ASUS Announces Price Hikes Starting January 5

ASUS has informed its partners that prices on certain products will increase starting January 5, just days before the company is expected to unveil new hardware at CES. In a letter dated December 30 and obtained by Digitimes, the Taiwanese manufacturer pointed to rising costs for memory and storage components as the primary driver behind the adjustment.

The company specifically called out DRAM, NAND, and SSD pricing pressure stemming from what it described as "structural volatility" in the global supply chain tied to AI-driven demand. ASUS also cited shifts in capacity allocation by upstream suppliers and higher investment costs for advanced manufacturing processes.

Oh good

[sinkskinkshrieks]

Another reason to avoid ASUS besides poor products and poor support.

Re:Oh good

[thegarbz]

There are very many things wrong with Asus, especially the way they treat any warranty claims. That they haven't been sued yet is a fucking miracle. Their hardware is okay, but every morning you need to pray to any deity you choose to that you won't have a problem with it because if it is you're proper fucked.

You know like how they quote $3500 to fix a GPU because someone had the audacity to plug it in which apparently voids the warranty: https://www.tomshardware.com/p... [tomshardware.com]

Re:

[coopertempleclause]

... at a college level.

Re:

[thegarbz]

Well you could have voted for stronger consumer laws, but hey at least a handful of trans women athletes don't get to play sport now so there's that.

Me? I did vote for strong consumer laws, and I have them. Still I'd rather deal with a good company with good customer service than with the competition regulator or a consumer ombudsman. Been there, done that, the paperwork is a bitch.

Re:

[karmawarrior]

ASUS has pretty good products, their mobos are great. I can't comment on the support because I've never needed it.

Regardless, it wouldn't be another reason to avoid them even if it was a legitimate complaint because everyone else is doing the same thing. You think ASUS is the only company affected by the world wide shortage of memory and other storage chips, thanks to AI and crypto and other techbro frauds?

Screw AI

[WeAreNotStupid321]

I want cheap energy. Cheap electronic devices. Wide open spaces. Screw the energy price increases. Screw the sharp rise in RAM and SSD prices. Screw the massive data centers. So far, AI's contribution to society has been all of the above, plus layoffs and frozen hiring, and more deadly drones. All that for the sake of hallucinating software that will tell you black is white, up is down, and crayons are food? Screw AI.

Re: Screw AI

[Fons_de_spons]

Hmmm I think that is too harsh... It really looks like Ai is an immense bubble, disconnected from reality. When the consequences of that hits us nerds where it hurts, some venting is appropriate.

Re: Screw AI

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Asus seems like a pretty weak candidate for just pulling off a price increase for fabricated reasons. They aren't a small shop; but I can't think of a single product of theirs that doesn't have a fairly ready substitute from another PC OEM or component manufacturer. It's possible that some of their stuff has a reputation that could support at least a modest price premium, I definitely don't know what their reputation is across all areas; but there are more or less direct cross-vendor substitutes that they would need to worry about if they tried to bump prices.

Re:

[Luckyo]

They do not make memory. They assemble things that memory goes into.

Therefore when memory gets more expensive, things they assemble have to also become more expensive to compensate.

Re:

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

No disagreement here. Asus is a totally logical party to be raising retail prices because component prices are going up. I was specifically responding to the claim that 'they' would find 'some other convenient excuse to raise prices, just because they can'; for which Asus seems like a much poorer candidate.

As a basically commodity vendor I'd assume that Asus is very poorly suited to try to mask component prices, because their margins just aren't all that exciting; but as a basically commodity vendor they

Re:

[Luckyo]

To be fair, most people don't seem to realize just how big of a company ASUSTeK is. It's way bigger than just a "commodity vendor". It's a >13 billion USD IT vendor that does everything from OEM to servers and workstations, to routers, to projectors to computers, to phones to monitors and more.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

ASUS' reputation is really bad now because of their absolute fuckery with warranty claims, and the fact that those claims are becoming more frequent because quality has apparently taken a nosedive. ASUS used to be very high in quality and support but now I would only recommend them to an enemy because they are crap at both.

Re:

[leonbev]

Without the AI boogeyman, they would probably blame tariffs or the war in the Ukraine for the price increases instead.

I'm not sure how you make the jump from a war in Eastern Europe to Chinese and Taiwanese electronics costing more, but then I also don't have a Marketing degree. Maybe something about rare earth metals?

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

I'm just not going to buy unless I really have to. I'll wait for the bubble to burst and the flood of used hardware to come.

Re:

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It will be interesting to see how that shakes out. Given the downright absurd debt levels and negative margins it seems unlikely that this gear will avoid the fire sale forever; but it's a lot more specialized compared to what came out of .com bust era equivalents. Even 'normal' GPU compute servers are aimed at relatively specific purposes(and all but the low end ones that are just ~8 PCIe GPUs in a row are even fairly topologically quirky, bunch of nvlinked GPUs and a PCIe topology that depends on GPUs RDM

Re:

[drinkypoo]

After the crash those compute GPUs will be auctioned off... probably mostly to China, whether directly or via intermediary. They will use some of them to bolster their GPGPU farms and yoink the RAM off of the rest, and use it to build consumer GPUs.

During the first big RAM crisis some of my friends made good money dumpster diving for boards with RAM on them, putting the boards over a bowl of water and torching the chips out (melts all the solder at once) and then testing the DRAM chips, cleaning up the lead

Re: Screw AI

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Iâ(TM)m curious whether it will be viable to extract HBM. BGA packages are absolutely doable; but HBM seems potentially more challenging.

You're looking at 4 or 5 years

[rsilvergun]

That's how long the contract open AI has to buy RAM and they have more than enough money from you and me to hold out even if the bubble bursts.

We aren't going to see a bubble burst here because AI really is very useful for replacing white collar workers and billionaires are sick and tired of being dependent on employees and consumers so they're going to spend all the money in the world automating away our livelihoods.

There's no stopping this and there's no putting the genie back in the bottle. But I

Re:

[karmawarrior]

I am patting myself on the back for making a rare call that everything tech was going to rise in price, albeit largely based upon Trump's rhetoric about tariffs, which turned out to be even more complicated than I thought. So late 2024 I built and finished the network servers I wanted, and early last year got my main PC as much memory as the mobo will take.

This one we all have to ride out. What's infuriating is the helplessness I feel as every other article on Slashdot is about someone adopting generative A

Do Monitors Contain Much RAM?

[SlashbotAgent]

Monitor prices are also jumping. Do their monitors contain much RAM?

Re:

[Luckyo]

Where does it say that? The letter being quoted specifically references only two things: RAM and NAND flash/SSD.

Re:

[Zocalo]

It might just be profiteering, but beside a little RAM they do contain other ICs which, like RAM chips, are all made on wafers. Any fab capable of turning blank wafers into ICs that is interested in turning a profit (e.g. ALL of them) are going to be prioritising those lines with a higher profit margin (RAM/GPUs/NPUs) and ramping up costs to match demand. That is eventually going to create a knock-on supply/demand problem for other chips that are not in high demand to fuel AI startups as well, and as supp

Re:

[thegarbz]

Monitors contain parts, RAM is parts, parts prices are rising so they are passing the cost of rising parts to consumers. How they do it doesn't need to align with the BOM of a specific product.

business cycle

[Anonymous Coward]

Meh...I'm fairly well set with my tech gadgets for the foreseeable future. I'm just going to wait for the AI implosion and then refresh my gear once manufacturers wind up with excess capacity/supply again and prices bend back down to reality.

fake news. prices are down 1500%

[Nicholas Grayhame]

you're suffering from extreme tds and you are a disgrace.

/s