In the Dwarkesh podcast with Semi-Analysis's Dylan Patel they forecast the phone market will shrink by 50% this year because of RAM prices:
But that’s the high end of the market, which is only a few hundred million phones a year. Apple sells two or three hundred million phones annually. The bulk of the market is mid-range and low-end. It used to be that 1.4 billion smartphones were sold a year. Now we’re at about 1.1 billion. Our projections are that we might drop to 800 million this year, and down to 500 or 600 million next year.
We look at data points out of China from some of our analysts in Asia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. They’ve been tracking this, and they see Xiaomi and Oppo cutting low-end and mid-range smartphone volumes by half.
Yes, it’s only a $150 BOM increase on a $1,000 iPhone where Apple has some larger margin. But for smaller phones, the percentage of the BOM that goes to memory and storage is much larger. And the margins are lower, so there’s less capacity to even eat the margins. And they have also generally tended not to do long-term agreements on memory.
Why this is a big deal is that if smartphone volumes halve, that drop will happen in the low and mid-range, not the high end.
This is an extinction event for the low-cost cell phone companies. How are they going to survive if they can't sell their $100 phones profitably for 2 years? I think many of the low-end companies will simply sell their allocations of RAM and close up shop.
This is my greatest concern. So many small players will be wiped out. Consolidation is assured. Always great for consumers to be under the thumb of increasingly large companies.
There are a bunch of subbrands but there are also a lot of genuine small Android phone companies, especially in China.
Some of these serve some interesting niches that might now disappear due to this DRAM supply issue, e.g. Unihertz for extra small phones or CAT for extra durable worksite phones.
Will it be such a big deal though? Currently people are swapping out their phones for another model that's exactly the same but with a different number at the end of the name every 12 months. This could just mean that the unnecessary churn dies down a bit, and companies taking advantage of it have to find a new line of business.
> Will it be such a big deal though? Currently people are swapping out their phones for another model that's exactly the same but with a different number at the end of the name every 12 months.
I don't think they do that at the low-end (nor the high-end, though that doesn't matter here - higher-end manufacturers have a small margin they can eat into). People on the low-end phones want a new phone, they just cannot afford it!
Even in the mid-end: If you buy a phone which you find to be decent, but affordable, and are not out for chasing the latest gimmick - there is no reason it would not last you 6 or 8 years easily - before applications start assuming the presence of better hardware, or a newer Android version than you have etc. Naturally you will have to protect it from physical damage, and maybe replace a battery at some point.
Because the phones stop working well? I write part of a post, open another tab to go look up some information, come back to the post and what I've written is gone, because the memory got dumped. That's the reality of using an old cheap phone.
And would you consider yourself representative of the phone-buying public in general?
My desktop PC is from 2008 but I'd never consider this to represent anything like common usage. In fact it's so unusual that I get to point it out in posts like this.
This comment makes no sense to me. I exclusively use very low-end phones from Xiaomi. I buy a new one roughly every two years. Each new phone has a better screen, camera, CPU/GPU, charging, and sometimes more RAM/storage.
But it had 4k 60fps video, optical image stabilisation, a "super retina display" etc five generations ago. The specs have kept improving, but it's not a quantum leap in performance.
The same applies at the low end, the grand parent comment even agrees.
You buy a new phone every two years, it comes with a camera, a cpu, a gpu, a host of sensors. Same as phones did two years ago, and ten years before that.
I don’t use my current smart phone in any ways that are different to the iMate PDA2K I had twenty years so.
How often does your browser freeze up when you open a webpage? How often does your phone browser dump its memory when you switch to another tab and then switch back? Eg if you were writing a post and opened another tab to go check some fact then the post in the original tab gets deleted.
Because that's what happens if you use an old cheap phone in the modern day.
I even had a phone that would occasionally just crash when on a heavy website and the onscreen keyboard popped up. That was not at all infuriating!!! Especially when it would crash when I try to refine a Google search.
your comment makes also no sense to me, I exclusively use very low-end phones from Xiaomi since 6 years, and change it only when it's dead or when I can't run my apps (I'm afraid mine won't last 2 years more). Before this I kept my first smartphone (iphone 3GS) for 10.
Forget developing countries, iPhone is a luxury even in some European countries, when rent is 500+ Euros and your take home pay is ~1000. After all the other bills you're not left with iPhone money, which is why 100-200 Euro models of Chinese brands are doing so well.
It's easier to name the countries where iPhone ISN'T a luxury, as you can count them on very few hands.
Many countries would develop much faster if there weren't bombed nor maintain by puppet dictactors from (economically) developped nations (USA and france keep doing this intensively, while countries like Germany dont mind supporting fascist states). (PS: I'm not woke, not even Marxist).
Thanks a lot, Sam Altman / OpenAI. Their little $100bn war chest being used for obstructive / destructive purposes will wipe out multiples of that amount via economic ripple effects. All in an attempt to keep a stranglehold over AI via competitive resource starvation. Basic.
> This is an extinction event for the low-cost cell phone companies. How are they going to survive if they can't sell their $100 phones profitably for 2 years?
This is a great thing to happen, actually. Those phones are all essentially trash that ends up in a landfill within a year or so. They should not exist at all.
