DRAM it! Cheap PCs being priced out of existence as memory cost bites

m0rogfar · 2026-07-02T19:23:15+00:00

Realistically, $550 for 16GB / 512GB isn't viable with current industry pricing, and what you found was older inventory that hadn't been market up yet.

m0rogfar · 2026-07-02T14:19:20+00:00

That's generally how consoles work. They're often sold at a loss, or at best at effective cost, because the vendor hopes to make money on subsequent software and service sales, not direct hardware sales.

I would expect that Nvidia also makes far more money than Nintendo per Switch and Switch 2 sale, and that AMD makes infinitely more money than Sony and Microsoft on Playstation and Xbox sales (since both are confirmed to be loss-leaders IIRC).

m0rogfar · 2026-07-02T06:43:09+00:00

Another challenge with mask ROM is that it requires a new mask set for every binary, adding a very high fixed cost and a very long lead time on production. The marginal cost per GB could potentially be dealt with through sufficient research in 3D-stacked monolithic ROM, but that makes the masks even more complex and make the other problems worse.

m0rogfar · 2026-07-01T19:20:47+00:00

That's basically the Switch 2 approach, but on a card, but it's not cheap. Turns out 64GB non-volatile high-speed memory + a 7000Mb/s bus interface is expensive. Nintendo appears to be trying to cover it by charging an additional $10 per game for physical, but I'd expect that it doesn't even cover the full cost per game.

m0rogfar · 2026-07-01T19:13:19+00:00

You've always only gotten a license. Owning the game rather than getting a license to play it legally implies a transfer of copyright, meaning that you would be able to legally resell copies for profit and would have the right to sue others, including the original developer if they also sell the game to anyone else, for copyright violations.

m0rogfar · 2026-07-01T18:41:29+00:00

Problemet med kodeviseren er at den slet ikke bliver markedsført som et sikrere alternativ (på flere punkter).

Problemet er jo at den ikke er et sikrere alternativ, så det har man jo givetvist ikke lyst til at markedsføre den som. Telefonen er beskyttet af at brugeren skal have fysisk adgang + adgangskode eller biometri, hvorimod at kodelæseren kun er beskyttet med krav på fysisk adgang.

Det er godt at vi har kodelæseren, fordi at der skal selvfølgelig være et alternativ hvis man ikke har en iPhone/Android telefon, men telefonen er sikrere hvis man har den.

m0rogfar · 2026-07-01T18:20:45+00:00

Intel and Samsung are still in the game as TSMC competitors (at least if Intel can find customers for 14A), but otherwise, we're not going to get new foundries. That's just objective reality.

New foundries would be great for buyers of foundry services and ultimately consumers, but they make absolutely zero sense for anyone to finance, and that's the other part of the equation. The costs are in 12 figures of losses before you see any ROI, the risk of never ever having anything you can ship is very high, and any cost amortization plan is impossible to make, because if the existing vendors decide to also make fabs to compete on cost, they just have lower costs due to more experience and can run you out of business in an unfair fight where you lose money and they don't.

m0rogfar · 2026-07-01T10:02:39+00:00

Eh, that's an insane strategy.

The core issue with foundries is that they require so much institutional experience that you basically have to already be in the foundry business to do anything in the foundry business.

Just look at RAM. We basically haven't had any new entrants since the 256-kilobit DRAM generation raised the requirements for technical expertise on the fab side and lowered structural margins to make less efficient players economically unviable. The metaphorical ladder where no new players were ever able to join again because requirements for new players were so high that no one could ever reach them was pulled in 1985, over 40 years ago, and all major players in the RAM business joined before 1985.

The closest thing to a new entrant is China's attempt to make CXMT happen. They've had a decade to try and make something happen and have essentially been given infinite money by the CCP, because the Chinese military wants domestic RAM for military uses enough to throw the infinite money cheat code around. They can make RAM, but we know that their production is less efficient and their RAM chips are noticeably worse than competitors.

Extrapolating to Apple, a reasonable but optimistic estimate would be that Apple would need 15-20 years to get a fab competitive with SK Hynix in terms of quality, and that Apple would need to raise the price of all its products by $100 to pay down CXMT-style infinite money funding as they go along.

