BRB, buying winrar stock.
Glad I just bought a 4tb gen 3 drive for dirt cheap
By what magik are they able to “predict” a 50% price increase ?
Setting expectations…
Market Manipulation Lvl 1: Hyping
Man I cannot wait for The Day Before!
They plan to raise prices 50%, then they raise prices 50%.
My employer isn’t any better. We raised prices on our second biggest product line about 6 months ago.
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
Then the journalist who wrote the article is absolutely lying to us.
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.
Maybe they should cut the executive class salaries. Bet there is plenty of money there.
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.
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.
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
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.
I think they’re underestimating how long reduced demand can continue… Especially when they make things even less affordable.
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.
Butter the bun before the bake
Yep pure market manipulation
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
You couldnt even get a good 4tb sata ssd for 50€ what made you hope for nvme?
I thought Moore’s law was only for CPUs/chip density?
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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).
Yeah, spend $200 on a 4tb m.2 gen4, or $200 on a 18tb hdd
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.
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
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
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.
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?
Unregulated capitalism some would say, I say cheap production costs with little to no consequence whatsoever for them doing this kind of thing.
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.
Exactly, if forced scarcity was regulated, we’d be in an entirely different situation. For instance diamonds would be practically worthless.
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.
I wonder if it’s gonna be a fire or a flood this year. They always make stuff up to raise it.
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Wait what? Link?
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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!
Maybe this will encourage devs not to make games over 100GB.
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
Hahahaha! Good joke mate :)
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.
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
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.
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”
Are you from the future?!
Even better… He’s from the past.
Rinse and repeat
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.
That’s capitalism for you 😉
More like monopoly.
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.
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?
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.
Never, not in our free markets!
At least a duopoly for the illusion of competition
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.
PC part prices are already extremely high, how in the hell can anyone build or buy anything with prices so high?
Nice, I bought 10 TB of SSD (6 for workstation, 4 for server) this year. And I have 3.5TB of USB SSD available. Workstation already had 2tb, but I expanded because I crossed the 1tb threshhomd.And 16tb HDD, and another 8tb HDD via USB available.
I’m good 😊
Having a sigh of relief is understandable. But saying “nice” in a situation where others suffer is a bit in bad taste, don’t you think?
No, not in the slightest. I’m happy for myself. Sorry that makes you upset.
There’s nothing wrong or selfish about that.
Nobody needs SSD storage. My timing was good. Get bent.
Lack of SSD storage killed my cat, so speak for yourself.
I’m hoarding all the SSD to kill all the kittens, obviously.
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