Amazon Hikes Hardware Prices By 60%, Blaming Memory Shortage (techcrunch.com) 51
Amazon has raised the prices of its hardware devices by as much as 60%, blaming "significant increases in memory and storage component costs." TechCrunch reports: The price explosion impacted Fire TVs, Echos, Kindles, and Eeros. One egregious example that's been cited is that of the Echo Dot, one of Amazon's cheapest smart speakers, the price of which jumped 60% overnight, from $49.99 to $79.99. Price-tracking sites like CamelCamelCamel show the stark uptick, which has previously hovered much lower. [...] The company also said that it would continue to offer occasional promotions to customers over the course of the next year. Amazon said in a statement: "The consumer electronics industry is facing significant increases in memory and storage component costs. After absorbing these increases for as long as we could, we recently adjusted pricing across our product lines."
Irritating but not really surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Irritating but not really surprising (Score:3)
They always run deals to discount their tech by 35-50%. So now we pay full price.
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I'm Not Anti-AI (Score:5, Interesting)
I use AI daily to write code ... a lot. And I love the technology.
However ... the narrative that "AI makes things better" is increasingly looking like an (industry-motivated) myth to me.
Pros: I can write code faster and easier (and generate diagrams and poorly-written English text). That *is* nice.
Cons: AI is adding adding trillions of gallons of greenhouse gases to a planet that is already starting to die (plus all the other costs of data centers). We're making all other electronics more expensive, slowing the pace of all other tech development. We're losing our ability to read and write (both code and English), our ability to assess academic achievement, and our ability to monetize the web (in a sustainable way).
Honestly, despite being very pro AI, I do question whether its benefits actually outweigh its costs.
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Not likely. In about 20 million years all complex plant dies from lack of CO2. It would have been more like 2 million if we hadn't pumped a lot of stored CO2 back into the atmosphere.
Not a lot of time for anything else to evolve into a technological society before any kind of complex life dies.
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Nope.
"the atmospheric concentration of CO2 will fall below 150ppm (parts per million) in 100 million years, which will eliminate plants that use solely C3 photosynthesis. Further studies have shown that this threshold will probably not be the end of the biosphere however. C4 pathway photosynthesis can persist to CO2 values as low as 10ppm. Those levels should persist for another 1 to 1.5 billion years."
https://atoc.colorado.edu/~van... [colorado.edu]
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C4 pathway photosynthesis can persist to CO2 values as low as 10ppm. Those levels should persist for another 1 to 1.5 billion years.
So our lawns will survive.
I wonder about CAM plants - desert plants, and tropicals like pineapple? That's pretty similar to C4.
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Your timetable is way too aggressive. Yes, plant life will eventually die from lack of CO2 - but that's expected to be no earlier than around 400 million years from now - and possibly as far as 1 billion.
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"Maybe they'll go to the stars." Nope, you cannot get there from here. Unless.....you are an idiot like Marc Andreessen who is somehow pissed that he isn't being swamped with accolades over something he thinks he has done. His idea is that AI will produce a singularity, transport his brainwaves into it (presuming it doesn't die from brainrot), and thence launch himself outward into the cosmos leaving behind an Earth he helped trash by producing his stupid singularity. Literally, that is his plan, read his c
Re:I'm Not Anti-AI (Score:4, Interesting)
There's a theory that if our civilization regresses to a pre-industrial state, or if indeed humanity dies out completely and some other species becomes sapient in the future and starts building its own civilization, this future civilization will never be able to achieve any kind of advanced technological level again.
The reasoning goes something like this. A civilization can't come up with new technology just by some smart guy sitting in a cave thinking things up. You need a certain level of social stability and organization, advanced enough agriculture, and most importantly ubiquitous technology that's just a bit less advanced than technology you're trying to inevent. Which in the end all comes down to resources. In the pre-industrial age it'll mainly be metals, for early industrial civilization coal, then gas, uranium, etc etc. Not sure if gold and silver are necessary for civilization.
However resource extraction also needs a certain level of technology. So you have a chicken and egg problem here, you can't have technology without resources, but you can't extract resources without technology. Our civilization was able to overcome that because there were widespread resource deposits that required only very primitive technology to exploit. Surface deposits, open-pit mines and so on. Those were depleted early on, but by that time we developed better technology and were able to use harder to get to resource deposits.
However for a hypothetical future civilization that bootstrap process won't be available. All the easy to get to resource deposits have already been depleted (by us) and all other deposits require technology which they don't have. So they'll be forever stuck at a pre-industrial level.
I don't know if I totally believe that theory, it'll depend on whether they could find a way to use the mines that were left over from our failed civilization, or if they could repurpose many artifacts left over from us. Or perhaps that hypothetical future civilization could base its technology on different resources than we did. It seems at least reasonably plausible though.
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Humanity deserves to go extinct.
You should talk to Peter Thiel about having him install you as the next VP. You'll fit right in.
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I am curious how this all plays out; it is cash flow negative, capitalization negative, and at least on the surface unlikely to have a major change. But, scarcity is a business model so maybe that is the real answer. It seems much more likely than the step-change necessary for more advanced systems.
