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Sony Shuts Down Nearly Its Entire Memory Card Business Due to SSD Shortage (petapixel.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 97 points 5 months ago (5 children)

Glad I'm stocked on memory cards that should last me for a while.

There is, however, a bigger problem that's not addressed - manufacturers seemingly only playing nice to big corporations while screwing the end customer.

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  • [–] 50 points 5 months ago* (4 children)

    It's mask off time for capitalism. Business to person sales are no longer lucrative. All the money is in company to company now. See AI companies buying out entire present and future stock of PC parts until 2030. Regular people are no longer needed in this form of society. That's why the market goes up while job numbers and employment go down. The economy can now support itself without anyone else.

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  • [–] 28 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Except that it seems a lot of these trades are on-paper, and not involving the actual transfer of goods. The data centres aren't getting built. The servers aren't going in them. The power isn't being supplied. The tokens are not being generated. At least... It's only a fraction of what they are all saying.

    Some auditor is going to have a field day.

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  • [–] 21 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    Yes but who actually cares? If society tolerates no actual real physical transfer of goods and leaves it all speculative, it doesn't matter. The deals are made, financial institutions accept this, realistically it doesn't matter that none of this is "real". If society decides that it's real, it's real. Just like how paper money has zero real tangible worth. It's all an agreed upon concept. The same is happening here.

    The economy we had for the last handful of decades is gone. Speculative economy where only the top percentage trades with itself is where we are at and where we will stay.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    It can't be completely circular. There is an end customer that will expect something for their money eventually. Right now it's driven by huge amounts of debt, but you can't be on that forever. At some point it unwinds

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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    It seems that end point is government bailing out banks using taxes, and people are paying more for the same due to inflation, while their salaries do not catch up with the cost of living.

    This seemingly happens in US right now.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago

    The rationale for bail out the banks previously was that the retail arms (what you and I use) were so intertwined with the commercial arms that allowing the commercial part to fail caused the loss of everyone's money. Regulation was introduced (at least in the UK. I don't know about elsewhere) that ring fenced the two from each other, making future bailouts unnecessary. The commercial arm would shoulder the risk of its own investments.

    Doesn't stop corrupt politicians bailing them out though.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    What you're describing is not a structural change. What you're describing has happened before. You're describing a bubble.

    I do think there is a structural change, similar to how there has been for the arrival of computers, the arrival of the internet, the arrival of covid and WFH etc. LLMs have changed how many people will work. However. They aren't able to replace workers.

    The onlystructural concern I have currently is that the models and processing power become out of reach for all but giant corporations and data centres. As there are open models and much of the changes are happening across many companies and individual programmers, I don't see that happening. Perhaps the best models and training data will be out of reach but there are enough people vested in open source and proficient, that should things start to get out of reach and computing become less available, I'd expect that to change. Similar to how windows led to Linux which is now better.

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  • [–] 8 points 5 months ago

    And now that they've had this incredible windfall, this is what they'll expect from now on.

    That kind of thinking has ruined lots of businesses, like the movie business. Titanic made ridiculous money, so now that's all anyone wants to invest in. Why put your money in a smaller project that will make millions, when you can our the same money in a project that will make billions?

    So great small movies never get made, while there are tons of crappy expensive movies instead, because the only real consideration was about the profit, never the art.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Well eventually someone has to consume something for all of this to make sense, no?

    Also isn't this more the result of unhinged capitalism without any real workers pushback?

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    Nope. This can keep going on. Big businesses with all the capital will continue doing trade exclusively with other big businesses and government. They don't need our money anymore. And it's not like we're really going to have any trivial amounts of money anyways.

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  • [–] 8 points 5 months ago

    And what does that money represent anymore at that point?

    Seems too many have forgotten that its the peasant's labor that gives money any value.

    Money doesn't produce anything.

    What's the value of a dollar if it can't buy you bread?

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (1 child)

    There is zero evidence that this supposed AGI can actually maintain itself, let alone it's owners.

    If they trade goods with each other, but leave us to starve and die, they eventually won't be able to buy food, coolant, maintenance, ANYTHING with their fake money.

    I don't see anything that can work in the real world yet.

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  • [–] 21 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Manufacturers are supply constrained and they are basically selling to those that pay the most. Prices are above what most consumers will pay, so consumer lines become unsustainable.

    The big question is what happens when they are no longer supply constrained. Will they be able to start the consumer lines back up again?

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  • [–] 23 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Consumer lines aren't unsustainable for them, they were able to sustain themselves with them just fine. They just aren't maximally profitable.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    What they mean by unsustainable is that for the price it costs them to stock these means selling them to consumers at the existing price would not make any money, and the amount of money they’d have to raise the prices by in order for it to be profitable would stop consumers from buying it altogether.

    Essentially, there’s no way to sell them to consumers in a way that will make money. Therefore they have to sell to big corporate customers in order to make any money at all. These companies are not lacking in corporate greed, but in this case there’s literally no other option.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 child)

    That look like white washing corpo. What changed which make their existing line go down. Aren't they building the RAM they sell ? Look like the make any money at all part is fake news. I look more like they think selling to corpo is more profitable than selling to humans. Why take 90 when you think you can take 150 selling to corpo. Édit : my bad I though they were building their own.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    What changed which make their existing line go down.

    Costs go up, but they can’t raise the price anymore. This makes line go down.

    Aren't they building the RAM they sell?

