‘Member States shall ensure that, in the cases referred to in paragraph 4 …, after taking its decision, the credit institution immediately informs the consumer of the refusal and of the specific reason for that refusal, in writing and free of charge, unless such disclosure would be contrary to objectives of national security, public policy or Directive [2005/60]. […]’
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
Home PCs are as cheap as they’ve ever been. Adjusted for inflation the same can be said about “home use” Macs. The list price of an entry level MacBook Air has been pretty much the same for more than a decade. Adjust for inflation, and you get a MacBook air for less than half the real cost of the launch model that is massively better in every way.
A blip in high end RAM prices has no bearing on affordable home computing. Look at the last year or two and the proliferation of cheap, moderately to highly speced mini desktops.
I can get a Ryzen 7 system with 32gb of ddr5, and a 1tb drive delivered to my house before dinner tomorrow for $500 + tax.
> I can get a Ryzen 7 system with 32gb of ddr5, and a 1tb drive delivered to my house before dinner tomorrow for $500 + tax
That's an amazing price, but I'd like to see where you're getting it. 32GB of RAM alone costs €450 here (€250 if you're willing to trust Amazon's February 2026 delivery dates).
Getting a PC isn't that expensive, but after the blockchain hype and then the AI hype, prices have yet to come down. All estimations I've seen will have RAM prices increase further until the summer of next year, and the first dents in pricing coming the year after at the very earliest.
Amazon[0] link below. Equivalent systems also available at Newegg for the same price since someone nitpicked that you need a $15 prime membership to get that Amazon deal.
Shipping might screw you but here’s in stock 32gb kits of name brand RAM from a well known retailer in the US for $280[1].
Edit: same crucial RAM kit is 220GBP in stock at amazon[2]
What regular home workload are you thinking of that the computer I described is incapable of?
You can call a computer a calculator, but that doesn’t make it a calculator.
Can they run SOTA LLMs? No. Can they run smaller, yet still capable LLMs? Yes.
However, I don’t think that the ability to run SOTA LLMs is a reasonable expectation for “a computer in every home” just a few years into that software category even existing.
It's kind of funny to see "a computer in every home" invoked when we're talking about the equivalent of ~$100 buying a non-trivial percentage of all computational power in existence at the time of the quote. By the standards of that time, we don't just have a computer in every home, we have a supercomputer in every pocket.
You can have access to a supercomputer for pennies, internet access for very little money, and even an m4 Mac mini for $500. You can have a raspberry pi computer for even less. And buy a monitor for a couple hundred dollars.
I feel like you’re twisting the goalposts to make your point that it has to be local compute to have access to AI. Why does it need to be local?
Update: I take it back. You can get access to AI for free.
It's not a blip and it's not limited to high end machines and configurations. Altman gobbled up the lion's share of wafer production. Look at that Raspberry Pi article that made it to the front page, that's pretty far from a high end Mac and according to the article's author likely to be exported from China due to the RAM supply crisis.
I can get a Ryzen 7 system with 32gb of ddr5, and a 1tb drive delivered to my house
before dinner tomorrow for $500 + tax.
B&H is showing a 7700X at $250 with their cheapest 32GB DDR5 5200 sticks at $384. So you've already gone over budget for just the memory and CPU. No motherboard, no SSD.
Amazon is showing some no-name stuff at $298 as their cheapest memory and a Ryzen 7700X at $246.
Add another $100 for an NVMe drive and another $70–100 for the cheapest AM5 motherboards I could find on either of those sites.
People that can reliably predict the future, especially when it comes to rising markets, are almost always billionaires. It is a skill so rare that it can literally make you the richest man on earth. Why should I trust your prediction of future markets that this pricing is the new standard, and will never go down? Line doesn’t always go up, even if it feels like it is right now, and all the tech media darlings are saying so.
If everything remains the same, RAM pricing will also. I have never once found a period in known history where everything stays the same, and I would be willing to bet 5 figures that at some point in the future I will be able to buy DDR5 or better ram for cheaper than today. I can point out that in the long run, prices for computing equipment have always fallen. I would trust that trend a lot more than a shortage a few months old changing the very nature of commodity markets. Mind you, I’m not the richest man on earth either, so my pattern matched opinion should be judged the same.
> B&H is showing a 7700X at $250 with their cheapest 32GB DDR5 5200 sticks at $384. So you've already gone over budget for just the memory and CPU. No motherboard, no SSD.