Smartphones are widely available on the used goods market though, perhaps even more so than second-hand SBCs or old PCs. The "low and mid range" can be filled by the former high end.
My Samsung Galaxy S3 died after 8 years. EMMC failure. Just started boot looping while I was asleep. Everything gone. Known issue.
My Samsung Galaxy S8 died at 7 years. Some kind of thermal failure, I was able to recover my data by keeping the phone in the freezer while I copied. Known issue.
My Samsung Galaxy S21? I figure I've got another year or two in it before it, too, dies.
Having beautiful dead phones that have never had a broken screen or a hard drop is pretty depressing.
It can also depend on the hardware it's connected to. If the endless gigabytes of Samsung's value-add software are scribbling to eMMC nonstop then it's not surprising the flash is wearing out. A lot of this stuff is masked by the fact that most people swap out their phone for a new one that's exactly the same every 12 months so they never notice this, but if you hold onto a phone or similar device for longer the unnecessary wear starts to add up.
Google Android should get more praise for doing quality control by analyzing and killing apps and processes that attacked the hardware - at least back in the day.
The great filter for incompetence by the big G was real and necessary.
Yeah, the Flash has a wear lifetime. Battery has a finite lifespan too. Anything over five years is pretty good going. My wife managed that with a Nokia 1020, the last and best of the Windows phones.
Like everything else, phones need to be backed up.
I just replaced my OnePlus 5 a couple of months ago at over 8.5 years old. No repairs needed, battery was a bit crippled in active use, especially making calls, but fine for a mostly idling phone. In idle it still lasts longer than a 1.5 year old iPhone 15. I still use it for by backup phone number SIM, as it slowly gets to ~9 years old.
The bigger issue was no more OS updates since 2020, and no Play updates since 2023. The battery can be replaced but getting a fully updated OS is more involved.
OnePlus 5 runs great with custom ROMs, including potentially ones based on mainline Linux as opposed to AOSP. (The Linux support is not as good as OP 6/6T but getting there pretty nicely.)
Too bad they have these long lists of "this doesn't work so well" and I'm too time constrained to troubleshoot for too long or dig for solutions. And I'd also need to replace the battery. It's an option for when I actually have some time.
The device integrity is a bigger deal, this is also a backup for some banking apps so if they don't work it kind of defeats the purpose. I removed all other apps to minimize the attacks surface.
If you're using it as backup for banking apps and the like I totally get not running a custom ROM on it! But you could also set that backup on something even cheaper, any one of the random not-bootloader-unlockable brands, and be left with the OP5 as a Linux phone. You're also right that the Linux support on OP5 is not up to standard yet, this is more of a question for the future if that support improves.
What's cheaper than an already existing phone that would otherwise stay unused or end up in the landfill (recycling center)? It could also be a great experimentation platform, play with Linux on the phone, but the time I have available now leaves little room for this kind of play.
The goal is not "experimentation" but having it eventually as an always up-to-date daily driver once the support for it matures. You're quite right that we're still a bit far from that, though.
>Smartphones are widely available on the used goods market though, perhaps even more so than second-hand SBCs or old PCs. The "low and mid range" can be filled by the former high end.
When new cars got more expensive, used cars got more expensive, too. I expect the same to happen with the phones.
If you're not a phone power user, you can get by on old low end stuff. When my pixel 4a died of a bad screen crack a couple years ago, I replaced it with a random used 4a on ebay for $80. Two years later and it's still completely fine for all my purposes (texting, phone calls, chrome browsing, tolerable camera, etc.), although I still haven't accepted google's deal for a free battery swap yet from sheer laziness. I've learned that I can accept a 90 minute screen-on phone battery, though it's an odd adjustment to make. Again, not a power user.
The free battery deal ended in January, but you're likely better off as mine ended up getting a damaged screen while being transported for mail in (because all local stores stopped doing the program), and they wanted to charge me an extortionate price to fix the screen. Support were useless
When it becomes clear that the insanely expensive AI data center orders are not going to be filled, we can expect a huge reversal in the price of RAM and GPUs. There are 241 GW of orders on the pipeline but only a third of that is under construction and of that third, even less is being quickly finished and brought online, It’s estimated that just 3GW came online last year.
Don't count on it. There's a lot of money in killing other businesses, or even just keeping prices high. Even if the high prices are an accident, there is always someone looking to take advantage of any situation for profit.
I have to agree. You only have to look at car and junk food inflation from after covid.
The prices make no sense, but that doesn't matter, they got away with it and are fighting to hold onto high prices, even as consumers balk. Their solution? Ditch poorer consumers. New cars and (branded) junk foods are luxury items now, apparently.
I had an iPhone 11. It was a good phone. It started giving up in early 2024. I held on with poor battery life until the new iPhones that year and bought the 16 Plus. I'm glad actually because they're discontinued the Plus models, annoyingly.
But I'm glad I don't need to upgrade for the next couple of years. I honestly want to get 4-5 years out of any phone going forward. There's basically no difference between models 12 months apart.
I can see the prices going up this year. IT's already happened to the PS5, which is bascially unheard of.
