No One Is Buying Computers Anymore

Even though it's been happening for a

while, I haven't actually made a

dedicated video on this. Can I just rant

about the absolute state of the PC

industry right now? And frankly, not

even just PCs, just consumer electronics

in general. If you're someone that likes

tech or if you're someone who is just

getting interested in tech and you know,

maybe you want to build your first

computer, this is a horrible time to do

so. this is an awful time to do so. I am

a Linux gamer and obviously I care about

things like the Steam Deck. The Steam

Deck did an absolutely phenomenal thing

for both Linux gaming and the Linux

desktop in general. Obviously, Proton

already existed, but it showed the

regular gamer that Linux is actually

viable for gaming as long as you don't

play, you know, multiplayer competitive

nonsense. Everything else, great

experience. It's amazing. And things

have been getting better. Even though

when it first launched, it was in the

middle of a global supply chain

shortage.

And now we don't have a global supply

chain shortage. We have a global RAM

shortage and a global flash storage

shortage. And now the Steam Deck is just

not in stock in most of the world. There

are still third party sellers that are

selling the Steam Deck, but those are

obviously going to dry up eventually.

There's going to be secondhand sellers,

things like that. So, there's going to

be some like stock floating around, but

you just can't easily buy a Steam Deck

right now, which what does that mean for

the Steam Machine? How much of this is

Valve taking any allocation they had and

then moving it over to the Steam

Machine? And how much of this is Valve

just not having anything to build

anything? We don't know what's happening

with the Steam Machine because Valve is

being relatively quiet about it and I

understand why because I don't think

they know what's happening either. They

probably have some numbers that are

floating around, some ideas of what's

going on, but until they are ready to

launch something, it's really hard to

commit to anything right now. So, they

put out this post a little while ago

basically trying to answer some of the

questions like pricing and timing and

things like that. And pretty much what

they said is

due to RAM pricing,

we don't know. Due to storage pricing,

we don't know. I'm sure they had like a

relatively sane price in mind initially,

but when you talk about PC like pricing

now,

that's well over $1,000. And all of this

is because of absolutely ridiculous RAM

and also flash storage pricing primarily

being caused by a massive demand for AI

data centers. prime example of that.

Open AI secured roughly 40% of the

world's RAM supply for their Stargate

project. And that lasts, I believe they

have it until like 2028

or something stupid like that. And

that's just one project and one company.

There are lots of others. And if you're

making RAM, I understand why you're not

selling to consumers. And if you are,

you're raising the price because you

have guaranteed sales going right to the

AI companies, going to the AI data

centers if you're a company. Like that

is logically the thing you would do.

Now, I do wish they would up production

and this would become less of a problem,

but this is the state we're in. What

makes this especially bad is whilst you

as a consumer might go and buy your RAM

dims from all of these different

companies, when we talk about the actual

production of the RAM chip modules that

go on the dims, there's basically three

companies that do 90% of the world's

production. That is Samsung, SKHEX, and

Micron,

who also make the RAM for your GPUs. who

also make not as much but together a

majority of the flash storage modules

closer to 60 65%.

We are seeing DDR5 pricing go upwards of

4x the price within a year.

Modules that you bought like January

last year,

let's say it was uh $200,

$800 for the exact same thing. Now,

there is some very recent reports of

minor price drops in Europe. This

literally just happened like 2 days ago.

I wouldn't put too much stock in this. A

lot of people are going to see this

like, "Oh my god, PRICES ARE FINALLY

COMING DOWN. THIS IS AMAZING. PRICES ARE

COMING DOWN." FIRSTLY, it's a small

drop. It's still upwards of 4x the

price. It's just not 5x the price

anymore. So, that's something at least.

Also, my expectation is they literally

cannot sell it at that price. So, people

are just not buying it. And we'll get

more to that in just a minute. Also, I

would expect that a lot of the people

that were buying RAM anyway probably

have stopped panic buying. So, with less

panic buying, there's less of a sort of

push to raise the price even further.

Without long-term data, it's really hard

to say exactly what is happening here.

But I really don't think prices are

going to just come back down,

let alone come back down to where they

were. I don't think prices are ever

going back to where they were. We're not

going to see prices like this anymore.