I didn't say I could build one from parts. Instead I said buy a mini pc, and then went and looked up the specs and price point to be sure.
The PC that I was talking about is here[https://a.co/d/6c8Udbp]. I live in Canada so translated the prices to USD. Remember that US stores are sometimes forced to hide a massive import tax in those parts prices. The rest of the world isn’t subject to that and pays less.
Don’t forget that many of these manufacturers operate with long-term supply contracts for components like RAM, maintain existing inventory, or are selling systems that were produced some time ago. That helps explain why we are still seeing comparatively low prices at the moment.
If the current RAM supply crisis continues, it is very likely that these kinds of offers will disappear and that systems like this will become more expensive as well, not to mention all the other products that rely on DRAM components.
I also don’t believe RAM prices will drop again anytime soon, especially now that manufacturers have seen how high prices can go while demand still holds. Unlike something like graphics cards, RAM is not optional, it is a fundamental requirement for building any computer (or any device that contains one). People don’t buy it because they want to, but because they have to.
In the end, I suspect that some form of market-regulating mechanism may be required, potentially through government intervention. Otherwise, it’s hard for me to see what would bring prices down again, unless Chinese manufacturers manage to produce DRAM at scale, at significantly lower cost, and effectively flood the market.
You don't need to be a genius or a billionaire to realize that when most of the global supply of a product becomes unavailable the remaining supply gets more expensive.
here’s an equivalent speced pc available in the US for $439 with a prime membership.
So with prime that's $439+139 for $578 which is only slightly higher than the cost without prime of $549.99.
> You don't need to be a genius or a billionaire to realize that when most of the global supply of a product becomes unavailable the remaining supply gets more expensive.
Yes. Absolutely correct if you are talking about the short term. I was talking about the long term, and said that. If you are so certain would you take this bet: any odds, any amount that within 1 month I can buy 32gb of new retail DDR5 in the US for at least 10% less than the $384 you cited. (think very hard on why I might offer you infinite upside so confidently. It's not because I know where the price of RAM is going in the short term)
> So with prime that's $439+139 for $578 which is only slightly higher than the cost without prime of $549.99.
At this point I can't tell if you are arguing in bad faith, or just unfamiliar with how prime works. Just in case: You have cited the cost of prime for a full year. You can buy just a month of prime for a maximum price of $14.99 (that's how I got $455) if you have already used your free trial, and don't qualify for any discounts. Prime also allows cancellation within 14 days of signing up for a paid option, which is more than enough time to order a computer, and have it delivered, and cancel for a full refund.
So really, if you use a trial or ask for a refund for your prime fees the price is $439. So we have actually gotten the price a full 10% lower than I originally cited.
Edit: to eliminate any arguments about Prime in the price of the PC, here's an indentically speced mini PC for the same price from Newegg https://www.newegg.com/p/2SW-00BM-00002
What is your estimate for when memory prices will decrease?
I agree that we've seen similar fluctuations in the past and the price of compute trends down in the long-term. This could be a bubble, which it likely is, in which case prices should return to baseline eventually. The political climate is extremely challenging at this time though so things could take longer to stabilize. Do you think we're in this ride for months or years?
I can’t be more clear: specificity around predicting the future is close to impossible. There are 9 figure bets on both sides of the RAM issue, and strategic national concerns. I say that prices will go down at some point in the future for reasons highlighted already, but I have no clue when. Keep in mind what I myself have said about human ability to predict the future. You would be a fool to believe anyone’s specific estimates.
Maybe the AI money train stops after Christmas. The entire economy is fucked, but RAM is cheap.
Maybe we unlock AGI and the price sky rockets further before factories can get built.
There are just too many variables.
The real test is if someone had seen this coming, they would have made massive absurd investment returns just by buying up stock and storing it for a few months. Anyone who didn’t take advantage of that opportunity has proved that they had no real confidence in their ability to predict the future price of RAM. RAM inventory might have been one of the highest return investments possible this year. Where are all the RAM whales in Lambos who saw this coming?
As a corollary: we can say that unless you have some skin in the game and have invested a significant amount of your wealth in RAM chips, then you don’t know which way the price is going or when.