It really sucks more because the reason for it--AI--is just so godawful and pointless.
I bought my wife an iPhone 11 Pro Max in 2020, and, knock on wood, outside of replacing the battery it has been going on like a champ.
I've offered to buy her a replacement phone but at this point I think she's kind of curious as to how much life she can get out of it.
I have an iPhone 13 Pro Max; I bought it in 2023 but it was a refurb so I don't actually know how old it actually is. Regardless, it's still going strong, and I am hoping it can last through whatever RAM crunch is going on.
>But I'm glad I don't need to upgrade for the next couple of years.
Said the user who didn't learn the lesson.
Apple, you do not own anything, if Apple wanna release an update next month that makes your current phone useless, there is nothing you can do to prevent it.
Apple was caught hacking battery level, hacking users GPS signal, etc.
> AI is the best thing I've seen in 30 years working in software and expensive RAM for 2 years is a price I think is worth it.
I think generative AI is pretty neat, but I'm not sure it's worth the RAM increases. I use Claude like everyone else does, and it's cool, but I am a little concerned at how much absolute low-effort crap is being produced with it.
It has made YouTube considerably worse; there was already a lot of low-effort shit flooding it, but now it's almost cartoonish. A lot of the videos that I'm recommended will have thousands of views, and give kind of a facsimile of a video with "effort", only for me to realize about a quarter of the way through a bunch of AI tropes in the writing and/or the visuals. It has made the already-mediocre experience of YouTube actively bad.
I am also not convinced that the prices will go down after two years. We already have big memory vendors completely leaving the consumer market, and we have these AI companies buying literal years worth of entire production lines of RAM chips.
This is something that could be solved by competitors jumping in to fill the niche, but it takes a lot of time to build new factories for this stuff, I think more than two years.
And if the AI bubble is still going then with datacenter construction going as planned, the RAM shortage will be even more extreme than today despite higher production capacities.
The only two changes that matter to me are: no more iPhone Mini and no more hardware switch to mute the phone. Instead they got a new "thinnest iPhone ever" that's actually thicker than my 4+ year old one when measured honestly.
I would not call any Apple phone even mid-range, and certainly not low-end?
This coming from an android user, that recently bought iphones for my daughters. Paying 600$ for not even top-of-the-line phones does not scream low-end to me.
My company-provided work phone is a base model iPhone, I'd definitely put it in a performance class lower than a flagship from any brand. Certainly not low-end, but I think mid-range would be a fair characterization.
Or optimize the os because I still find 8GB insane for everyday tasks. Ok, gaming I can understand, but most common tasks should be runnable with at most 2GB of memory and that is mostly for browsers.
Its going to be interesting, when big the big AI bubble directly attacks via pricing the government by preventing the sale of surveillance devices. So the bubble will pop- not because it can not sustain, but because its existence is adversarial to government demands for surveillance.
Just checked my Amazon history, and in late 2020 I bought two Raspberry Pi 4s with 4GB memory for ¥6,500 JPY (~$62 USD) each. At the time, they were in somewhat short supply and I payed a little over the $55 list price from a reseller on Amazon.
It looks like the current price on Amazon for the Raspberry Pi 4 4GB is ¥18,800 (~$117 at current rates), which is indeed expensive AF. Oddly, the Raspberry Pi 5 4GB is priced about the same, at ¥18,950 (~$119).
Considering inflation and the speed increases over the 4, the Raspberry Pi 5 price doesn't seem too unreasonable to me. But having the price go up well over ¥10,000 definitely takes it out of the realm of impulse buy and more into something I would only buy if I had a specific and urgent need. So I can definitely see this killing off a good chunk of the hobbyist market.
As it stands, my two older Pis are currently sitting unused in a closet, so I would definitely try to use those before buying anything new.
My big regret at the moment is not buying a 4TB M.2 SSD last year when prices were dipping down below ¥30,000. Now they have more than doubled to ¥65,000 or more. I had one in my cart, but decided not to buy it with the rationale that "well I still don't need the space right now, and the price per TB will probably come down even further by the time I do need it". That is, after all, the way that prices on computer component have worked for most of my life.
I bought a pair of 4 TB SSDs for like $300-350/ea two years ago. I don’t remember exactly.
Around Christmas I tried to order one more. They wanted to above MSRP, like $500. Given the price of everything else I decided to just bite the bullet and do it.
After about a month they canceled my order. Whether that’s because they didn’t actually have one and couldn’t get one, or because they just wanted to wait for the prices to go up further I don’t know.
I went looking again two weeks ago. The exact same drive is back in stock. MSRP is now $1000. Amazon has it “on sale” for $900. Other retailers that often have slightly higher prices are asking $1250.
I built a new desktop in 2023 and repurposed my old desktop for my daughter. The old desktop had a couple of smaller SSDs so I swapped them out for a 2TB Samsung SSD. Paid $99 on Amazon.
The exact same SSD is $479 on Amazon today. It's not a fancy super fast NVMe. It's a slow SATA drive. I have no idea why anyone would even consider building a PC with prices this inflated.
> I have no idea why anyone would even consider building a PC with prices this inflated.
