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I asked AI what humans could do to prepare for AI being everywhere, and it said “suffer”
Wow the tech is really advancing
Price per GB is at normalized 2007 levels. However that’s a useless metric as the amount of RAM required to run average computing tasks is much greater.
he cannot think of an instance where technology hardware prices reverted to levels from decades before.
Not as large an increase, but as we’ve mentioned before, the 2011 Thailand floods flooded a substantial portion of the world’s hard drive production capacity, which had been concentrated in an area that was hit, and hard drive prices roughly doubled for about two years.
Thailand is the world’s second-largest producer of hard disk drives, supplying approximately 25 percent of the world’s production.[76] Many of the factories that made hard disk drives were flooded, including Western Digital’s, leading some industry analysts to predict future worldwide shortages of hard disk drives.
As a result, most hard disk drive prices almost doubled globally, which took approximately two years to recover.
You have to either have a massive reduction in supply (as with the Thai floods in 2011) or a massive increase in demand (as with AI memory users today). It’s not common for something large enough to swing the needle that much.
In the early 1980s dram prices went through the roof, that’s why the Vic 20 used static ram. The price fell in the mid1980s when the Koreans began manufacturing dram.
And just as hard disk prices were on the verge of getting to pre-flood trends, AI increased their prices as well. Gotta save all the stolen training data somewhere.
Hard drive prices returned to their pre-flood level a decade prior to the AI boom.
The first website with data going that far back I found is pcindex.app. to be fair, I’ve never heard of it, but their data for 1TB HDDs follows what I emotionally remember; prices skyrocketed in 2011 after the floods, then stayed higher forever after. They started getting more reasonable in 2019, but the AI boom have since sent things off again.
That’s why I wrote “trend”. Prices were about to reach 10 € per TB before the flood. For new drives.
So, being specific, what are you claiming? That the rate of change in price over some time period (what time period?) was comparable and accelerating and you believed that it would continue to increase?
Basically, yes.
I bought a new drive every two years or so for about 100 to 150 Euros and it was always double the size of the last one. Moore’s Law style. The next one would have been an 8 TB one. I don’t think that was an unrealistic expectation.
Then the floods happened. Yeah, we’ve seen 4 TB drives, maybe even 6 TB drives for that price. But not 8 TB or I must have missed them. I was lucky to get some 12 TB drives for about 140 €. But they were refurbished and one is already dead.
The whole discussion is moot either way. The floods happened and besides that inflation and AI are hell bent on keeping the prices up for us mortals.
Was there some peak in 2007 for some reason? I don’t remember that.
RAM manufacturers were colluding to keep prices high, as I recall. There were convictions.
Edit: Back when governments actually did anything about all this bullshit. Ah those were the days.
Edit edit: Hooooly cripes. This should just about tell you all you need to know about how shitty corpos are: On 5 April 2006, Sun Woo Lee, Senior Manager of DRAM at Samsung Electronics, entered into a plea bargain with the US Government for his involvement in the price fixing conspiracy. Following the plea agreement he was sentenced to 8 months in prison and fined US$250,000. Lee was subsequently promoted to President of Samsung Germany in 2009, and then President of Samsung Europe in 2014.
Conviction = promotion if you made the company money
2007 had a strong economic middle class who could afford shit.
The middle class is a 50s era lie.
The middle class only existed when there’s a miserable lower class to shoulder their burden I.e., black, asian, Hispanic immigrants.
Once there was a push for more equal rights, the “middle class” magically faded away.
The middle class exists as a buffer for the rich. The rich want the poors to think doctors, lawyers and engineers are the rich people they should be angry at instead of the truly rich.
The middle class arose - in Europe at any rate - well before the 50s, before the United States which your perspective seems to assume, even existed.
The concept of the middle class is a thing, the label came about later but for Americans when they talk of the middle class it is strictly referring to the middle class of the 50s which oddly magically faded after civil rights movements occurred
I’m afraid I’m not gonna just take your word for that.
That’s not really a reply to what I was saying but okay, oddly hostile.
You can read about it on Wikipedia lol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_class
American middle class is different.
Nah, the middle class is shriveling up because we tolerate meager taxes on the ultra rich and stagnant wages. Fix the tax code and form some unions, and I think you’d be surprised how much the middle class could rebound.
No, that time’s gone. The climate crisis will make sure that that sweet home you bought from your union wages won’t survive until you’re old… If you don’t die early to starvation thanks to the collapse of agriculture.
