Thread

1. redsymbol · 1789989280 · focus · HN ↗

   Right now, every company that can is ramping up their RAM production as much as humanly possible. There is such outrageous and growing demand, that it's like printing money if you can manufacture more RAM chips. And that massive financial incentive is driving huge investment in manufacturing capacity.

   But someday, that demand will stop rising.

   At some point, most people will have enough RAM. And they just won't need to buy more.

   The inventories of RAM will become overfull, in warehouses and stores. And suddenly the manufacturers, middlemen, and even retailers will all find the price they can sell at keeps dropping.

   But you can't shut down a huge manufacturing facility overnight. You can't shut down a years-in-the-making retail distribution system overnight, either. You can't even shut down a facility that is halfway finished with construction. They'll keep producing and selling RAM at lower and lower profit margins, until the day comes they finally accept they're losing money with each sale.

   And when that happens, we'll all have more RAM than we know what to do with. It'll be cheaper than we have all ever experienced in our lifetimes.

   I don't expect this to happen soon. But demand cannot keep exponentially rising forever. There will come a point, probably in the next 5 years, when demand at least levels off, even as production capacity is still rising.

   And it will be interesting to see what's possible at that point. We'll be able to create software that is not doable right now, because it will no longer be constrained by memory. And even cheap laptops will massive amounts.

   1. ricardobayes · 1789989636 · focus · HN ↗

      Yeah, that's kind of the beauty of capitalism. It can lead to short-term shortages but never structural ones. Any demand gets immediately fulfilled.

      I grew up in a country where there was a structural shortage of say, shoes and cars. You didn't really even get to choose which shoe you wanted to get, when there was a new shipment, folks went to the "department store" and got whatever size they could get their hands on and later trading it for the right one. To get any car, you would submit an application and 5-8 years down the line you would get a letter that your car would now be ready to be picked up, in a random color.

      1. maxglute · 1790022777 · focus · HN ↗

         This bizarro take, HBM is a triumph of non market, industrial policy. HBM is product of autocratic chaebol industrial strategy + markets (which =/= capitalism) at work. The reality is SKHynix corporate autocracy kept nonprofitable HBM going for 10+ years until it turned into unobtanium by chance, any normal capitalist+market system would have strangled HBM dead years before - Murican brand capitalism - Micron couldn't have done what SK did. HBM is literally inefficient Chaebol department store holding stock of useless misallocated shit 10 years ahead, and through sheer serenity (arguably in face of SK mismanagement) became the trendiest product around, and now positioned to reap rewards from market signals. Meanwhile memory companies that operated off capitalist impulses (intel, micro, gf) years head and can't respond to signal at all.

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