I did recently, specifically targeting lower capacities for the components that have been increasing (RAM and storage).
It didn’t seem like prices would be going down for a while and I didn’t have a desktop pc otherwise, so just went for it. We’ll see how it all plays out but I don’t think it was a terrible decision, as long as prices stay high for a couple years it still makes sense to just suffer through the increases
Those will dry up soon enough. Corporate laptop refreshes will be drawn out as they try and cost save on the increased price.
You also better hope the aliexpress dont figure out a way to get the RAM out of those things because they will start harvesting it for sure if there is money to made.
We're talking about a pi replacement. The Pi 5 is slower than a 10yo laptop. That's gives us a very vast pool of used laptops.
> You also better hope the aliexpress dont figure out a way to get the RAM
That is a real worry and I can see used machines being gutted because selling DDR3/4/5 sticks is way easier and profitable than the whole machine. Adapters for SODIMM to regular DIMM are readily available and cheap, too.
And worse, they're shucking surplus for RAM And SSD's now. I am seeing more and more eBay auctions for surplus PC's sans SSD and RAM. So the second hand market is going to be invaded by the reseller parasites leaving us with $50 CPU-in-a-box and $500+ RAM/SSD parts
I recently did an install of Windows 11 on a machine without TPM
To bypass the check during installation:
Boot the laptop from your USB.
When you see the "This PC can't run Windows 11" screen, press Shift + F10 to open a command prompt.
Type regedit and hit Enter.
Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Setup.
Right-click Setup, create a new Key named LabConfig.
Inside LabConfig, create two DWORD (32-bit) values:
BypassTPMCheck = 1
BypassSecureBootCheck = 1
Close the registry and the command prompt; the installer will now let you proceed.
It's a never-ending cat-and-mouse game, and unsupported hacks like these usually aren't well-received in corporate environments. Decent stop-gap for home use, though!
The Pi isnt a loss leader for user acquisition nor do they get to enjoy Apples economy of scale. Apple can take a small loss on this and it will still be worth it if they retain the users in their ecosystem.
Is there any evidence that’s the case? They always had massively bigger margins than all other PC manufacturers so it’s unlikely they are selling it at a loss even if’s significantly reduced
For most older laptops it's easy enough, you just open them up and take the RAM sticks out. There are SO-DIMM to DIMM adapters to fit a laptop memory stick in a DIMM socket.
In the Dwarkesh podcast with Semi-Analysis's Dylan Patel they forecast the phone market will shrink by 50% this year because of RAM prices:
But that’s the high end of the market, which is only a few hundred million phones a year. Apple sells two or three hundred million phones annually. The bulk of the market is mid-range and low-end. It used to be that 1.4 billion smartphones were sold a year. Now we’re at about 1.1 billion. Our projections are that we might drop to 800 million this year, and down to 500 or 600 million next year.
We look at data points out of China from some of our analysts in Asia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. They’ve been tracking this, and they see Xiaomi and Oppo cutting low-end and mid-range smartphone volumes by half.
Yes, it’s only a $150 BOM increase on a $1,000 iPhone where Apple has some larger margin. But for smaller phones, the percentage of the BOM that goes to memory and storage is much larger. And the margins are lower, so there’s less capacity to even eat the margins. And they have also generally tended not to do long-term agreements on memory.
Why this is a big deal is that if smartphone volumes halve, that drop will happen in the low and mid-range, not the high end.
This is an extinction event for the low-cost cell phone companies. How are they going to survive if they can't sell their $100 phones profitably for 2 years? I think many of the low-end companies will simply sell their allocations of RAM and close up shop.
This is my greatest concern. So many small players will be wiped out. Consolidation is assured. Always great for consumers to be under the thumb of increasingly large companies.
Are there really that many small players? Aren't they all just subbrands of Xiaomi, Lenovo and Oppo?
There are a bunch of subbrands but there are also a lot of genuine small Android phone companies, especially in China.
Some of these serve some interesting niches that might now disappear due to this DRAM supply issue, e.g. Unihertz for extra small phones or CAT for extra durable worksite phones.
Is there any 'guide' to this ecosystem...because 'odd niche communications gear' is always interesting.
Transsion
Will it be such a big deal though? Currently people are swapping out their phones for another model that's exactly the same but with a different number at the end of the name every 12 months. This could just mean that the unnecessary churn dies down a bit, and companies taking advantage of it have to find a new line of business.
> Will it be such a big deal though? Currently people are swapping out their phones for another model that's exactly the same but with a different number at the end of the name every 12 months.
I don't think they do that at the low-end (nor the high-end, though that doesn't matter here - higher-end manufacturers have a small margin they can eat into). People on the low-end phones want a new phone, they just cannot afford it!
Even in the mid-end: If you buy a phone which you find to be decent, but affordable, and are not out for chasing the latest gimmick - there is no reason it would not last you 6 or 8 years easily - before applications start assuming the presence of better hardware, or a newer Android version than you have etc. Naturally you will have to protect it from physical damage, and maybe replace a battery at some point.
But why? I just replaced my Huawei P20 after eight years and only because nobody cares about app sizes and compatibility.