    No they don’t. Sonys semiconductor subsidiary makes image sensors, not the type of RAM that goes into a PlayStation for example.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    The big question is what happens when they are no longer supply constrained.

    I can't see that happening unless the AI bubble pops and their insatiable demand for more hardware ends.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Manufacturers only have a limited capacity of production and want to make money. It’s a much better business to sell all your production’s capability for a few months to one customer for a fixed price, instead of selling to thousands of small customers for a highly volatile price. In the worst case you produce stuff, you can’t sell or have to sell at a loss. A factory standing still and not producing is also expensive.

    A factory with all machines running, all people working, all product selling at a good price is the ideal state for a manufacturer to be in.

    Big customers bring stability and predictable profits.

    Production capacity for in demand products will increase over time. Likely these same manufacturers‘ profits will be invested in more production capacity, optimizations, cost savings, etc.

    In a few years this will result in cheaper and available consumer products.

    General purpose computers have been fast enough and had enough memory for a decade now. I bought a quad core (8 threads) laptop with 16 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD, 2 GB VRAM twelve years ago. Around the same time I built a NAS with an HP Gen8 microserver, also with 16 GB of RAM for ZFS. That one I recently upgraded with a better CPU for 20 €. Both of these machines still perform really well for most tasks. I haven’t upgraded my phone in 5 years, and my tablet in 8 years. These start to show their age because of the small amount of RAM built in. Last week I bought high end EIZO monitors from 8 years ago for 50 €. These are fine!

    Ask yourself, are you even doing things that are limited by your hardware? If you are limited by hardware, could buying a last generation high end machine fill your needs? If you need vast amounts of computing power, renting cloud computing might be a solution as well.

    If you actually make serious money with your work computer, then paying 8k for a machine will pay for itself over a few months.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

    General purpose computers have been fast enough and had enough memory for a decade now. I bought a quad core (8 threads) laptop with 16 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD, 2 GB VRAM twelve years ago. Around the same time I built a NAS with an HP Gen8 microserver, also with 16 GB of RAM for ZFS. That one I recently upgraded with a better CPU for 20 €. Both of these machines still perform really well for most tasks. I haven’t upgraded my phone in 5 years, and my tablet in 8 years. These start to show their age because of the small amount of RAM built in. Last week I bought high end EIZO monitors from 8 years ago for 50 €. These are fine!

    Ask yourself, are you even doing things that are limited by your hardware? If you are limited by hardware, could buying a last generation high end machine fill your needs? If you need vast amounts of computing power, renting cloud computing might be a solution as well.

    Yeah, I generally agree with your points. I dislike the push to planned obsolescence with everything. I'm also trying to maximise the life out of things I have and I buy a little less often even if under normal market conditions I can afford new things whenever I want.

    I'm a hobbyist photographer (so almost everything I throw at the hobby is out of pocket) and recently made a jump to higher megapixel cameras (the megapixel increase wasn't a requirement, more of a side effect). I have a pretty adequate AM4 PC, but suddenly the 32 gigs of RAM that it has don't quite cut it. Could've maybe bought 64 back then, but opted not to. It's still a workable situation, just not ideal. Had to replace a dead SSD recently (the Phison controller ordeal), swallowed the increased prices on these as well (because the old one was "luckily" just a few months out of warranty). As for the RAM, before the price boom I could've gotten a decent 64 or even a 96 GiB DDR5 kit for 500-ish EUR (to add to a new CPU and mobo) - and now both cost 1500+. Upgrading the existing also wouldn't be exactly easy because when I built it I hunted a very specific combination of frequency and timings - just buying anything would cost as much as it did when it was brand new. Should've jumped to AM5 last year, I could've even sold the current things at a profit now, but who would've known... At this point it's a market crisis after another market crisis - maybe we should buy and never look back at the prices the next day.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    A lot of people seem to think I'm we're crazy for not getting a new phone every year or two. Previous one lasted 7 years, this one is at a bit over 5 years... It's fine.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    True enough, my previous phone I kept until my banking app stopped working (my very, very old version of android was no longer supported) and my current phone is from 2019. I don't think people need new phones/tablets/computers every year.

    However.. eventually I'm going to be needing a new computer. My desktop is about 6 years old now. And if it broke down right now, I don't even know if I could afford to build a new one, unless I build one that's worse than the one I currently own - and probably way more expensive than it was years ago (the RAM price alone is insane already).

    And my phone won't last another 6 years either. Although, who knows, it might. It seems indestructible so far, lol.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    I've been dreading the new computer as well. I built the original incarnation of my current one in ... holy shit, late 2013. I was thinking 2016 but I just looked up the order and it was 2013. I did it pretty damn "top of the line" because I wanted it to last ages. I have occasionally upgraded or replaced drives, GPU, RAM, power supply, but I'm still on the original board+CPU.

    It's still great... running Linux and occasionally gaming.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    Wow, yours is a bit older than mine. Hopefully mine will keep functioning that long as well! I don't honestly think it'll break down any day now, but you never know. Things are known to happen, and when they do happen it's always at the most inconvenient of times! Also, my computer is very heavily used, every day. Lots of games too.

    I was surprised about my phone. I don't even know how many times I dropped it already and the battery is still good enough to survive an entire day. Truly, I dread getting a new one. I always hate having to figure out the settings, downloading and installing every thing, and configuring the thing exactly the way I want to. If it were up to me I'd keep using the same one forever, but I doubt even my stubborn phone will outlast me. ;)

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