What's going to happen is prices will

come down eventually, but I expect still

probably minimum

double the price, probably even more

than that. There is no world where

you're seeing things return to how they

were. You know what happened with GPU

prices postco?

Things are not going back to the way

they were. Things have been getting so

bad that for a while people were buying

up so dim modules which is laptop RAM

and then using an adapter to run that in

their desktop system. It technically

sort of works. It can be a little

unstable, but at least at the time it

hadn't yet been hit by the price hike,

at least anywhere near as much. Even

now, it has gone up. It's just not as

much because there's just way less

interest in laptop memory and getting it

working is

a bit rough. As for regular desktop RAM,

a lot of people aren't even considering

GDDR5 platforms. A lot of them are just

staying on DDR4.

But even then, we are seeing people who

are building DDR3

machines. People are buying DDR3

motherboards, DDR3 memory, older CPUs

that use a DDR3 motherboard, and

we're seeing price rises there.

Now the thing is for a lot of people if

you're not doing like rendering you're

not playing the most up to-ate games on

the highest settings if you just need a

computer frankly a DDR3 machine is

actually totally fine now for some

reason and I don't know how people had

this much copium

there were people going around saying

Chinese RAM was going to save the day

Chinese RAM it's so much cheaper it

works in a regular motherboard oh my god

we just buy Chinese RAM and then and

then everything is good. So, China has

some domestic manufacturers that weren't

really selling globally as such hadn't

really been hit by the price hikes and

it's just regular RAM. It's by some

companies that exist in China. People

started buying the RAM and hey, guess

what happened when they started selling

more outside of China? Um,

they just sold at market rate and then

the discount is is is just gone. What I

will say is having more manufacturers of

RAM is going to put global supply chain

pressure on RAM pricing and probably

will affect pricing to some extent.

However,

there are AI companies in China and

Chinese AI companies are going to want

RAM as well. So, they're not going to

just sit back and just ignore a local

supplier. So this idea that Chinese RAM

would save the day just didn't even make

any sense as a premise. Now RAM has been

the main focus because RAM has been the

most affected by the problem. But flash

memory again is made by mostly the same

companies and also has been having a

price hike. This means your 2 and 1/2 in

SSDs, your M.2 drives, fun stuff like

this. It also means any devices that

happen to have flash storage like you

know phones

and

everything else that has storage

basically because pretty much no one is

using a spinning metal disc, especially

in a device that is supposed to be

portable. It's been nowhere near as bad.

We've seen price hikes in the range of

30 to 60%,

sometimes worse depending on the region.

I recently had to buy a new drive. It

was 400 Australian dollars for a two

terbte drive. I was not happy about it,

but

I had to buy it. I needed the drive. And

that's the problem, right? I needed a

drive. I needed my computer to be

working correctly. You can't just not

buy it. Now, there's secondhand stuff,

but because the primary new market is

going up, the secondand market is also

going to be going up. Also, secondhand

drives can be a little bit iffy.

Secondhand RAM's definitely a lot

better. But again, if you see the market

is saying $1600 for 32 GB of RAM, what's

your secondhand RAM going to be CHARGED

AT? PROBABLY PRETTY close to that. And

while storage isn't as bad just yet,

prices are expected to continue rising

at least for the rest of the year. I

would honestly expect longer. And

when we're talking about businesses,

right, businesses will buy computers

because they have to. But what about

regular people? What are regular people

doing? So, we're also seeing price

raises happening with GPUs, which is

also great. So, here's where we're at.

GPUs are going up. RAM is going up.

Storage is going up. What about the

things that uh don't have those issues?

What's happening there? Well, prices of

motherboards are not going up. But if

you can't buy the RAM for it, if you

can't buy a new GPU, if you can't buy

storage, well, it's pretty logical

what's going to happen.