Because the phones stop working well? I write part of a post, open another tab to go look up some information, come back to the post and what I've written is gone, because the memory got dumped. That's the reality of using an old cheap phone.
You just answered your own question.
There's also the issue of phones occasionally getting broken, of course.
And would you consider yourself representative of the phone-buying public in general?
My desktop PC is from 2008 but I'd never consider this to represent anything like common usage. In fact it's so unusual that I get to point it out in posts like this.
This comment makes no sense to me. I exclusively use very low-end phones from Xiaomi. I buy a new one roughly every two years. Each new phone has a better screen, camera, CPU/GPU, charging, and sometimes more RAM/storage.
Take a look at a comparison of the iphone 17 and the iphone 12
https://www.apple.com/iphone/compare/?modelList=iphone-17,ip...
Is the newer model better? Sure!
But it had 4k 60fps video, optical image stabilisation, a "super retina display" etc five generations ago. The specs have kept improving, but it's not a quantum leap in performance.
iPhone 12 wasn't low end
The same applies at the low end, the grand parent comment even agrees.
You buy a new phone every two years, it comes with a camera, a cpu, a gpu, a host of sensors. Same as phones did two years ago, and ten years before that.
I don’t use my current smart phone in any ways that are different to the iMate PDA2K I had twenty years so.
https://www.gsmarena.com/i_mate_pda2k-962.php
How often does your browser freeze up when you open a webpage? How often does your phone browser dump its memory when you switch to another tab and then switch back? Eg if you were writing a post and opened another tab to go check some fact then the post in the original tab gets deleted.
Because that's what happens if you use an old cheap phone in the modern day.
I even had a phone that would occasionally just crash when on a heavy website and the onscreen keyboard popped up. That was not at all infuriating!!! Especially when it would crash when I try to refine a Google search.
Old cheap phone is not the same as modern low end.
your comment makes also no sense to me, I exclusively use very low-end phones from Xiaomi since 6 years, and change it only when it's dead or when I can't run my apps (I'm afraid mine won't last 2 years more). Before this I kept my first smartphone (iphone 3GS) for 10.
This is huge problem for developing countries. Most people here have $100-$200 phones. iPhone is a luxury.
Forget developing countries, iPhone is a luxury even in some European countries, when rent is 500+ Euros and your take home pay is ~1000. After all the other bills you're not left with iPhone money, which is why 100-200 Euro models of Chinese brands are doing so well.
It's easier to name the countries where iPhone ISN'T a luxury, as you can count them on very few hands.
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Many countries would develop much faster if there weren't bombed nor maintain by puppet dictactors from (economically) developped nations (USA and france keep doing this intensively, while countries like Germany dont mind supporting fascist states). (PS: I'm not woke, not even Marxist).
What country would be the stereotypical example you are thinking of? I fail to find any
From the US point of view only:
Historically, most of Latin America.
Very recently: why was Venezuela attacked by the US?
Latin America isn’t a country and Venezuela wasn’t developing in any sens of the word
Also, why are they trying to do a genocide in Cuba?
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Won't matter - if enough people in developing countries can afford iphones, apple will just rise the prices.
Thanks a lot, Sam Altman / OpenAI. Their little $100bn war chest being used for obstructive / destructive purposes will wipe out multiples of that amount via economic ripple effects. All in an attempt to keep a stranglehold over AI via competitive resource starvation. Basic.
> This is an extinction event for the low-cost cell phone companies. How are they going to survive if they can't sell their $100 phones profitably for 2 years?
This is a great thing to happen, actually. Those phones are all essentially trash that ends up in a landfill within a year or so. They should not exist at all.
Smartphones are widely available on the used goods market though, perhaps even more so than second-hand SBCs or old PCs. The "low and mid range" can be filled by the former high end.
My Samsung Galaxy S3 died after 8 years. EMMC failure. Just started boot looping while I was asleep. Everything gone. Known issue.
My Samsung Galaxy S8 died at 7 years. Some kind of thermal failure, I was able to recover my data by keeping the phone in the freezer while I copied. Known issue.
My Samsung Galaxy S21? I figure I've got another year or two in it before it, too, dies.
Having beautiful dead phones that have never had a broken screen or a hard drop is pretty depressing.
I bought a used Samsung and it started boot looping almost immediately, all these issues seem very specific to Samsung
The Seagate of cellphones
>I bought a used Samsung and it started boot looping almost immediately
Maybe that's why the previous owner sold it.
I am noticing something those devices have in common.
My Galaxy Tab also has dead EMMC. My HTC One M8 still works and even holds a day of charge. Too bad Android doesn't support 32bit ARM anymore.
It can also depend on the hardware it's connected to. If the endless gigabytes of Samsung's value-add software are scribbling to eMMC nonstop then it's not surprising the flash is wearing out. A lot of this stuff is masked by the fact that most people swap out their phone for a new one that's exactly the same every 12 months so they never notice this, but if you hold onto a phone or similar device for longer the unnecessary wear starts to add up.
Google Android should get more praise for doing quality control by analyzing and killing apps and processes that attacked the hardware - at least back in the day.
The great filter for incompetence by the big G was real and necessary.
The S3 ran Samsung software for about, oh, a month after I bought it brand new?
