This is a pretty big tell that it has nothing to do with AI, it’s just price gouging for price gouging sake’s. Data center setups don’t use consumer level PSUs and CPU coolers. If anything, their price should be going down given that the rise in RAM, SSDs, and GPUs are leading to people building less PCs and waiting longer to do so. The supply for these components should be going up due to excess supply.
Data center setups don’t use consumer level PSUs and CPUs.
CPU coolers, not CPUs.
And presumably the raw materials are the same for server PSUs and heatsinks, which is the explanation (true or not) for price hikes given in the article:
The company explained that prices for key upstream materials such as copper, silver, and tin have continued to climb over the past few months due to global market conditions.
These mother fuckers are nickel and diming us on fucking tin now? That’s how you get riots
Thanks for the correction, I meant CPU coolers, which ironically are even less affected by the “key upstream materials” you quote since they are mostly made out of aluminum alloys. The price hike on raw materials, while real, is much less than the effect of surplus should be on the market, and they affect everything through inflation. Don’t just take their word for it, look at the 10-year historical graphs, they follow a general trend.
At this rate, my PC will be in service into the 2030’s. Crazy considering I built it like 8 years ago.
i guess i will finally be forced to go through my steam backlog.
PC will be
ina service into the 2030’sI think this is the main goal, otherwise you can’t fully enslave consumers/citizens.
So glad I built mine last year. I still wish I had gotten a bit more ram but I didn’t realize that the price gouging I was fighting at the time was just the beginning.
Are you all ready for subscription based PCs? Because they are going to make sure that’s the only way you can afford decent hardware.
Or it’ll be like buying a used car, 36 monthly payments and your PC will finally be yours!
I think we’re already there.
More like you’ll access better hardware over the web with a subscription fee.
And NVidia are ramping up their subsciption prices already…
Nvidia already does this with their game streaming service. Buy cheap hardware for yourself, then play games as if you’re running a 5090.
But eventually you won’t have a choice. They will make they hardware entirely unaffordable.
Im skeptical of this. I think the opposite might happen, at least in terms of supply. Ramm/GPU price hikes are all supply driven. If no one is building/buying a computer due to increased ramm/GPU prices, then I bet a lot of PSUs/coolers/cases and other consumer gear that isn’t used in the datacenter will be overstocked.
When theres increased demand, companies raise prices because of scarcity. When theres decreased demand, they raise prices so they can make their profits over fewer units sold.
This works in a vacuum, but falls apart once you have competition to drive prices down. That said, the world is falling into cartels that price fix anyway.
Basic economics is understamding supply-demand. Advanced economics is knowing when it’s being manipulated.
I have to agree. I mean come on, cpu coolers? There’s nothing proprietary about them, nothing particularly high tech or difficult to produce, it’s a heat sink and a fan… Fancy ones may have a coolant loop, but still… I just can’t see any reason that prices would go up noticeably for such easy to manufacturer, commodity parts.
I’m just saying, it seems a little early to start screaming “the sky is falling”.
Power Supply OEMs: “Hey! We want in on the price gouging too!”
This has nothing to do with needing semiconductor and micro controller factories though. You can build these from any electronics fabrication company on earth pretty much, so I expect that a bunch of people will fill in the gap if the prices start going up like crazy.
This timeline sucks
CPU cooler, as in, cheap-ass fans and a slab of metal with fins? Is that hard to come by too? Or is it professional grifters at work…
This is why we can’t have nice things.
(I know radiators are more than metal slabs, fans can be quite elaborate, and there can be liquid in the mix, but seriously)
Give me enough time off and I can make my own CPU cooler. There’s no way a shortage is happening, this is non-news trying to grab clicks.
Especially since servers can do more sophisticated cooling systems than the average home user, like dunking the entire system in oil.
Just trying to kill the DIY PC market. You will buy the Paystation, Xbox, and Steam machine and like it. No user upgradable hardware. Only upgradable models. All non-console GPUs, CPUs, and DRAM are for AI alone.
That implies there’s some thought behind this. Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.
Never attribute to profit?
Sure… but I don’t think there’s any particular malice towards people that build PCs. Just greed and incompetence. Gotta buy up GPUs that there isn’t enough electricity to run to drive up the share prices!
But when the bubble bursts and hardware gets cheap, is that something we’d considered to be goodwill towards people building PCs? Or will it just be a side-benefit of incompetence?
Just ebbs and flows of incompetence to me.
I figure I would just stop at greed. I don’t think there’s incompetence, they know what they’re doing to maximize profit. Our concerns being DIY PC builders are pretty low on their radar.
Bezos was talking about computer rental being the future of the market.
Presumably with him reaping the rewards.
Yeah, just read that article here. Follow the money. They never stop enshittifying, trying to force people into walled gardens that are as shittily built and expensive as possible.
I feel super fortunate for having just built a new machine just months ago. Otherwise I would have had to dial down the specs a lot.
In any case this AI thing has got to topple
I am trying to decide whether to buy a chassis, because I am not sure if this style would be around when DDR6 is released. The Thor Rosewill V2 went extinct, so I might buy the Thor NAS.
I wish that there was a Thor V3.
This literally makes no sense, unless they’re claiming the crisis will hit entire metal industry and basic electronic parts like fans and caps
Then again, beginning to manufacture basic parts is not a question of years, if such demand happens, it will be solved fairly quickly
ok so what stocks to buy?
