rmay635703 wrote on 2026-06-17, 20:51:

Yeah 8tb ssds used to be about $500 for a commodity one, back in ye olde 2024 […]
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Dimos wrote on 2026-06-17, 20:42:

SanDisk's new 8TB PS5 SSD costs $2,959.99, more than three times as much as the PS5 Pro.

https://www.engadget.com/2196530/sandisks-new … as-the-ps5-pro/

Yeah 8tb ssds used to be about $500 for a commodity one, back in ye olde 2024

At the rate we are going the IBM PC 5150 will become the home computer for offline gaming, typing and spreadsheet work.

They will have to relaunch color dot matrix ribbon production.

I realize you are being sarcastic, but realistically things can only get so bad before the indie market starts taking over. Homemade lithography etc. I'm not worried.

As for the SSDs, thank god for RAID 😀

tcaud wrote on 2026-06-18, 05:25:

rmay635703 wrote on 2026-06-17, 20:51:

Yeah 8tb ssds used to be about $500 for a commodity one, back in ye olde 2024 […]
Show full quote

Dimos wrote on 2026-06-17, 20:42:

SanDisk's new 8TB PS5 SSD costs $2,959.99, more than three times as much as the PS5 Pro.

https://www.engadget.com/2196530/sandisks-new … as-the-ps5-pro/

Yeah 8tb ssds used to be about $500 for a commodity one, back in ye olde 2024

At the rate we are going the IBM PC 5150 will become the home computer for offline gaming, typing and spreadsheet work.

They will have to relaunch color dot matrix ribbon production.

I realize you are being sarcastic, but realistically things can only get so bad before the indie market starts taking over. Homemade lithography etc. I'm not worried.

As for the SSDs, thank god for RAID 😀

I'm not bashing spinning rust or Raid here but.

I know you are trying to be upbeat here but conventional spinning rust Raid cannot ever get close to matching a NVME SSD, the one I have transfers at 14Gb/s burst and yes it can hit those speeds even its more normal transfer speeds are between 8 - 12 Gb/s. Raid speeds at best is cope and at worst a raid 0 with no backup. Even a lowly still cheap PCIe 3.0 NVME can still move data far faster than any Raid could hope to hit.

Now if you were talking about capacity . .well yes spinning rust wins that race by a very large margin and really that's its intended purpose and one its perfect for.

Or perhaps you were talking about a more exotic type of Raid using cheap PCIe 3.0 SSDs .. now that would be a fun setup.

tcaud wrote on 2026-06-18, 05:25:

rmay635703 wrote on 2026-06-17, 20:51:

Yeah 8tb ssds used to be about $500 for a commodity one, back in ye olde 2024 […]
Show full quote

Dimos wrote on 2026-06-17, 20:42:

SanDisk's new 8TB PS5 SSD costs $2,959.99, more than three times as much as the PS5 Pro.

https://www.engadget.com/2196530/sandisks-new … as-the-ps5-pro/

Yeah 8tb ssds used to be about $500 for a commodity one, back in ye olde 2024

At the rate we are going the IBM PC 5150 will become the home computer for offline gaming, typing and spreadsheet work.

They will have to relaunch color dot matrix ribbon production.

I realize you are being sarcastic, but realistically things can only get so bad before the indie market starts taking over. Homemade lithography etc. I'm not worried.

As for the SSDs, thank god for RAID 😀

Yeah the guy who is most advanced in home lithography in his garage, might be up to the point where he can sell you an 8 bit 8080 clone or 1 kilobyte RAM chips in a couple of years, so only half a century off catching up to DDR5.

I'd say the bigger market would be ripping modules off shitty SoC's in the trash, and building modular memory from them.

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-06-18, 13:01:

tcaud wrote on 2026-06-18, 05:25:

rmay635703 wrote on 2026-06-17, 20:51:

Yeah 8tb ssds used to be about $500 for a commodity one, back in ye olde 2024

At the rate we are going the IBM PC 5150 will become the home computer for offline gaming, typing and spreadsheet work.