I'd been running CyanogenMod until they quit giving updates to the S3.
My Galaxy Note 8 is still going as my main daily music player/backup phone.
My Galaxy Note 4 still works. Had to sideload updated web certificates.
My Galaxy S1 would still be going, but somebody got the charging port wet.
Yeah, the Flash has a wear lifetime. Battery has a finite lifespan too. Anything over five years is pretty good going. My wife managed that with a Nokia 1020, the last and best of the Windows phones.
Like everything else, phones need to be backed up.
I just replaced my OnePlus 5 a couple of months ago at over 8.5 years old. No repairs needed, battery was a bit crippled in active use, especially making calls, but fine for a mostly idling phone. In idle it still lasts longer than a 1.5 year old iPhone 15. I still use it for by backup phone number SIM, as it slowly gets to ~9 years old.
The bigger issue was no more OS updates since 2020, and no Play updates since 2023. The battery can be replaced but getting a fully updated OS is more involved.
OnePlus 5 runs great with custom ROMs, including potentially ones based on mainline Linux as opposed to AOSP. (The Linux support is not as good as OP 6/6T but getting there pretty nicely.)
Too bad they have these long lists of "this doesn't work so well" and I'm too time constrained to troubleshoot for too long or dig for solutions. And I'd also need to replace the battery. It's an option for when I actually have some time.
The device integrity is a bigger deal, this is also a backup for some banking apps so if they don't work it kind of defeats the purpose. I removed all other apps to minimize the attacks surface.
If you're using it as backup for banking apps and the like I totally get not running a custom ROM on it! But you could also set that backup on something even cheaper, any one of the random not-bootloader-unlockable brands, and be left with the OP5 as a Linux phone. You're also right that the Linux support on OP5 is not up to standard yet, this is more of a question for the future if that support improves.
What's cheaper than an already existing phone that would otherwise stay unused or end up in the landfill (recycling center)? It could also be a great experimentation platform, play with Linux on the phone, but the time I have available now leaves little room for this kind of play.
The goal is not "experimentation" but having it eventually as an always up-to-date daily driver once the support for it matures. You're quite right that we're still a bit far from that, though.
Never. I am very gentle to my phones. Thing has one small dot of a scratch on the screen. Never been opened.
iPhones usually live pretty long life.
>Smartphones are widely available on the used goods market though, perhaps even more so than second-hand SBCs or old PCs. The "low and mid range" can be filled by the former high end.
When new cars got more expensive, used cars got more expensive, too. I expect the same to happen with the phones.
> The "low and mid range" can be filled by the former high end.
With the 4-7 year support window on Android? Maybe that's why Google is trying to kill off Graphene et al.
If you're not a phone power user, you can get by on old low end stuff. When my pixel 4a died of a bad screen crack a couple years ago, I replaced it with a random used 4a on ebay for $80. Two years later and it's still completely fine for all my purposes (texting, phone calls, chrome browsing, tolerable camera, etc.), although I still haven't accepted google's deal for a free battery swap yet from sheer laziness. I've learned that I can accept a 90 minute screen-on phone battery, though it's an odd adjustment to make. Again, not a power user.
The free battery deal ended in January, but you're likely better off as mine ended up getting a damaged screen while being transported for mail in (because all local stores stopped doing the program), and they wanted to charge me an extortionate price to fix the screen. Support were useless
When it becomes clear that the insanely expensive AI data center orders are not going to be filled, we can expect a huge reversal in the price of RAM and GPUs. There are 241 GW of orders on the pipeline but only a third of that is under construction and of that third, even less is being quickly finished and brought online, It’s estimated that just 3GW came online last year.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-ai-industry-is-lying-to-you/
Don't count on it. There's a lot of money in killing other businesses, or even just keeping prices high. Even if the high prices are an accident, there is always someone looking to take advantage of any situation for profit.
I have to agree. You only have to look at car and junk food inflation from after covid.
The prices make no sense, but that doesn't matter, they got away with it and are fighting to hold onto high prices, even as consumers balk. Their solution? Ditch poorer consumers. New cars and (branded) junk foods are luxury items now, apparently.
When weren't new cars luxury items exactly?
My last car was new and I bought it in for about $13,000 in late 2016. How is that a luxury?
Somebody needs to redub this with Hanoi Hannah from that video game as the voice of the AI industry.
My iPhone 11 hanging on for dear life…
I had an iPhone 11. It was a good phone. It started giving up in early 2024. I held on with poor battery life until the new iPhones that year and bought the 16 Plus. I'm glad actually because they're discontinued the Plus models, annoyingly.
But I'm glad I don't need to upgrade for the next couple of years. I honestly want to get 4-5 years out of any phone going forward. There's basically no difference between models 12 months apart.
I can see the prices going up this year. IT's already happened to the PS5, which is bascially unheard of.
It really sucks more because the reason for it--AI--is just so godawful and pointless.
I bought my wife an iPhone 11 Pro Max in 2020, and, knock on wood, outside of replacing the battery it has been going on like a champ.
I've offered to buy her a replacement phone but at this point I think she's kind of curious as to how much life she can get out of it.
