Samsung has decreased its output by 50% since September, though the market has already seen price bumps due to inventory being cleared out.
So they artificially create a shortage to hike up the prices. Nice.
That’s capitalism for you 😉
More like monopoly.
Yes, capitalism will always choose the most efficient path to acquiring capital, which is evidently acquisition + mergers until they can artificially limit supply, then exploit and extort society wholesale; regardless of the consequences.
Yep… Doesn’t matter if the answer is war, famine, mass incarceration, crippling debt, homelessness, mental illness, pollution, climate change, ecocide, or genocide — capitalists will always find the most efficient path to the acquisition of capital.
Monopolies are the natural, direct result of unbrindled capitalism. So yeah, capitalism at work.
[example of corruption] is the natural, direct result of unbridled [system invented by humans].
Huh.
How is that corruption?
The only higher Return On Investment than creating yourself or finding and securinb a monopoly position and squeezing costumers is, maybe, buying politicians and having laws written to favour you, so naturally people guided only by the personal upside maximization idology will engage in both if they think they can get away withnit (or the penalties if caught are less than the profits).
It is absolutelly natural in Capitalism for companies to seek and even create monopoly positions and then squeeze customers, and to corrupt those who make the laws and regulations as well as those who enforce them, and often these things are combined: notice for example how the artifical monopoly which is Copyright has been repeatedly extended in duration to well beyond the point were there is an upside for Society, and now none of us will ever see the works created during our lifetime become Public Works.
Never, not in our free markets!
At least a duopoly for the illusion of competition
To be fair they did far over produce them which is why they’ve been so dirt cheap lately.
But companies did learn over Covid that if you just don’t make something you can charge whatever you want for it and people will pay it.
There are plenty of other players on the SSD marker. Crucial, WD, etc. I predict that their prediction will be wrong
We cynics predict the other players will follow suit, acting as a cartel. The prices will remain inflated, and media covering the price rise will blithely repeat industry talking points as fact. A few keyboard warriors will be convinced enough to point to these articles in online arguments. Someone somewhere types “supply and demand” unironically.
Maybe a few years down the line there will be an investigation when a whistleblower forces some government in europe to appear as if they’re doing something. The trial will last longer than the media coverage of it.
After that, we predict a settlement that costs less than the profits they made colluding to inflate prices. Someone somewhere types “cost of doing business”
Rinse and repeat
Are you from the future?!
Even better… He’s from the past.
If Samsung publicly announces cutting back production and the rest do the same I don’t think it’s considered collusion.
I think it’s only collusion if they all talk about doing it. Reading that your competitor raised prices and then raising your own isn’t the same as using back channels with your competitor in order to agree to both raise prices
It is okay to respond but not okay to plan.
Yeah but they probably have all the same suppliers and even if one keeps their prices low for now eventually someone there is going to wonder why they are doing the same work as everyone else but getting paid less for it.
This is why you need a healthy market. You need lots of competitions selling a lot of different products. Not 4 companies all seeing the same crap.
From today’s prices, an increase of 40% will reportedly get these companies back to breaking even, and a rise of 50% will mean profits instead of the losses that threatened bankruptcies earlier this year.
Spreading rumors of price hikes, to justify later price hikes and quell customer outrage over it.
Capitalism 101.
They all cut way back on manufacturing last year due to the price drops from significantly reduced demand. So it’s 100% expected that prices will go up because they’ve created a reduced supply.
It’s like there is a SSD OPEC.
There’s an unofficial open for everything these days, food, medicine, computer components, etc… there’s a handful of companies that corner the market for everything now and they all are perfectly happy matching supply and pricing.
so they are treating computer parts like diamonds now? Faking supply shortages to increase demand, therefore prices?
Capitalism is so efficient.
The graphics card market the last few years has really shown how much money there is to be made doing that. If they all reduce supply together or there simply isn’t anyone setup to compete with them, they can make a killing.
They’re reducing supply because they can’t make any money with this supply/demand mismatch, Micron for example didn’t have a single profitable quarter and lost something like $6B total over the course of 2023
The only reason SSD prices have been this low is because we’ve been paying less than the cost to produce them as they try to recoup some of their losses and shed inventory
I think they’re underestimating how long reduced demand can continue… Especially when they make things even less affordable.
