This represents a 442% increase 29 months later, about 81% cheaper 2 years ago for a computer hardware part.
TEAMGROUP T-Force Delta RGB DDR5 Ram 32GB Kit (2x16GB) 7200MHz (PC5-57600) CL34 Desktop Memory Module Ram (White) for 600 Series Chipset - FF4D532G7200HC34ADC01
$112.49 - May 2024
$609.99 - Oct 2026
How have things gotten so bad?
Damn for a laptop memory kit WHAT? Oh I think those can be used in a bigger server, maybe that’s why?
My SSD is about 300% as expensive as it was a couple years ago. And advertises itself as “25% off”. But wait! “Savings: 90 days free of Amazon Music with purchase”! So if I purchase now, I can save big by also being tricked into autorenewing a wildly overpriced $13/month ($156/year) subscription I don’t need.
(Aside: I’m sick of monthly subscription pricing breaking people’s sense of value. We should be including the yearly amount next to the monthly.)
I was just doing the same this morning. Looking at adding another 2TB to mine.
I snagged a WD NVMe 4TB for like 370USD a few months ago. They’re still decent deals sometimes!
FYI, you have your lowercase at the wrong end of the acronym. It’s “NVMe”, where the ‘e’ is for “express” – like “PCIe”.
Not all M.2 slots are NVMe capable.
And some motherboards have limited PCI Express lanes and share them between slots… and they may prefer to have other devices using those lanes.
I just ended up buying a used drive on eBay that still had good health.
It was still more than it should have been, but 99% life remaining on a 4TB 2.5" drive for only a 25% premium over the new price 2 years ago is a steal right now.
I’m in the same boat for hard drives. I bought 20 TB hard drives for $360 each three years ago. Today, they’re more than double that price, selling for $880!
The worst part is, I have one drive that’s failing and 5 more in a NAS that are about due to be swapped for newer ones. It’s the worst timing for this price hike!
Huh. I can’t add screenshots to this thread for some reason. Well, you can check their current price on Amazon. I buy the Seagate Ironwolf Pro drives.
How have things gotten so bad?
Because AI companies pre-ordered all the resources needed to build their data centers for the next decade, which means there are practically no computer resources for the average consumer for years to come. Everything being produced is going toward data center development now.
So everything still on the market has gone way up in value, being a rare commodity. Basic supply and demand, except a handful of rich losers have tipped the scale of the market, effectively screwing over every regular person who wants computer parts.
That’s because Crucial is a dead brand. Micron killed their consumer lines and will ONLY sell to AI companies for the foreseeable future.
It’ll be funny to see what they do when everyone can run local models as powerful as Opus 5.5 on their own hardware. It’s really crazy what this debt bubble is doing to the market.
I’ll tell you how things have gotten so bad:
ML researchers finally made a language model that convinces rubes that it is thinking and responding. It passes the Turing test (unless you know how to break it). Immediately, Silicon Valley vultures convinced every other capitalist that they could now eliminate the skilled labor in the United States, just as offshoring had eliminated almost all of the blue collar high wage jobs. Every smarmy middle manager saw bonus potential as they could cut all the costs, and they all become “Director of Transformation, Efficiency, and Vision” at their respective companies. If you weren’t on the AI train you’d be left behind. The future is here! Thinking-machine supercomputers! Oh boy I bet those flying cars you got excited for as a kid in the 1960s are coming any day now.
"Wow, demand is so huge! Hey guys, these models are the BIGGEST most POWERFULEST brains ever, OooOoo they might be dangerous guys (maybe you should even pass regulations that only the most well funded AI companies can meet - for safety!) they’re so powerful. But in order for them to access all your stuff and make decisions, we’re going to need to host them ourselves, and you will need to put all your data in the cloud! That’s right, fire your stinky help desk people, who needs those assholes! Just store all your trade secrets on OneDrive guys! It’s EncryptedWePromise™. Except for when an agent needs them! But we won’t be scanning them all and summarizing everything. Never.
Anyway in order to pull this off we’ll need to buy literally all of the computing component output on earth for several years, maybe 7-10? For the buildout? Yeah in that time it’s going to get REALLY expensive for you to purchase anything but maybe like the most basic tablet with about 4GB RAM and maybe 16GB storage in it. BUT THATS OKAY GUYS because we can run all your favorite apps STREAMED from the CLOUD! Only $16.99 a month per app. There’s even CAD/CAM and Photoshop type stuff, and we have game streaming! You guys LOVE games right? Imagine you have 8 video cards because that’s how many our cloud gives you at once!
So you don’t NEED computers anymore where you can store stuff we can’t see and do communications we can’t read and run software we didn’t authorize! How boring is that? You’ll never have to worry about setting up any of that again, and your kids never need to learn about how any of this works or what is happening to them. We will even taylor your news to your preferences, so you’ll only see the stories that should matter to you.
This system will also keep you safe by verifying your ID so no one can steal your identity anymore! Anytime you do anything on your computer at all, each action will be recorded and summarized by our AI agents in real time with your identity attached to it so that any fraud can be spotted and the accounts immediately closed! No more traitors to the union! Everyone knows it’s those illegal immigrants who came here to do cyberstalking and crime! You wouldn’t let your DAUGHTER go online without a verified ID would you?
Trust us, this is going to usher in a new era of peace and prosperity, where all these annoying problems we have in the world today simply melt away as AI takes care of everything for us. You won’t have a care in the world. It’ll be like living in a dream.
Trust us."