I have an iPhone 13 Pro Max; I bought it in 2023 but it was a refurb so I don't actually know how old it actually is. Regardless, it's still going strong, and I am hoping it can last through whatever RAM crunch is going on.
>But I'm glad I don't need to upgrade for the next couple of years.
Said the user who didn't learn the lesson.
Apple, you do not own anything, if Apple wanna release an update next month that makes your current phone useless, there is nothing you can do to prevent it.
Apple was caught hacking battery level, hacking users GPS signal, etc.
You don't own an Apple device, Apple owns you!!!
What? Apple support their phones for a very long time. I got 8 years out of my previous iPhone.
I had an iPhone 12 and just upgraded to a 17 because I don't see any point waiting - prices will just increase.
> It really sucks more because the reason for it--AI--is just so godawful and pointless.
Strong disagree.
AI is the best thing I've seen in 30 years working in software and expensive RAM for 2 years is a price I think is worth it.
> AI is the best thing I've seen in 30 years working in software and expensive RAM for 2 years is a price I think is worth it.
I think generative AI is pretty neat, but I'm not sure it's worth the RAM increases. I use Claude like everyone else does, and it's cool, but I am a little concerned at how much absolute low-effort crap is being produced with it.
It has made YouTube considerably worse; there was already a lot of low-effort shit flooding it, but now it's almost cartoonish. A lot of the videos that I'm recommended will have thousands of views, and give kind of a facsimile of a video with "effort", only for me to realize about a quarter of the way through a bunch of AI tropes in the writing and/or the visuals. It has made the already-mediocre experience of YouTube actively bad.
I am also not convinced that the prices will go down after two years. We already have big memory vendors completely leaving the consumer market, and we have these AI companies buying literal years worth of entire production lines of RAM chips.
This is something that could be solved by competitors jumping in to fill the niche, but it takes a lot of time to build new factories for this stuff, I think more than two years.
New Chinese vendors are scaling up, seeing the opportunity for large profits. Prediction: in 5 years half the market will be Chinese brands
Assuming the bubble doesn’t pop first.
It’s amazing how quickly people forget why we only have a handful of DRAM manufacturers in the first place.
Listen to the podcast I linked. 2 years is ramp up time for new memory factories (which are currently being built)
I do not see any linked podcasts.
https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/dylan-patel
And if the AI bubble is still going then with datacenter construction going as planned, the RAM shortage will be even more extreme than today despite higher production capacities.
I replaced my old iPhone XS when they stopped making IOS updates for it. I was also curious what the news ones could do.
Turns out not much more.
I switched from an 11 to a 15 because my friend got the 14 and it took amazingly stabilised videos while snowboarding.
Photos taken in the dark also became much better.
The default photos app can find words inside photos and translate without going on the internet. My wife’s 13 couldn’t even though we had the same OS.
I’m sure there’s more that I don’t even know about.
And it does the word search and image recognition locally, which is the killer feature for me
Anyone can do it in the cloud, but I don’t want them looking at my photos
The only two changes that matter to me are: no more iPhone Mini and no more hardware switch to mute the phone. Instead they got a new "thinnest iPhone ever" that's actually thicker than my 4+ year old one when measured honestly.
I don't see myself replacing mine any time soon.
HODLing my iPhone 8 here. I can’t use a lot of apps, but Venmo and Lyft work on it still.
hanging in there with you. Its a great phone.
I would not call any Apple phone even mid-range, and certainly not low-end?
This coming from an android user, that recently bought iphones for my daughters. Paying 600$ for not even top-of-the-line phones does not scream low-end to me.
My company-provided work phone is a base model iPhone, I'd definitely put it in a performance class lower than a flagship from any brand. Certainly not low-end, but I think mid-range would be a fair characterization.
I wonder if manufacturers opt to install less memory.
Or optimize the os because I still find 8GB insane for everyday tasks. Ok, gaming I can understand, but most common tasks should be runnable with at most 2GB of memory and that is mostly for browsers.
Optimizing the OS won't do anything about shrinking sales when the spec sheet changes.
Its going to be interesting, when big the big AI bubble directly attacks via pricing the government by preventing the sale of surveillance devices. So the bubble will pop- not because it can not sustain, but because its existence is adversarial to government demands for surveillance.
Government will bail out the big tech companies related to the AI bubble when that pops, that's why they're all massive donors to TRUMP INC.
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Just checked my Amazon history, and in late 2020 I bought two Raspberry Pi 4s with 4GB memory for ¥6,500 JPY (~$62 USD) each. At the time, they were in somewhat short supply and I payed a little over the $55 list price from a reseller on Amazon.
It looks like the current price on Amazon for the Raspberry Pi 4 4GB is ¥18,800 (~$117 at current rates), which is indeed expensive AF. Oddly, the Raspberry Pi 5 4GB is priced about the same, at ¥18,950 (~$119).
Considering inflation and the speed increases over the 4, the Raspberry Pi 5 price doesn't seem too unreasonable to me. But having the price go up well over ¥10,000 definitely takes it out of the realm of impulse buy and more into something I would only buy if I had a specific and urgent need. So I can definitely see this killing off a good chunk of the hobbyist market.