Yep pure market manipulation
Butter the bun before the bake
By what magik are they able to “predict” a 50% price increase ?
Market Manipulation Lvl 1: Hyping
Man I cannot wait for The Day Before!
Setting expectations…
Article says SSD manufacturers currently sell at a loss & intend to raise prices because they want to be profitable, 40% is break even, 50% is profitable
Selling at a loss? Lol yeah sure they are.
Actually a common practice to gain a leg up in the market and kill the competition. This can drag on for long, but the endgame is always buyers getting screwed by a monopoly/oligopoly.
Then the journalist who wrote the article is absolutely lying to us.
If that is real, this is baffling, why was it done in the first place? Was there some new company that could manufacture a significant amount of SSDs who started selling at loss so everyone else had to follow to not lose all marketshare? Also it’s not like SSDs are some eggs that expire, there is no need to dump all inventory. Pretty hard to believe.
Fake problems in order to get in on all this fake inflation bullshit. All these capitalist pigs raking people over the coals for record profits under the entirely fabricated “inflation” crisis. SSD manufacturers want to get theirs too.
This is the prep/hype phase where they spread fake news to get the consumers prepped for surgery. None of it is real.
Well that’s not great… They’re already pretty expensive as it is.
yeah i thought 4TB would be like $50 now. whatever happened to moore’s law
Unregulated capitalism some would say, I say cheap production costs with little to no consequence whatsoever for them doing this kind of thing.
Exactly, if forced scarcity was regulated, we’d be in an entirely different situation. For instance diamonds would be practically worthless.
Unless this is a matter of price collusion (which I doubt as it appears more as a supply demand issue) I don’t think this unregulated capitalism is bad. Last I checked making any kind of products involving semiconductors isn’t cheap or easy. Maybe it is once you figure out how to, but the R&D costs involved are insane.
We as consumers want prices as low as possible. Suppliers want prices as high as possible. Samsung (and the like) clearly aren’t willing to make more of a product at the price that it is currently at (which is a mistake to begin with). There are plentu of other players making ssds, and the prices are all very similar. Something tells me that they’re not gonna price things for cheaper because they can’t survive that way.
Moore’s law has been dead for a long long time.
E: if you’re downvoting this it’s because you don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. Moore’s law was the observation that transistor density would double every ~2 years. That’s not happening and hasn’t for a long time.
No need to downvote this. It’s an insidery technically correct statement. We’ve redefined how we measure Moore’s law several times to make it “keep working” and some people designing chips, not selling them, think it’s not only outlined it’s usefulness but also not true anymore.
In my experience, a lot of people incorrectly conflate Moore’s Law with “computers get faster”
So when you say Moore’s Law is dead and it’s unrealistic to expect it not to be, they get upset and jump to the conclusion that you’re defending tech companies for giving paltry upgrades, which obviously isn’t what I’m doing.
There are other things to PCs getting faster in a post Moore’s Law world. Architecture improvements, hardware acceleration, advanced packaging such as AMD’s chiplet technology, etc - these are all commonplace and have replaced the idea of “let’s just double transistor counts every two years”
We’ve gone through die size, clock speed, instructions and operations, the transistors count. All are stand-ins for “complexity” which is why some people question if the law ever existed.
That said, regardless of the “real” law, until recently the colloquial usage has always been a stand in for how “quick” a processor is. In that sense, you really need to do some hand waving around core counts and even then it doesn’t really work.
Maybe more importantly, one of the most important processor markets are mobile and servers which are largely focused on less complex more efficient processors like arm.
So outside of marketing, it’s very easy to see why a lot of people think Moore’s law is dead and we’re all better for it. We can continually make better processors without trying to meet some arbitrary metric that didn’t really mean anything useful to start with.
E: aggressively agreeing
Moore’s law hasn’t died, if you mean number of transistors per area. Linear scaling to transistor counts has.
It absolutely has. Transistor count in an area absolutely is not doubling every two years.
I just checked. Yup, you’re right. Funny though that Pat of all people claims it’s not dead lol
I thought Moore’s law was only for CPUs/chip density?