They will have to relaunch color dot matrix ribbon production.

I realize you are being sarcastic, but realistically things can only get so bad before the indie market starts taking over. Homemade lithography etc. I'm not worried.

As for the SSDs, thank god for RAID 😀

Yeah the guy who is most advanced in home lithography in his garage, might be up to the point where he can sell you an 8 bit 8080 clone or 1 kilobyte RAM chips in a couple of years, so only half a century off catching up to DDR5.

Not sure that understand how absurd the idea of home made lithography is or that its highly amusing to even suggest it.

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-06-18, 13:01:

Yeah the guy who is most advanced in home lithography in his garage, might be up to the point where he can sell you an 8 bit 8080 clone or 1 kilobyte RAM chips in a couple of years, so only half a century off catching up to DDR5.

Have you ever heard of this Japanese company called Minimal Fab? They manufacture a set of desktop-size machines that can be used to manufacture chips without requiring a sophisticated chip foundry that would take billions of dollars and years to build. Apparently they don't even need a clean room.

They are suitable for manufacturing chips in small batches, or for prototyping. Basically, 3D printers, but for microchips. 🙂

Their most advanced variant supports a 1000 to 500 nm process node. That puts it in the ballpark of late 1980s to early 1990s. Decades behind what a modern chip foundry can produce, but way more advanced than an 8-bit 8080. You could make 486 CPUs and EDO RAM with this tech. Perfect for retro-computing purposes, actually. 😄

Cost: a few million dollars. Way too expensive for the average mere mortal, but doable for universities and medium-sided companies.

That is downright huge (most fab today a tiny fraction of that feature size!), so chip density will be very poor.

A hot air rework station, and home made pcbs, looks much more practical.

Scoop up discarded 'last year's' shitty SoC crop, pull the components off, then build modular memory out of them.

Far more approachable, with actually useful chips.

wierd_w wrote on 2026-06-18, 14:10:

That is downright huge (most fab today a tiny fraction of that feature size!), so chip density will be very poor. […]
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That is downright huge (most fab today a tiny fraction of that feature size!), so chip density will be very poor.

A hot air rework station, and home made pcbs, looks much more practical.

Scoop up discarded 'last year's' shitty SoC crop, pull the components off, then build modular memory out of them.

Far more approachable, with actually useful chips.

The problem really is that we are allowed to shred functional ewaste despite how destructive it is.

Considering recent events
All functional ewaste is valuable and should generally be banned from recycling in eurozone and American channels.

Based on how polluting ewaste recycling is we would have been better off with the hi desert boneyard approach used with planes that get placed into areas that never rain until a demand to strip components occurs. Could have kept a lot of crap from being piled, burned and leaching into 3rd world tropical regions.

Would have greatly simplified repair channels for old equipment and CRTs.

Sadly we are too shortsighted to understand that electronics from an ewaste standpoint need a 20 year plus life from an environmental standpoint in stark opposition to the disposable phone model where the ewaste costs more than the production of a new phone.

We forgot the reduce and reuse aspects

I'd say the 'mandated shredding' was *purposeful*, because it hobbles secondary markets.

Lines gotta go UP UP UP, you see.

wierd_w wrote on 2026-06-18, 15:01:

I'd say the 'mandated shredding' was *purposeful*, because it hobbles secondary markets.

Lines gotta go UP UP UP, you see.

Well, thankfully, the Right to Repair movement has been gaining steam and has even been winning serious legal and legislative battles in multiple parts of the world.

Interesting idea by the way about more actively salvaging components including RAM chips from e-waste. It's indeed getting to the point where many of those chips continue to be of practical value.

digger wrote on 2026-06-18, 14:00:

Have you ever heard of this Japanese company called Minimal Fab? They manufacture a set of desktop-size machines that can be use […]
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BitWrangler wrote on 2026-06-18, 13:01:

Yeah the guy who is most advanced in home lithography in his garage, might be up to the point where he can sell you an 8 bit 8080 clone or 1 kilobyte RAM chips in a couple of years, so only half a century off catching up to DDR5.

