Generative “AI” data centers are gobbling up trillions of dollars in capital, not to mention heating up the planet like a microwave. As a result there’s a capacity crunch on memory production, shooting the prices for RAM sky high, over 100 percent in the last few months alone. Multiple stores are tired of adjusting the prices day to day, and won’t even display them. You find out how much it costs at checkout.

    • notabot@piefed.social
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      8 days ago

      It wouldn’t be quite so bad if the previous gold rush ended first, but they seem to just be stacking up.

    • Em Adespoton@lemmy.ca
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      8 days ago

      It’s why I started treating computers as commodities — I rarely upgrade anymore; just wait the 5 years and by an entirely new system.

        • Pope-King Joe@lemmy.world
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          8 days ago

          This is about my upgrade cadence, except for storage. I ran my Ryzen 1600 until the 7000 series dropped and upgraded mobo+RAM at once for about $600.

          I then moved the old parts to another case to use as a low load server only for both the motherboard and CPU die within a few weeks. 🫡

        • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
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          8 days ago

          Yeah, i think the correct response to planned obsolescence from the side of computer manufacturers is to exclusively buy products from companies who have produced long-living machines in the past.

          That gives manufacturers an incentive to make the machines they produce last longer, instead of shorter to sell newer products more frequently.

    • mack@lemmy.sdf.org
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      8 days ago

      because we’re in an era where there always will be a gold rush for a specific component. upgrades have slowed down considerably in the past 10 years, my laptop is 4 years old and still kicks like the first day, I still game on my 8 year old laptop which is permanently attached to the TV and running as a steam machine with more than decent performance.

      this wasn’t even thinkable in the 00’s

      I’m pretty sure after hard disks, GPUs, rams the next shortage is either Arm CPUs or a specific future type of PSUs