Moore’s law is the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles about every two years. Moore’s law is an observation and projection of a historical trend.
It is.
It’s about the shrinking in integrated circuit feature size, hence increase in IC element densities, so it applies to memories which are integrated circuits such as flash memory and the various kinds of RAM, but not to magnetic storage such as in HDDs as they’re something else altogether.
That said, I believe (but am not absolutelly sure) that IC feature size has been shrinking slower than Moore’s Law predicts for maybe a decade as the size of the features becomes so small that quantum-level effects start becoming a problem (think stuff like signal leaks due to quantum tunnelling).
Moore’s law makes no comments about the cost of each transistor in an advanced process. And believe me, they ain’t cheap. It’s not a coincidence we’re up to PLC flash… why go for 32 levels when TLC is likely already a pain?
As tech shrinks it’s only getting more and more expensive per mm. Unless we get some major improvement we’re kinda at the limit for the moment.
Yeah, spend $200 on a 4tb m.2 gen4, or $200 on a 18tb hdd
You couldnt even get a good 4tb sata ssd for 50€ what made you hope for nvme?
SSDs are absurdly cheap at the moment. 2023s demand glut led to a huge over abundance of SSDs and dirt cheap prices.
Right? SATA III SSDs currently cost the same as HDDs of the same capacity, at least where I live. If it stays like that, it will no longer make any sense to buy HDDs. Finally.
I still remember buying my first SSD some 10 years ago which at the time cost 20 times more per GB of what it costs now.
Greeedflation bullshit
These companies need to get smacked upside the head. Hard drives would be pretty much completely obsoleted if SSDs hit the prices that they should if we had proper competition instead of the “competition” to keep prices up that this memory cartel loves to keep up. My only hope is for another player to come in and dump cheap product onto the market like Japan did in the 80s.
Hdd wont be obsolete for awhile. They’re the best media to store large libraries cost effectively. Until there are 10+TB SSDS with reasonable prices, many people with home storage systems won’t upgrade. Not shelling out $10k for SSDS, sorry.
That’s what they said though…
yes.
Lower end 4TB SSDs were around $130 a while back (summer or fall of last year). I bought an 8TB hard drive for about $100 around that time since I just wanted archival storage. Since then, prices for both SSDs and HDDs have gone up. Still, I think for most people 4TB should be more than enough and I have a feeling that prices could’ve gone even lower back then but they want to keep prices high and they also want to keep segmentation between HDDs and SSDs instead of erasing most of the market for HDDs.
Yeah, I had 4tbs for only about a year. upgraded this summer to 4 8TB.
While I love the thought, I’m not going to hold my breath on replacing my 880 TB of spinning platters with SSDs.
Honestly I was getting scared we’d start seeing a really bad market crash with companies consolidating and going bankrupt left and right with how hard SSD prices crashed. Since that didn’t happen there’s at least still (an illusion of) competition
Maybe it’s a cartel but I don’t have my hopes up. Storage technology is only getting more complicated and the number of players is only decreasing.
In my view (and maybe I’m wrong) there’s just not that much money to be made in it, contrary to what consumers think. Why fight each other over pennies when you can both earn dollars? Maybe if China figures things out, but you can be my ass I’m not gonna trust a CCP backed storage company lol
A 3D printing revolution is what we need. Something that can print a very basic storage device. It doesn’t have to be good, just needs to be free shitty alternative to these price gougers.
I’d suggest you do some research on 3d printing, you seem sorely misinformed about it’s capabilities
Oh I know what they’re limited to now. But imagine a 3D printer that is capable of writing its own PCBs. Hell we have people with their own basic lithographers, it can’t be that far off, though probably a decade or two, granted.
Unfortunately it’s not possible to 3D print memory and the memory densities required makes it impossible for anyone other than those on expensive cutting edge hardware to achieve cheaply.
Lies!
I can 3D print all the parts of an Abacus, giving me tens of bits of memory and a calculating device!