Have you ever heard of this Japanese company called Minimal Fab? They manufacture a set of desktop-size machines that can be used to manufacture chips without requiring a sophisticated chip foundry that would take billions of dollars and years to build. Apparently they don't even need a clean room.

They are suitable for manufacturing chips in small batches, or for prototyping. Basically, 3D printers, but for microchips. 🙂

Their most advanced variant supports a 1000 to 500 nm process node. That puts it in the ballpark of late 1980s to early 1990s. Decades behind what a modern chip foundry can produce, but way more advanced than an 8-bit 8080. You could make 486 CPUs and EDO RAM with this tech. Perfect for retro-computing purposes, actually. 😄

Cost: a few million dollars. Way too expensive for the average mere mortal, but doable for universities and medium-sided companies.

To buy one outright yes. To assemble one yourself (or friends) with the required know-how? Maybe not so much...

School system equipment luquidation auctions might become hot items in that kind of envirionment.

Most (in the usa at least) have a yearly equipment budget that they MUST spend.

Kids are very hard on keyboards and displays, so they 'die' regularly and need replacing. Onboard RAM modules could reasonably be harvested fairly reliably from this waste stream.

Some deals with your local schoolboard could get you these raw materials with preference.

Just saying, there's viable paths for community recycled memory module creation. PCBway and co, open a lot of doors here for skilled tinkerers.

It looks like Apple is going to join the party: Tim Cook recently said that current memory/storage prices are "unsustainable", and that Apple will have no choice but to pass on increased costs to customers; article here.

wierd_w wrote on 2026-06-18, 17:50:

School system equipment luquidation auctions might become hot items in that kind of envirionment. […]
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School system equipment luquidation auctions might become hot items in that kind of envirionment.

Most (in the usa at least) have a yearly equipment budget that they MUST spend.

Kids are very hard on keyboards and displays, so they 'die' regularly and need replacing. Onboard RAM modules could reasonably be harvested fairly reliably from this waste stream.

Some deals with your local schoolboard could get you these raw materials with preference.

Just saying, there's viable paths for community recycled memory module creation. PCBway and co, open a lot of doors here for skilled tinkerers.

I think its been forgotten but harvesting ICs and being able to actually use the ICs are two very different things, ram sure its pretty ubiquitous and data sheets are likely all over for it but other ICs .. not so much, many are proprietary and have no publicly available data sheets on pins outs or are built in such a way that they rely upon other closed source ICs to function . .ASUS is bad for this.

Then you have the current trend of pushing for HBM use or unified memory where there is zero chance of it being able to be harvested or reused. The big corps are not stupid and they know full well the right to repair movement is in full swing, so expect them to make it nigh impossible to actually repair anything even if the law says you can*. They will make it full closed house and impossible to repair outside of shops that have their repair tools. Apple has already done this with their M series of Macs and their Unified architecture.

Except others to follow suit and expect the homebrew markets to find the recycling push to get worse, not that they actually recycle anything but the corps don't want it out there to be reused and they want the secondhand markets gone.

*Sure you can repair the hardware but the software activation and linking that allows that hardware to work.. well that's not part of right to repair and its closed source in house, so sad too bad for you. - Yes Apple and John Deere Im looking at you.

640K!enough wrote on 2026-06-18, 21:54:

It looks like Apple is going to join the party: Tim Cook recently said that current memory/storage prices are "unsustainable", and that Apple will have no choice but to pass on increased costs to customers; article here.

Then why don't they use of that big pile of money that they're sitting on to build out some new chip foundries?

Yes, I know, it would take over a year for those to come on-line even if they started today, but why aren't they?