No one's buying CPUs. Down 51%

yearonear. And the exact same thing is

happening with motherboards. Down 50%

because if you can't build a PC,

why would you buy the parts that haven't

gone up? And if you have a PC right now

and it works,

why would you leave the platform that's

going to charge you a lot more money? If

you have working RAM, like

unless you just really want to upgrade,

you have like a business reason to do

so,

it's really getting hard to justify

actually spending that money. For some

reason early on there were this idea

that like consoles were not gonna be

affected by the pricing. I don't know

where anyone got that idea because

consoles have all of the same problems

that PCs have here. It's just you don't

really get to see the price of the

individual components and well

there's there's there's been some price

hikes. Also sometimes with consoles the

price hikes aren't directly with the

console. It's going to be price hikes

with their subscriptions and other

things surrounding it or game price

increases, things where they can make

back the money in various other ways.

This is happening to the entire tech

industry. Many consumer electronics

manufacturers will go bankrupt or exit

product lines by the end of 2026 due to

the AI memory crisis. Feison CEO

reportedly says this is a problem that

is going to affect everyone even if you

don't have a PC. This is going to affect

phones. It's going to affect tablets.

It's going to affect laptops. It's going

to affect desktops. It's going to affect

consoles. It's going to affect cars. Not

to the same extent because they tend to

have not that much RAM. And the price of

the RAM is very small in comparison to

the rest of the car, but as cars get

more technologically advanced, there's

more electronics, there's more RAM,

there's more storage.

Everything

everything electronic gets affected.

Consumer electronics will see a large

number of failures from the end of this

year to 2026. This was the end of 2025.

Many system vendors will go bankrupt or

exit product lines due to a lack of

memory. Mobile phone production will be

reduced by 200 to 250 million units and

PC and TV production will be

significantly reduced. Oh yeah, didn't

mention that one. Also TVs. Yeah,

because you know smart TVs have lots of

additional RAM in them and

yay. Um, imagine

imagine if you're like you work an

artisan PC builder right now. You must

be terrified about what's going to

happen over the next like year or

actually best case estimates say this is

going to last until like 2028. Some are

even predicting out to 2030. If you're

an artisan PC builder, if you manage to

stay in business for all this time, I'm

going to be genuinely impressed because

if you're a Dell, if you're an HP, if

you have government and business

contracts, governments and businesses

will continue buying whatever you charge

them. But if you're trying to sell to

regular people, you run a gaming PC

company,

I can only imagine that your numbers

probably look pretty similar to what

we're seeing happen to CPUs, what we're

seeing happen to motherboards, possibly

even worse. Another very fun thing

that's been happening is there's been

talk of HP having a gaming laptop

subscription service, a rental laptop, a

lease laptop. Leasing is pretty common

in the corporate world. Lease to own is

pretty common for consumers. But there

is no owning here. There is you are

renting the laptop. Now, is this a bad

deal? The problem

is it's really hard to say that it is

with the way things are right now

because basically it is like 16 to 19

months of the price that you pay to

purchase the device

and you're going to be able to get

upgrades and other things like that. So

I don't like it. I really don't like it,

but it's not a bad deal for a lot of

people, and that's really annoying to

me. I don't like the idea of renting a

laptop. Business is obviously different,

but like a personal laptop that you're

renting,

but with things the way they are,

I see why people might be interested.

funnily enough, um, also

we all know that Apple does like

ridiculous RAM pricing, but Apple has

yet to increase their RAM prices. If

they have, it's been like a very minor

increase. This somehow makes Apple a

good deal for RAM.

I don't know how this world exists.

Obviously, they're going to raise prices

with the next device, but I don't know

how this world exists and how we got

here. So, everything sucks. Everything

is going to keep sucking. And

well, it's a really bad time to be a

young person that wants to get involved

in tech, isn't it? But hey, maybe, just

maybe, this is the excuse people to

write good optimized code. If they don't

have fast hardware, they got to make it

work somehow. That's my copium. That's

my opium.

It's not going to happen. But hey,

maybe. Anyway, what's probably going to

happen is everyone like cloud computing

and nobody owns a computer. And anyway,

um yeah, if you like the video, go like

video. Go rant about your experience

down below. How much you hate everything

right now. And if you really like, go

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the description down below. That's going

to be it for me. And

what do I say?

If it don't involve money, then I don't

accept. If it don't involve money, then

I don't accept.