But yeah, on the serious side, nobody is going to be 3D printing any time soon, if ever, the kind of stuff small enough (and hence with sufficient memory densities for modern applications) to require advanced lythographic techniques and clean rooms to make, even if somebody went to the trouble of figuring out printeable materials for each of the kinds of layer (undoped semiconductor, various variants of doped semiconductors, conductive layer, isolating layer and others) currently present in ICs.
You can print “kiddy electronics” (really big transitors, resistors, capcitors and so on) on flexible substrates, but that’s way too big for any halfway decent memory densities (the Abacus joke is only half joking).
Actually, DIY lithography is a thing and in the uprise.
Is it not possible to print a plastic tape storage device?
The magnetic read write head is going to be difficult to manufacture. The gearing will need to be 100% on point. You will either need a PCB custom made for your project or you will need to program an Arduino or pi to perform the tape backup. Your OS will need software to manage the data transfer.
You can store 30tb on tape for well under $100. It’s the magnetic tape itself that costs.
You could buy a used tape drive and cassette for less than the cost of a HDD of the same capacity.
Tape storage is slow and finicky. Retrieving is even slower due to seek time.
An admirably optimistic goal! What you’re talking about here is a post-scarcity society like Star Trek, though. And even with machines to turn energy and goo into anything, they couldn’t replicate complex machinery like a tricorder - only the individual parts, sometimes.
Good enough for me! I’m not looking for a perfect solution, I can work with incomplete products with weak parts, as long as those parts are readily replaceable
Fuck it, let’s all just start winding our own magnetic core memory arrays.
Here’s the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
Magnetic-core memory was the predominant form of random-access computer memory for 20 years between about 1955 and 1975. Such memory is often just called core memory, or, informally, core. Core memory uses toroids (rings) of a hard magnetic material (usually a semi-hard ferrite) as transformer cores, where each wire threaded through the core serves as a transformer winding. Two or more wires pass through each core. Magnetic hysteresis allows each of the cores to "remember", or store a state. Each core stores one bit of information. A core can be magnetized in either the clockwise or counter-clockwise direction. The value of the bit stored in a core is zero or one according to the direction of that core's magnetization. Electric current pulses in some of the wires through a core allow the direction of the magnetization in that core to be set in either direction, thus storing a one or a zero. Another wire through each core, the sense wire, is used to detect whether the core changed state. The process of reading the core causes the core to be reset to a zero, thus erasing it. This is called destructive readout. When not being read or written, the cores maintain the last value they had, even if the power is turned off. Therefore, they are a type of non-volatile memory. Using smaller cores and wires, the memory density of core slowly increased, and by the late 1960s a density of about 32 kilobits per cubic foot (about 0.9 kilobits per litre) was typical. However, reaching this density required extremely careful manufacture, which was almost always carried out by hand in spite of repeated major efforts to automate the process. The cost declined over this period from about $1 per bit to about 1 cent per bit. The introduction of the first semiconductor memory chips in the late 1960s, which initially created static random-access memory (SRAM), began to erode the market for core memory. The first successful dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), the Intel 1103, followed in 1970. Its availability in quantity at 1 cent per bit marked the beginning of the end for core memory. Improvements in semiconductor manufacturing led to rapid increases in storage capacity and decreases in price per kilobyte, while the costs and specs of core memory changed little. Core memory was driven from the market gradually between 1973 and 1978. Depending on how it was wired, core memory could be exceptionally reliable. Read-only core rope memory, for example, was used on the mission-critical Apollo Guidance Computer essential to NASA's successful Moon landings. Although core memory is obsolete, computer memory is still sometimes called "core" even though it is made of semiconductors, particularly by people who had worked with machines having actual core memory. The files that result from saving the entire contents of memory to disk for inspection, which is nowadays commonly performed automatically when a major error occurs in a computer program, are still called "core dumps".
You wanna store a few hundred bytes? Print some mechanical knobs and call it a day. You wanna make some real storage devices?
Hire top PhD:
Physicists for quantum effects used (and parasitics mitigated)
Chemical engineers for CVD and other very hard and expensive clean room processes.
