioxia also adjusted its output from 4.80 million last year to 4.69 million this year.. SK hynix and Micron are likewise keeping output conservatively constrained in a bid to benefit from higher prices. SK hynix's NAND output fell about 10%, from 2.01 million sheets last year to around 1.80 million this year. Micron's situation is similar: it is maintaining production at Fab 7 in Singapore—its largest NAND production base—in the low 300,000-sheet range, keeping a conservative supply posture.

China's YMTC and CXMT are increasing production capacity, but their product mix depends on non-market inputs, https://thememoryguy.com/some-clarity-on-2025s-ddr4-price-su...

  The Chinese government directed CXMT to convert production from DDR4 to DDR5 as soon as the company was able. The order was said to have been given in the 4th quarter of 2024, and the price transition changed from a decrease to an increase in the middle of March 2025.. A wholesale conversion from DDR4 to DDR5 would probably be very expensive to perform, and would thus be unusual for a company that was focused on profitability. As a government-owned company, CXMT does not need to consistently turn a profit, and this was a factor in the government’s decision to suddenly switch from DDR4 to DDR5.

▲ andrekandre 10 hours ago | parent [-]

   > bid to benefit from higher prices

et tu 'law of supply and demand'?

	▲	andruby 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Constrict the supply, and price goes up. It works like textbook economics. Maybe I'm misinterpreting "et tu" here. Or maybe you meant "free markets" instead. Modern RAM production requires enormous R&D expenses, and thus has huge moat, which means the oligopoly is pretty safe (at least in the short to medium term) from new entrants. They "just" need to keep each other in check because there will be an incentive to increase production by each individual participant. I do like the "OMEC" name as a paralel for OPEC.

▲ torginus 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Old devices work just fine. I've upgraded my old iPhone XS last year to the latest and greatest 16 to see what changed (not much), the old one was still fast (in fact faster than a most upper-midrange Androids, its insane how much of a lead Apple has) and the battery was good. I considered selling it, but quickly had to realize it was worth almost nothing.

Also, when treated right, computers almost never break.

There's so much hand-me-down stuff, that are not much worse than the current stuff, that I think people even in the poorest countries can get an okay computer or smartphone (and most of them do).

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Imustaskforhelp 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Well the industries the most impacted by it are homelabbing/datacenters imo.

Like in current circumstances, its hard to get a homelab/datacenter so its better to postpone these plans for sometime

I agree with your statement overall but I feel like till the years that these ram shortages occur, there is a freeze of all companies providing vps's etc. ie. no new player can enter so I am a bit worried about those raising their prices as well honestly which will impact everyone of us as well for these few years in another form of AI tax

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GCUMstlyHarmls 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Bleh. I was already sad but I hadn't really thought about that specific impact, I can imagine smaller (read: small to big) VPS providers will be forced to raise prices while meta providers (read: AWS) can probably stomach the cost and eat even more of the market.

	▲	Imustaskforhelp 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Exactly. I was thinking of building my own VPS provider on the pain points of development I felt and my father works in broadband business and has his own office and I was thinking of setting up a very small thing there almost the same hardware-alike of homelabbing But the ram prices themselves are the reason I am forced to not enter this industry for the time being. I have decided right now to save my money for the time / focus on the job/college aspect of things to earn more so that when the timing is right, I would be able to invest my own money into it. But basically Ram prices themselves are the thing which force us out of this market for the most part. I researched a lot about datacenters recently/ the rabbit hole and as previous hardware gets replaced/new hardware gets added/datacenters get expanded (whether they are a large company or small), I would expect an increase in prices mostly This year, companies actually still took the cost but didn't want the market to panic so some black friday deals were good but I am not so sure about the next year or the next next year. This will be a problem in my opinion for the next 1-3 or 4 years in my estimate Also AWS is really on the more expensive side of things in the datacenters and they are immensely profitable so they can foot the bill while other datacenters (small or semi large) cant So we will probably see a shift of companies towards using AWS and big cloud providers(GCP,AWS,azure) a bit more when we take all things into account which saddens me even more because I appreciate open web and this might take a hit. We already see resentment towards these tri-fecta but we will see even more resentment as more and more people realize their roles / the impacts they cause and just overall, its my intuition that average person mostly hate big tech. It's going to be a weird year in my opinion for this type of business and what it means for the average person. Honestly for the time being, I genuinely recommend hetzner,upcloud,(netcup/ovh) and some others that I know from my time researching. I think that they are cheaper than aws usually while still being large enough that you don't worry about things too much and there is always lowendtalk if one's interested. Hope it helps but trust me, there is still hope as I talked to these hosting providers on forums like lowendtalk and It might help to support those people too since long term, an open web is the ideal. Here is my list right now: hetzner's good if you want support + basic systems like simple compute etc. and dont want too much excess stuff OVH's good: if you want other things than just compute and want more but their support is something which is of a mixed bag Upcloud's good: if you want both of these things but they are just a bit more expensive if one wants to get large VPS's than the other options. Netcup's good: Their payment processing was really painful that I had to go through but I think that one can find use case for them (I myself use netcup but although that's because they had a really steal deal once but I am not sure if I would recommend it if there are no deals) There are some other services like exe.dev that I really enjoy as well and these services actually inspire me to learn more about these things and there are some very lovely people working in these companies. There is still hope though. So never forget that. Its just a matter of time in my opinion that things get back normal hopefully so I think I am willing to wait till then since that's all we can do basically but overall, yea its a bit sad when I think about it too :<

▲ pgryko 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

We are now moving to a post human economy. When AGI automates all human labour, the consumer i.e. the bulk of humanity stops mattering (economically speaking). It then just becomes Mega corps run by machines making stuff for each other. Resources are then strictly priorities for the machines over everything else. We are seeing this movement already with silicon wafers and electricity.