Extending that even further: people complaining about RAM prices being so high, and moaning that they bought less RAM because of it are actually signaling through action that they think that prices will go down or have leveled off. Anyone who believes that sticks of DDR5 RAM will continue the trend should be cleaning out Amazon, Best Buy and Newegg since the price will never be lower than today.
The distinct lack of serious people saying “I told ya so” with receipts, combined with the lack of people hoarding RAM to sell later is a good indirect signal that no one knows what is happening in the near term.
“A computer in every home” (from the original post I was replying to) does not mean “A computer with the highest priced version of the highest priced optional accessory for computers in every home”
I’m talking about the hundreds of affordable models that are perfectly suitable for everything up to and including AAA gaming.
The existence of expensive, and very much optional, high end computer parts does not mean that affordable computers are not more incredible than ever.
Just because cutting edge high end parts are out of reach to you, does not mean that perfectly usable computers are too, as I demonstrated with actual specs and prices in my post.
The original base MacBook Air sold for $1799 in 2008. The inflation adjusted price is $2715.
The current base model is $999, and literally better in every way except thickness on one edge.
If we constrain ourselves to just 15 years. The $999 MBA was released 15 years ago ($1488 in real dollars). The list price has remained the same for the base model, with the exception of when they sold the discontinued 11” MBAs for $899.
It’s actually kind of wild how much better and cheaper computers have gotten.
I feel bad for their competitors. We need good competition in the long run but over the last few years it's made less and less sense to get something other than an Apple laptop for most use cases.
The thing is, it seems like they are planning to force everyone else out of the market. Acquire all the RAM they can possibly get, leave none for the competition, pray to survive the entire mess.
It's the inevitable peak of the venture capital pipeline, just this time it isn't individual industries (e.g. taxis with Uber, hotels with AirBnB) getting squeezed out by unsustainable pricing - it's the economy at large that's suffering this time.
And it's high time for us as a society to put an end to this madness. End the AI VC economy before it ends our economy.
Perhaps we can call this type of maneuver, "The Sam Altman": Your expensive business's mid-term outlook not looking so good? Why not use all that cash/credit to corner the market in some commodity in order to cripple your perceived competition?
He's not the first one though. The crypto miners used to do the same (I distinctly 'member first GPUs, then HDDs, then ordinary RAM being squoze by yet another new shitcoin in less than a year), and Uber plus the food delivery apps are a masterclass in how to destroy competition with seemingly infinite cash.
> In 6 months you'll be able to get memory chips and GPUs for nothing.
I highly doubt that. Memory chip production takes years to scale up, which is partially a reason why the memory market (both RAM and solid-storage) is so susceptible to "pig cycles" - high prices incentivize new players to join the market (although less likely than decades ago, given just how much capital one needs and how complex the technology has gotten) and for established players to scale up their production, and then prices collapse due to oversupply.
For GPUs, the situation is even worse. During the GPU crypto mining craze, at least that was consumer GPUs so there indeed was an influx of cheap second hand gear once that market collapsed due to ASICs - but this time? These chips don't even have the hardware for rendering videos any more, so even if GPU OEMs would now get a ton of left over GPU chips they couldn't make general-purpose GPUs out of them any more.
Additionally, this assumption assumes that the large web of AI actors collapses in the next 6 months, which is even more unlikely - there's just too much actual cash floating around in the market.
You can't, it doesn't have any video output port per the product brief [1].
Of course, if one is inclined, I'd take a wild guess and say you could try something like Steam Remote, but I wouldn't bet on that actually working out. And even if you could get it working - per an analysis of German newspaper Heise, the bloody thing has less shader compute capacity than the iGPU of AMD's Ryzen CPUs [2]. 30.000€ - and it'll probably struggle running GTA 5.
This is a huge Hail Mary... IMO they'd be better served slowing down the training pipeline, becoming profitable now, hiring a bunch of scientists and figuring out the next AI technology.
Oh, both Uber and AirBnB did get dinged by the courts - but it took them years and the damage was already done, on top of that the fines were laughable.
We need the corporate death penalty aka forced dissolution for egregious cases of misbehavior, we need easier ways to pierce the corporate veil (and I'm more and more inclined to actually support the death penalty here as well, despite the potential for abuse), we need corporate fines to all be measured % of gross income, at least double the profit margin.
... only to the degree it hasn't been manufactured by tabloid media and Russian propaganda warfare, that is.