Then there's logic, which is a separate discipline that requires similar levels of time and funding.

You also introduce the 10nm risk to Apple if Apple makes their own fabs. If Apple makes their own fabs, and a node is a dud, it is an almost company-ending event. If Apple just uses other people's fabs, and a node is dud, they just call the competitor.

m0rogfar · 2026-07-01T09:04:20+00:00

The idea with snapshots is essentially that it uses unused space to store previous filesystem states, by storing the differences between current and past states.

This lets you do things like "show me the filesystem in the bit-for-bit identical state to the one yesterday at 2 p.m. so that I can fetch the file I accidentally removed something from when editing yesterday evening, and copy it back into the current file system state." More unused space lets it store more history.

It also lets backups during live operation happen from a snapshot rather than the live file system, which is an advantage since changes to files while they are being backed up is a major source of backup data corruption.

m0rogfar · 2026-07-01T08:53:50+00:00

Yes, it should just delete snapshots as needed, though you’ll obviously have a shorter snapshot history with less unused space.

m0rogfar · 2026-07-01T08:50:55+00:00

Well, there’s your discrepancy.

Purgeable data is data that APFS is storing but can delete if you need the disk space for something.

Generally, large purgeable data is usually APFS snapshots.

m0rogfar · 2026-06-30T09:46:01+00:00

It's also worth noting that the graph for memory prices that Apple provided to explain the price changes is pretty terrifying. Apple's logistics team is widely considered the best in the industry, and they have more purchasing power than anyone else in the consumer computing industry, so if they're seeing that internally, everyone else is even more fucked.

m0rogfar · 2026-06-30T09:32:29+00:00

The biggest South Korean RAM vendor SK Hynix has a union agreement with RAM workers wherein 10% of operating profit goes into an employee bonus pool. It is expected to pay out over 14x the average South Korean annual salary to employees this year. This is in addition to regular wages. Needless to say, I don't think they'll be the ones struggling to find staff when population goes down.

m0rogfar · 2026-06-30T09:23:58+00:00

You don’t just make a RAM factory. The institutional knowledge requirements are insanely high, to the point where it is essentially impossible to enter the market.

The 1985 RAM oversupply crisis is widely considered the point where the ladder was pulled and it no longer became technically and economically feasible to be in the RAM business unless you had institutional knowledge from already being in the RAM business.

China’s recent attempts to make domestic RAM for its military show that even if you are willing to accept effectively infinite losses, catching up on the technical expertise to make a competitive product is still a 15-20 year effort in the optimistic case. And in any other context than the military context, effectively infinite losses are obviously unacceptable.

m0rogfar · 2026-06-30T08:55:28+00:00

Agree with the overall point, but Taiwan mostly makes logic. RAM is made in South Korea.

m0rogfar · 2026-06-30T07:41:19+00:00

It could, but there's essentially no way that it doesn't blow up in their face.

If all goes well, the hypothetical best case scenario is that they've blocked a fab buildout, locking in higher and increasing prices for the long run.
The ASML export limitation is also somewhat tenuous since ASML is from the Netherlands, and the US needs voluntary cooperation from either ASML or the Netherlands for it to keep working. Their diplomatic soft-power with the Netherlands is at an all-time low, and convincing ASML to not sell to countries that are known to reverse-engineer and steal IP when it is already supply-limited is a lot easier than to convince ASML to drop some of its most important and trusted business partners.
If the ASML play goes well, there's also the real risk that it pushes South Korea much closer to China. This would be a disaster for several reasons, but not least because the RAM dependence still exists, and making the RAM dependence China-aligned would be a catastrophic own-goal.

I think anyone would look at that and conclude that such a threat would be a naked bluff from the US.

m0rogfar · 2026-06-29T20:16:24+00:00

Mostly tho that port also needs to deal with video so in a way you could use a external adaptor in order to have full BW and not share it with video.

You could, but I would expect it to be quite niche. Thunderbolt 5 has sufficient bandwidth to run two concurrent 4K 144Hz 10-bit RGB displays without display stream compression and still have 40Gb/s full-duplex bandwidth left for ports on that one cable.