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Challenging one religious narrative with another doesn't help. You don't have to believe in the religion of hydrocarbons do understand the tangible and easily measurable impacts of speculative data center expansion.
I do entirely agree with the assessment that we're losing our cognitive engineering skills. That is a real issue. I've written about it here:
https://battlepenguin.com/tech... [battlepenguin.com]
We're also nowhere near global capacity for
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I do entirely agree with the assessment that we're losing our cognitive engineering skills. That is a real issue. I've written about it here:
Lately seeing crazy interactions from customers where they are given instructions in a couple of paragraphs and turn around and do something completely different. Or they will ask a question when the answer to the same question is in the preceding sentence written in nearly identical language as their question. Numerous customers have started doing the equivalent of looking for the "any" key / reading teleprompter instructions aloud.
I'm not all that sure what is going on. Is it coincidence? Are people f
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This is looking like the railroads to me. Massive investment in a massive buildout that massively changes the world, mostly for the better.
And nobody cared? (Score:2)
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I supposed Kindle readers will be upset, but Alexa is garbage.
What has the former got to do with the latter, other than both being Amazon products?
I like my Kindle, but I agree that Alexa is garbage.
Trade Ins? (Score:4, Insightful)
So the question becomes, where is the new trade-in industry hungry to rip the chips out of all of my older unused devices to pay me top dollar?
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Saving my upgrades... (Score:4, Interesting)
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And who is to blame for the memory shortage? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm pretty sure that Amazon is one of those institutions that's all-in on AI so they can join in the attempts to take over every business in the country.
Maybe they should just say "We're upping our prices because of our own greed and lust for power, just not in the usual way."
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Whether it's profit or not depends on whether people buy anyway. I've decided "no upgrade this year".
The free market (Score:3)
Bad news. the so-called free market does not care, if your devices are too expensive then demand will fall.
There will be a reckoning with the bungling of the memory component supply chain. Too many industries have staked their business on a handful of manufacturers and went for spot pricing and low inventory overhead over hedging through contracts and second source warehousing on the components they need to build devices.
Because consumer electronics margins have been so bad, we're seeing multiple parallel failures across OEMs, and compounded by a tightening of many whitebox foreign imports into the US that would help in the lower tier pricing that dampens the demand for mid tier products.
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Chinese equivalents will fill the space using Chinese memory and storage.
Re:The free market (Score:4, Interesting)
Great for China, but the North American economy is weighed down by escalating tariffs. We're on track to look a bit like Brazil in the 1980's with different root causes to our economic woes.
TLDR: don't care (Score:2)
I wasn't a consumer of those devices, nor do I expect to become a consumer of those devices.
That said, I do take some umbrage at the increases in costs for devices I DO care about, but Amazon isn't the producer of any of those.
Re: TLDR: don't care (Score:2)
Deceptive Business Practices (Score:3)
Nobody wanted this (Score:2)
Pause non-essential purchases (Score:5, Insightful)
I think most of us should try to pause our non-essential purchases. I can understand that Amazon has to increase prices because of component costs going up. But, we are not forced to play this game. Most of us can hold out with the gear we already have. If enough of us did that, and I think many will, it will cause a sharp decline in demand. And that might actually help the component shortage problem after a while.
The frontier AI labs are losing billions of dollars every quarter. The open source Chinese models are getting really really good. The music will eventually stop.
Re: Pause non-essential purchases (Score:2)
It's easy for those of us who built a new PC right before things went nuts. I only wish I'd built a newer one instead of carrying on my tradition of building a last generation machine when the new generation machines show up to drive down the price, then it would be more future proof. Who knows how long this will persist...
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Damnit.
I figure memory prices will return to sanity in the next year or two. When my computer will be... 8. Not great for a gaming machine. Which I built during the last supply crunch, so my timing has sucked for a while now.
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On an individual level, definitely. On the level of society, that will make the upcoming crash and long economic crisis harder.
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Really, a lot of us in I.T. should have seen this coming.
Earlier in the year, my significant other was still gaming on an Alienware laptop that was about 3 generations behind on its nVidia GPU and had issues like a non-working trackpad (someone messed up the ribbon cable inside it while replacing dying cooling fans in it). We found a high-spec upgrade for it at the local Micro Center, selling for around $3500 with an RTX5090 in it, 64GB RAM, etc. Just about all of our friends advised us not to dump that kin
How much of this are they responsible for? (Score:2)
For how much of this are they responsible? (Score:2)
Common problem (Score:2)
I was looking at replacing some of my security cameras with newer models and noted the manufacturer
( Ubiquiti ) now adds a fifteen percent tarrif and memory surcharge to the overall price.
Over nine cameras that I would need to upgrade, that's an additional ~$600 I would have to spend were
I to pull the trigger on the upgrade as of today.
As a result, I think I'll wait until my cameras actually fail and need to be replaced instead.
Hopefully, this pricing stupidity will have subsided a bit by then.
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