With every little news about local shootings, robberies, rapes, beatings, thefts, whatever not just making national, but in the worst case international headlines, one might think that Western countries are unsafe hellholes of the likes of actually legitimately failed states - despite criminality rates often being on record lows. Of course parents are going to be afraid for their children, and it's made worse by many Western countries financially only allowing for one, maximum two children.
On top of that, a lot of the panic is simply moral outrage. Porn and "trans grooming" it seems to be these days, I 'member growing up with the "Killerspiele" bullshit after some nutjob shot up a school in the early '00s. My parents grew up with the manufactured fear of reading too much as it was supposed to make you myopic. Again, all manufactured fear by organized groups aiming to rip our rights to pieces.
Parents should relax and rather teach their children about what can expect them on the Internet, how people might want to take advantage of them, and most importantly, that their children can always come to them when they feel something is going bad, without repercussions. When children think that they cannot show something to their parents, that is where the actual do-bad people have an in.
The problems I mentioned aren't real, that's the point.
It hasn't just never been proven that Counter Strike et al cause amok runs, it's been disproven [1]. Consuming porn doesn't make people rapists (although I do concede: the ethical aspects particularly around studio-produced porn do require discussions), and consuming LGBT content doesn't make children LGBT. People are, to the extent that we reasonably know, born LGBT.
The fact that some organizations (particularly religious) have framed these issues as "political" doesn't make them political either.
Very much this. The research points to hours spent on social media - not 'I saw something adult and now my fragile little mind is le bork'.
If you want kids to be healthier you're gonna have to deal with it on the device level at worst, and the healthcare level at best. Include mental health services and counseling as part of a single-payer preventative care plan if you really, really want to save the kids.
"The problems I mentioned aren't real, that's the point."
Can you possibly think that determining what is and is not a valid problem isn't a subjective evaluation?
Even looking at your examples, which are not chosen well for your argument. In each of these you're just shifting the burden of proof to reflect what your values. "No one has proven counter strike causes violent behavior, consuming porn makes people rapists or people can become gay." All wide-open empirical questions. Maybe none of these gets resolved in the near future; they aren't even well-formed questions. Meanwhile parents, governments, policy-makers need to make decisions. If you are very concerned about your kid being violent, you will avoid videogames even as a precautionary measure.
"The fact that some organizations (particularly religious) "
Ah you found an even easier way to resolve the issue, just ignore religious values.
Maybe go after Discord then for doing nothing meaningful against abusive, should we not?
And if that means that Discord has to shut down... well, okay, if that's the price? An organisation that doesn't care about the impact on its host society is nothing more than a parasite or cancer and should be treated as such.
(Besides: if you're aiming at stuff like groups of kids bullying other kids into suicide or self harm - guess what: that existed in times where there was no Internet. It just wasn't widely reported, other than maybe holding a vigil for a classmate who had "passed away")
I'm not debating whether they should ban VPNs for minors with you. I'm providing a counter statement to your ill-conceived thought that this is "all manufactured fear by organized groups aiming to rip our rights to pieces".
> I'm providing a counter statement to your ill-conceived thought that this is "all manufactured fear by organized groups aiming to rip our rights to pieces".
What is making Discord different from the real world? Do we ban kids from going to school because they could get bullied there?
Yes, sure, some content we decide to age-gate in real life... but hell. Our parents perused the VHS porn stash of their parents. Their parents wanked off to Playboy magazines. It has all been bullshit from the start.
> You name the quality directly. You point at it. You own it.
Fun thing: it works even better with Americans and Germans when it comes to negativity, because Germans also express negativity directly. For me, as a German, Americans want to be coddled and they do not like it if you clearly express to an American that he is bullshitting you. Germans (and I'd say, Germanic/Nordic-origin cultures as a whole) don't like wasting time coddling around and sucking up for no reason at all. We're an efficient people, after all.
That's also a part of why Linus Torvalds is such a polarizing figure across the Internet. To me as a German, yes, he could dial down the ad-hominem a bit but that's it. The constant American whining about his tone however is... grating on my nerves. He's speaking the truth, accept it for what it is and move the fuck on.
Oh, and it's also why Wal-Mart failed so disastrously many decades ago when they tried to enter Germany. Ignoring labor rights was bad enough, but we could have let that slide (given that our own discounters were all heavily embroiled in scandals)... but what was just way too uncanny from what I hear from older people who actually lived during that time was the greeters. And it matches up with many a write-up [1].