Electrical engineers to design analog circuitry for charge pumps and multi-level cell readout technology, as well as digital VLSI/HDL design for digital logic including storage controllers
Mechanical engineers for packaging design and automation for your expensive and dangerous production line
Civil engineers for your fab plant, which is so large that significant infrastructure needs to be built to support your fab (e.g. TSMC in Taiwan funded/built a municipal scale desalination plant of which a significant fraction is used for semiconductor processes)Until we have replicators as the other commentor pointed out, I’m afraid we aren’t even close yet. Fingers crossed we hit type II civ sometime but I won’t be holding my breath for it.
deleted by creator
I think that would just be a normal printer. Printing pages of data lol Edit: use the scanner with OCR to get the data back into the computer
Step one: invent replicators
Looks Iike a good year for deleting things.
nothing like a little digital Swedish death cleaning to free up space
Maybe this will encourage devs not to make games over 100GB.
Hahahaha! Good joke mate :)
Doubts in Spanish
¿Qué?
If what people go for are AAA games with hyperdetailed graphics and massive playing spaces, the tendency is for games to grow in size (all those highly detailed textures and masses of data for terrain and object placement really add up) and the only alternatives for trying to deliver some of that using less data, such as No Man’s Sky and their heavy use of generation, end up with results that quickly feel repetitive after some playing and an inferior experience on the adventure side than a carefully crafted gamespace with carefully crafted chracters and encounters.
There are plenty of smaller games from indies which focus mostly on engaging game mechanics and hence are much smaller datawise, but if all you’re going for is something like GTA or Fallout, don’t be surprised when the tens of thousands of highly detailed objects and characters, days worth of voice data and hundreds of square kilometers of gameplay area translate into more than 100GB.
Mind you, the industry uses tons of generation in game making (nobody is going around making, say, the various maps in a chainmail texture by hand) but it’s all vetted and costumized by actual people and the best results end up properly fitted to the models and stored as mainly static stuff in the game data files so big and varied gameplay ares will add up to lots of data even if a lot of it was done with the help of generative tools.
So far and from what I’ve seen, unsupervised AI can’t really deliver good results in a lot of that, so whilst it will probably be a massive leap foward in the area of generative tools for game making, you will still end up with massive game data files containing the output of the AI generation, carefully curated and even customised by actual humans.
the only alternatives for trying to deliver some of that using less data, such as No Man’s Sky and their heavy use of generation, end up with results that quickly feel repetitive
This is an area where generative AI can actually really push the envelope and be completely gamechanging. It’ll require a ton of work for it to get it right 99.9% of the time without outside input, but it’s going to be really cool when game developers do figure it out.
As I pointed out further down in my post, judging by all I’ve seen so far I highly doubt that unsupervised generative AI can produce good enough results, so I expect it to be just another tool in making games rather than games using it directly for most things.
Certainly there are all kinds of considerations that go into the making of game assets that generative AI doesn’ take into account (for example, how you model 3D assets taking into account the needs of animation).
Oh yeah it’s absolutely not a complete solution, but as a tool in the toolbelt of generated game elements it can be incredibly powerful. Really until the right game comes along and truly shows the potential it won’t happen, but there’s a ton of potential there to fill in the gaps that are usually left to limit scope in game development
Glad I just bought a 4tb gen 3 drive for dirt cheap
PC part prices are already extremely high, how in the hell can anyone build or buy anything with prices so high?
Well, guess I’m buying that new NVME in January after all…
Exactly what they want you to do.
Well, if they need/want storage, what else are they supposed to do though?
That’ll show them!
I wonder if it’s gonna be a fire or a flood this year. They always make stuff up to raise it.
I was on crucial last night half interested in an M2 drive but they’re a little out of range, guess I won’t be getting one for the time being
This sucks. For awhile prices were so great for consumers. Finally thought prices would settle low. I’m already seeing a 50% increase in some products. Some cheap team group 128gb SSD could be had for like $12 last year. I tried to look at prices a few days back and it was about $20 and rising.
From article looks like they don’t want to settle at prices before plummet, but at recent peak prices. Shit companies raising cutting output to inflate prices. Car companies are going to be next to follow. They’ve had to cut prices to sell recently. Once that settles …
Well, I did pay $500 for a 128gb SSD when they first came out. Later that year Amazon was accidentally shipping 512gb instead and I was psyched to get one in the mix.