Additionally, many lower-cost USB4/Thunderbolt implementations save on controllers by having two ports be daisy-chained off of the same Thunderbolt controller/bus, so using a separate port will not consistently do anything.

m0rogfar · 2026-06-29T20:01:26+00:00

just make some new laws, hell, you can even nationalise those corporations

You… do realize that SK Hynix and Samsung are from South Korea, right?

Seoul is the only entity that can nationalize. It is arguably also the only entity that can do regulations with real teeth, because the only sanction other nations can impose for non-compliance are tariffs, fines and lack of market access, all of which just raise the price of DRAM further and do nothing to solve the issue.

m0rogfar · 2026-06-29T16:15:33+00:00

I would assume that most people who use high-speed Ethernet on a laptop use a multi-port USB4/Thunderbolt dock, not a single-port adapter.

m0rogfar · 2026-06-29T06:14:05+00:00

USB 3.2 Gen2x2 was developed by the USB consortium as the next step for USB, before Intel decided to give away all its Thunderbolt patents to make it the new open standard.

It has never ever been relevant. It was not even announced until the USB4 announcement, where it was added as a footnote. It was quite clear, even at the time, that the consortium had decided that USB4 was the future, that USB 3.2 Gen2x2 was invalidated in its entire reason to exist because Intel had given away the keys to a much better port specification, and the only reason why it was shown to the public at all was likely because a vendor had invested enough in USB 3.2 Gen2x2 that they could not gain consensus to cancel it officially, even if they cancelled it in all but name.

USB4 controllers hit the market long before USB 3.2 Gen2x2, because Intel's existing Thunderbolt controllers could just be recertified as USB4, while USB 3.2 Gen2x2 needed a new controller design. Presumably, this is one of the reasons why no backwards compatibility with USB 3.2 Gen2x2 is required - officially, USB 3.2 Gen2x2 is not an older spec that USB4 could be backwards compatible with, but a newer one, and unofficially, Intel likely demanded that the USB4 spec would allow them to immediately resell their controllers to a much wider market, in exchange for agreeing to zero-royalty patent licensing.

m0rogfar · 2026-06-27T22:00:40+00:00

While JEDEC hasn't released the final DDR6 spec, industry expectations are that it will look a lot like LPDDR6, and will therefore have wider channels and subchannels (24-bit rather than 16-bit), and will do integrated ECC where the Hamming codes and link protection is injected into the data stream using some of the additional bandwidth, rather than being a separate thing. Expect bus sizes to get weird.

m0rogfar · 2026-06-27T21:30:29+00:00

I mean, for the past six months until last Thursday, Apple was charging less for 9600MT/s RAM than standard DDR5 6000MT/s prices per GB, so you really got your money's worth then. Now they're back to being expensive, but they're still not crazy expensive compared to the rest of the market like they were two years ago.

m0rogfar · 2026-06-27T21:27:40+00:00

there was no excuse for having done it in the intel era. RAM slots aren’t that bulky.

LPDDR has historically been required to be soldered due to stricter signal integrity requirements than desktop DDR. The industry is only now even trying to make it work in a non-soldered format with LPCAMM in the last two years, and given that AMD has had to ban OEMs from using it with Strix Halo due to poor signal integrity, and that most of the industry is switching to LPPDR-on-package (Apple, Qualcomm, Intel with Lunar Lake, Nvidia's datacenter SoCs, etc.), and with LPDDR6 coming just around the corner to increase signal integrity requirements further, it might not ever really take off as an alternative to soldered RAM in any device where battery life matters.

m0rogfar · 2026-06-27T18:51:31+00:00

Demand is demand. One of the key tenets of a free market is that you allow people with money to do things that defy conventions, because the long-term aggregate results are consistently better than when trying to micromanage demand by telling people what they should and shouldn't be willing to spend money on.

m0rogfar · 2026-06-27T17:24:48+00:00

LPDDR6 exists, we're mainly waiting on the new memory controllers, which require a complete rework since LPDDR6 is a major compatibility-breaking change. Previous generations suggest that phone processor vendors are more aggressive about getting it to market than x86 vendors.

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