> Probably because many are purists. It is like how anything about improving Electron devolves into "you shouldn't use Electron."
The Electron debate isn't about details purism, the Electron debate is about the foundation being a pile of steaming dung.
Electron is fine for prototyping, don't get me wrong. It's an easy and fast way to ship an application, cross-platform, with minimal effort and use (almost) all features a native app can, without things like CORS, permission popups, browser extensions or god knows what else getting in your way.
But it should always be a prototype and eventually be shifted to native applications because in the end, unlike Internet Explorer in its heyday which you could trivially embed as ActiveX and it wouldn't lead to resource gobbling, if you now have ten apps consuming 1GB RAM each just for the Electron base to run, now the user runs out of memory because it's like PHP - nothing is shared.
Or these devs & users can migrate to a PWA. Which will have vastly less overhead. Because it is shared, because each of those 10 apps you mention would be (or could be, if they have ok data architecture) tiny.
PWAs have the problem that for every interaction with the "real world" they need browser approval. While that is for a good reason, it also messes with the expectations of the user, and some stuff such as unrestricted access to the file system isn't available to web apps at all.
Each person seems to have their own bugbear about Electron but I really doubt improving Electron to have shared instances a la WebView2 would make the much of a dent in the hate for it here.
> It’s even easier to delete your WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook accounts.
Unfortunately, it's not, at least for Whatsapp.
That's a part of the issue - as there is no open access federation requirement, there are messenger islands. Whatsapp for the non-tech folks, Telegram for those who either are wary of Meta, want gambling, or a service decidedly not affiliated with the American judicial sphere, Signal and Threema for the utter nerds/journalists/activists, iMessage for the Apple crowd, or the now-defunct rich bro network of Blackberry. SMS, MMS or its replacement RCS that the carriers are trying (and failing) to push, I don't even count these given how faded to irrelevance they all are. Oh, and then there are (particularly in the Asian market) all the country specific "everything in one"-apps that Musk tried and failed to convert X to.
And particularly among the non-tech folks, no way to get them to use anything but Whatsapp. Network effects are a thing, hence the EU's push to break up the walled gardens at least a tiny tiny bit, but it will take years until it's implemented.
Ok sure, delete Instagram and Facebook then. That seems easier to start, no?
But you're assuming these messaging apps are something we need and have to have and then solving backward from there.
While I certainly recognize that a society may have made the mistake of going all-in on a proprietary app in order to participate in society (whoops!), I can tell you for a fact that it's not required for any given society to function because I don't have any of these apps and just use SMS and e-mail and I am able to work, coordinate events with friends, make dinner reservations, and send funny videos. I can also vouch for the United States, specifically that such apps aren't required.
So we can clearly separate out that we don't need these apps to function as a society - we can go back to the question of morality. In the US if you are "against" Meta or Mark Zuckerberg or whatever, you can just delete the apps because you don't need them.
What the (hardware) people want doesn't matter, at least as long as the IP owners have the deeper pockets.
"The market can stay irrational longer than you can remain solvent" is a pretty universal saying, and it also applies here - the rational thing for MAFIAA et al would be to give up and engage in universal licensing schemes similar to the lesson the music industry learned well over a decade ago. There, you have virtually every single mainstream artist/band available everywhere... Apple Music, Youtube Music, Spotify, Amazon Music, Tidal, Qobuz and I'm sure I forgot a bunch. Piracy in music has all but vanished as a result.
We could have had that with Netflix, and a lot of IP catalogs actually were on Netflix, but because of naked greed it all splintered up, and everyone is running their own distinct streaming silos again.
The problem is, while Valve has balls of tungsten... MAFIAA et al have the money, much much more of it.
It makes a good underdog story, but unless Valve goes all-in and flashes a notification to every American Steam user "hey, write to your Congress reps to pass a law to fix this shit, and call their office every day until they publicly relent", no PR can force their hand. It took many years for Right to Repair bills to pass, and many of these only succeeded because the people pushing for it (aka farmers) are very well connected to their representatives and have very deep pockets of money.
The other solution is of course mass protests over civil disobedience to outright violence. That can work to force change as well, we've seen many a law changed in the past (most recently at scale during the Covid pandemic), but I don't see any big-tent movement going on against big-co extortion practices.
At least in Europe, PayPal is a regulated bank which means you can hand the case over to the authorities and they can and will help you out.
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