• TheMurphy@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    188
    ·
    2 years ago

    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.

        • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          41
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          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.

        • Aceticon@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          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.

    • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      24
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      2 years ago

      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.

    • akrot@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      2 years ago

      There are plenty of other players on the SSD marker. Crucial, WD, etc. I predict that their prediction will be wrong

      • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        2 years ago

        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.

        • Kiwi@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          2 years ago

          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

  • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    150
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    2 years ago

    Spreading rumors of price hikes, to justify later price hikes and quell customer outrage over it.

    Capitalism 101.

    • roofuskit@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      24
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      2 years ago

      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.

        • roofuskit@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          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.

      • trafficnab@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        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

      • 4lan@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        2 years ago

        so they are treating computer parts like diamonds now? Faking supply shortages to increase demand, therefore prices?

        Capitalism is so efficient.

        • roofuskit@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          2 years ago

          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.

      • scottywh@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        2 years ago

        I think they’re underestimating how long reduced demand can continue… Especially when they make things even less affordable.

    • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      18
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      2 years ago

      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.

  • hark@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    44
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • Thermal_shocked@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      20
      arrow-down
      4
      ·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • hark@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        2 years ago

        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.

    • hips_and_nips@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      While I love the thought, I’m not going to hold my breath on replacing my 880 TB of spinning platters with SSDs.

    • tetris11@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      arrow-down
      18
      ·
      2 years ago

      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.

      • hark@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        12
        ·
        2 years ago

        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.

        • Aceticon@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          2 years ago

          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).

      • scarilog@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        12
        ·
        2 years ago

        I’d suggest you do some research on 3d printing, you seem sorely misinformed about it’s capabilities

        • tetris11@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          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.

      • voracitude@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        10
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        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.

        • tetris11@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          2 years ago

          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

      • Guest_User@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        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

    • Aceticon@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      2 years ago

      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.

  • Smacks@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    2 years ago

    PC part prices are already extremely high, how in the hell can anyone build or buy anything with prices so high?

  • yamanii@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    2 years ago

    I wonder if it’s gonna be a fire or a flood this year. They always make stuff up to raise it.

  • N00dle@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    2 years ago

    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 …

  • Squizzy@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    2 years ago

    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

  • foggy@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    arrow-down
    18
    ·
    2 years ago

    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 😊

    • puppy@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      14
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      2 years ago

      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?

      • foggy@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        arrow-down
        21
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        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.

  • poopkins@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    arrow-down
    23
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Since this community has already established that piracy* is justified, and we need our SSDs to store all our morally rationalized but illicitly obtained copies of content we enjoy but don’t want to spend money on, how do we now proceed? Obviously we won’t spend money, it’s the entire reason we’re pirating in the first place. This leaves us with only one option: we’ll have to be modern-day Robin Hoods and shoplift these SSDs, because fuck corporate greed.