As it stands, my two older Pis are currently sitting unused in a closet, so I would definitely try to use those before buying anything new.
My big regret at the moment is not buying a 4TB M.2 SSD last year when prices were dipping down below ¥30,000. Now they have more than doubled to ¥65,000 or more. I had one in my cart, but decided not to buy it with the rationale that "well I still don't need the space right now, and the price per TB will probably come down even further by the time I do need it". That is, after all, the way that prices on computer component have worked for most of my life.
I bought a pair of 4 TB SSDs for like $300-350/ea two years ago. I don’t remember exactly.
Around Christmas I tried to order one more. They wanted to above MSRP, like $500. Given the price of everything else I decided to just bite the bullet and do it.
After about a month they canceled my order. Whether that’s because they didn’t actually have one and couldn’t get one, or because they just wanted to wait for the prices to go up further I don’t know.
I went looking again two weeks ago. The exact same drive is back in stock. MSRP is now $1000. Amazon has it “on sale” for $900. Other retailers that often have slightly higher prices are asking $1250.
That’s 3-4x price increase in 2 years.
I built a new desktop in 2023 and repurposed my old desktop for my daughter. The old desktop had a couple of smaller SSDs so I swapped them out for a 2TB Samsung SSD. Paid $99 on Amazon.
The exact same SSD is $479 on Amazon today. It's not a fancy super fast NVMe. It's a slow SATA drive. I have no idea why anyone would even consider building a PC with prices this inflated.
> I have no idea why anyone would even consider building a PC with prices this inflated.
I did recently, specifically targeting lower capacities for the components that have been increasing (RAM and storage).
It didn’t seem like prices would be going down for a while and I didn’t have a desktop pc otherwise, so just went for it. We’ll see how it all plays out but I don’t think it was a terrible decision, as long as prices stay high for a couple years it still makes sense to just suffer through the increases
Mine were SATA too!
Funny I make cameras around the Pi ecosystem and having 4GB of RAM is pretty overkill, might as well put an LLM on there/vision while you're at it
I did think for more basic cameras I'd use a lower spec Pi like 1GB, I use the full pis now for the high resolution DSI displays
> The price increases bring the 16GB Pi 5 up to $299.99.
Meanwhile, a refurbished corporate laptop with 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD can be yours for $199 [1]
I'm sure there will still be people who want the Pi 5 but at these prices, I ain't one of them.
[1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/327079631563
Those will dry up soon enough. Corporate laptop refreshes will be drawn out as they try and cost save on the increased price.
You also better hope the aliexpress dont figure out a way to get the RAM out of those things because they will start harvesting it for sure if there is money to made.
> Those will dry up soon enough.
We're talking about a pi replacement. The Pi 5 is slower than a 10yo laptop. That's gives us a very vast pool of used laptops.
> You also better hope the aliexpress dont figure out a way to get the RAM
That is a real worry and I can see used machines being gutted because selling DDR3/4/5 sticks is way easier and profitable than the whole machine. Adapters for SODIMM to regular DIMM are readily available and cheap, too.
> Those will dry up soon enough.
And worse, they're shucking surplus for RAM And SSD's now. I am seeing more and more eBay auctions for surplus PC's sans SSD and RAM. So the second hand market is going to be invaded by the reseller parasites leaving us with $50 CPU-in-a-box and $500+ RAM/SSD parts
Windows 11 requiring a TPM is still going to force a decent number of replacements: extended support on W10 is $61 Y1, $122 Y2, $244 Y3.
Delaying that refresh might actually end up the more expensive option.
I recently did an install of Windows 11 on a machine without TPM
To bypass the check during installation:
It's a never-ending cat-and-mouse game, and unsupported hacks like these usually aren't well-received in corporate environments. Decent stop-gap for home use, though!
The EDU Neo is $500, too bad it’s not as versatile.
What is the edu neo
The MacBook Neo’s education price of $499
It blows my mind that a Pi is a significant portion of the cost of it.
And the Pi doesn't even come with a monitor, keyboard, speakers, or power supply!
I’d bet a lot that the Neo has a better SSD in it too.
Having a SSD certainly is better than no SSD.
The Pi isnt a loss leader for user acquisition nor do they get to enjoy Apples economy of scale. Apple can take a small loss on this and it will still be worth it if they retain the users in their ecosystem.
Is there any evidence that’s the case? They always had massively bigger margins than all other PC manufacturers so it’s unlikely they are selling it at a loss even if’s significantly reduced
I mean, it's Apple we're talking about. Selling at margins <50% can probably be considered "at a loss"
For most older laptops it's easy enough, you just open them up and take the RAM sticks out. There are SO-DIMM to DIMM adapters to fit a laptop memory stick in a DIMM socket.
RPis are used in a lot of embedded devices. From industrial IoT to music keyboards. You can't easily use refurbishes laptops for those[1].
--
[1] Korg Kronos with its crazy Intel Atom based architecture notwithstanding.
Those are not in the same order of magnitude in power consumption or physical size. This drastically changes their optimal use cases.
Second hand equipment being cheaper than brand new equipment isn't much of a surprise.
Some people don't want trashy looking crap sitting around their family room in order to save $100