It's not possible to just "make it happen". The EUV photolithography equipment used by the global industry is only available from one source and is manufactured at a snail's pace, so there's no unused hardware laying around at the current generation of tech, though the "next-gen" systems are rolling out right now, which will displace the older lines that could be repurposed elsewhere. That's why the Chinese are trying to develop their own advanced manufacturing hardware. Any foundry built by Apple or anyone else would take years to get up and running with the "latest and greatest".

It'll be like Q1 2013 when everyone panicked over shortage of 22nm fab space, then by Q3 and 4 a shit load had come online and 22nm got "cheap" ... though that might have ultimately shoved some players out of the game... big gamble... ran a little behind or didn't fill the slots, took less money than anticipated.

Though some fabs upgrade in a rolling fashion, equipment works for 2 or 3 generations, while critical parts are new each gen, so there's never a full plant selloff to get moved elsewhere... then also I think every time the litho machines have someone sneeze too hard near them the one company has to fly guys out to set them up again. So backlog on their techs means you can't move litho willy nilly.

digger wrote on 2026-06-19, 09:59:

Then why don't they use of that big pile of money that they're sitting on to build out some new chip foundries?

Yes, I know, it would take over a year for those to come on-line even if they started today, but why aren't they?

They probably have some bean-counters on staff or contract who said that it would take large amounts of money, time to set up and would reduce dividends. I wouldn't be surprised if they just decided that it is cheaper and easier to just pass on increased costs to their customers, and unless it leads to significant reductions in sales, they will just leave it that way. After all, Apple has never been too pre-occupied about the customer having to pay more. That was one of the core obsessions that Jobs had: cost to produce versus "value" to the customer (meaning how much can one somewhat-reasonably charge, beyond cost-plus-reasonable-margin, without causing sales to implode?).

Even with Intel's production troubles lately, it shouldn't be too far out of the question to be able to produce some amount of consumer-grade memory for a large customer like Apple. One has to wonder why they aren't doing that, when Intel likely has some idle capacity on an older process that would suffice.

AFAIK production increases were always planned - even when 2/3 of the RAM cartel said something to the opposite effect - but were the overly conservative standard of 'business is OK YOY, let's assume some growth next year'. Refusing to immediately meet the (ridiculous) increase in demand might be a sign of these companies acting... uncommonly reasonable about the AI bubble. If they increase production to match the spike in demand and that spike... proves to be temporary they'll be left holding the bag if they're building for a 1000% production capacity increase. Naturally, there's consequences to that, and some of this can be used against the consumer, but ultimately I do think the foundation of all this is just a healthy reaction to someone offering to buy half of the global production for something that wasn't really a thing just a few years prior. You check if they're good for it, if they are you make the deal, but it still looks shady AF.

Cooler Master reacted to the US tariff bullshit by ramping up their stock in the US... that they're unable to sell now because the market is collapsing as no one is building computers. They thought they were thinking when they were making that decision and got FOMO'd into even bigger losses.

wierd_w wrote on 2026-06-18, 01:47:

Shitty SoC based machines will be a noticable regression in capabilities and quality. They most certainly wont fill the niche n […]
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Shitty SoC based machines will be a noticable regression in capabilities and quality. They most certainly wont fill the niche needed by high performance applications, like engineering seats, and so they *cannot* completely subsume the market.

Since they *cannot* completely subsume the market, there will be an avenue for purchase, even at a premium price. The benefits of such ownership will still be there, even if at a premium price.

The mere existence of such options will puncture the ability to fully dictate the market, and as a consequence, manufacturers will produce products to meet the people wanting that freedom, or those options.

Enough people in that category, and economies of scale start to happen, and consumer revolt occurs.

Engineering software will mostly move to cloud compute services. For what's left, corporate IT will give everyone SoCs with 8GB of RAM and hope that the engineers don't know any better (and there's always one loud guy who thinks that a mid-spec laptop is a "beast").

There are already lots of things that should have caused a consumer revolt, but they never resulted in anything more than one angry Facebook post before almost complete acceptance. I think this will be the same.

How old can a laptop get before it isn't worth upgrading because the battery is old and no replacements are available?