- chunes@lemmy.worldEnglish1 hour
eli5 why can’t someone make their own hardware, sell only to humans, and become instantly beloved and rich
- Canaconda@lemmy.caEnglish26 minutes
Because producing chips requires a complicated supply chain.
- Taiwan. China wants to own it for the same reason they can’t just bomb it to smithereens. Producing chips requires human hardware engineers, possibly thousands depending on the complexity. Each engineer specializes in specific tasks and processes.
The human talent element is the most fragile and least replicable piece of the supply chain.
- Taiwan is close enough to China to take advantage of cheap factory labour for anything that doesn’t require engineering skills.
The geography of Taiwan & China is the backbone of the supply chain.
- Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography systems. ASML from the Netherlands owns the proprietary design for the massive and complex machines that print microchip transistors onto silicon. US/Netherlands have restricted the sale of the most advanced systems to China.
The machines that allow for microchip production are all owned by one company
- In retaliation to the above China has restricted Rare Earth Metal exports to western manufacturers.
Video Game components are now military assets
- Atropos@lemmy.worldEnglish39 minutes
They totally could, but it would take years and a looooot of money to be entirely vertically integrated. I bet at least some groups are considering getting into chip making, but it will be a long time before we see any new players.
40 minutesThey are, but they’re not beloved for it. The companies still selling to consumers now have less competition for fewer available parts, which is why prices are higher.
- AlphaSpellswordZ@lemmy.worldEnglish7 hours
Raising prices that much with no hardware upgrade? I guess I won’t be buying a Steam Deck anymore. May as well get a ROG Ally or Logitech Cloud for that price.
Depends on when precisely you’re in the market for a handheld, because if Valve is raising their prices, everyone will be eventually.
- ms.lane@lemmy.worldEnglish9 hours
They raised it an extra $100 in Australia over the US price.
Should of been increased to ~AU$1320, is actually AU$1429. (AU$1049 last week)
Thanks Gabe :')
$1130 CAD for the 512gb model.
I built my gaming desktop for that price and it has a 4070 super.
Next word generating companies have literally made personal computing unaffordable for the next decade (at least).
have literally made personal computing unaffordable
…not if you buy our XBOX GAME CLOUD!!! and WINDOWS 365!!! rent forever and own nothing! the future is looking bright 🤑 /s
- zqps@sh.itjust.worksEnglish2 hours
Yup. I built my rig when it was just barely affordable and plan to maintain it for many years. It works just fine for the titles I play.
I mainly feel for the enthusiasts and the community and economy they built. Most people aren’t interested in tech they can never hope to reasonably afford. Gone are the times of a new rig every 3-4 years. Gone is the excitement.
unaffordable for the next decade
If you’re talking RAM prices, those are expected to come down in early 2028, so 18-ish months.
So how are they expected to come down? If new capacity becomes available the ai companies would gobble it up again.
- Belazor@lemmy.zipEnglish15 hours
Because there are some signs the bubble might be about to burst. Some of the purchase orders have either been rescinded or downsized, and - ironically - thanks to capitalism AI is becoming unaffordable for some businesses. As popularity increases, AI companies are raising prices and this is leading to human labour once again becoming cheaper than just vibe coding everything.
Sources:
Just ad infinitum? If so, the most profitable venture for any human being to be involved in right now would be RAM production. All of those producers would be expanding, because there would be infinite demand. No, these purchases are capex costs; the kind that they have to do once or every so many years. And the only way it happens every so many years is if the companies currently buying these things survive long enough to replace those parts when they reach their end of life.
I hope people here give Valve the same flack they gave Nintendo and Sony for raising prices.
Hell, the Switch 2 went up $50 and everyone on Lemmy lost their god damned minds in that thread because “Nintendo bad” or whatever. But I’m sure because it’s our sweet baby angel Gabe on his 20 yachts we’ll all be reasonable about the $200+ upcharges.
Look, none of these companies WANT to raise prices on these consoles. It’s just the AI bullshit and stupid ass tariffs ruining everything. That’s what needs to change.
- brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish3 hours
I hope people here give Valve the same flack they gave Nintendo and Sony for raising prices.
Narrator: they did not.
“We can’t get mad at Gabe and Valve! PC Master Race loves not being able to buy physical games and loves buying a license to them from Valve!”
Waiting for the “bu-bu-bu-Game Cards!” response to this. I can still sell a game card.
- DillDough@lemmy.zipEnglish8 hours
Valve doesn’t have 50+ years of hardware experience though. Sony, Nintendo, and Msoft can all swing their big dicks all over that industry and get whatever the fuck they want, Valve cannot.
Valve can and does strongarm the software side all the time, the gaming industry would have died instead of exponentially surpassing the film industry if it weren’t for Valve setting strong precedents.
And finally how in the fuck are you blaming AI at the same time that you are trying to defend Sony? The company that’s adding AI to PLAY THE FUCKING GAME FOR YOU?
- 8 hours
True! I own both and I remember people losing their minds over the switch 1 price increase.
- atrielienz@lemmy.worldEnglish15 hours
They lost their minds because Nintendo said:
Last week, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa told shareholders that the house of Mario had no current plans to raise the price of its $449.99 Switch 2.
Then they raised the price of the original switch and a bunch of the accessories.
Then the tariffs in the US were deemed to be illegal and they sued to get their
moneyprofit back and didn’t want to repay the price increase they passed along to their customers.There’s also the fact that Nintendo was on a lot of people’s shit lists for their litigiousness and other anti-consumer crap they had done so people were already mad at them before they raised prices.
When you look at it that way, Sony (who were also on people’s shit lists for a laundry list of reasons) are no better in many’s eyes.
Also, this completely ignores how small a company Valve is in comparison to Nintendo and Sony. I think that’s the main problem actually. Valve isn’t a hardware power house and they can’t command the kind of sales contracts or parts/fab that Nintendo or Sony can. So they are less likely to be able to withstand raising prices on their hardware as a result. The fact that they have raised prices so late in comparison to their counterparts in the space is interesting even if you don’t find it laudable.
At the end of the day, the backlash that Sony and Nintendo faced wasn’t because of the price increase so much as it was because of all the other stuff.
Requiring proprietary hardware for $80+ games that almost never go on sale or have online subscription services that also keep going up, and then anti-consumer practices like (in Sony’s case) the whole have to have an account to play their games on PC and not wanting to issue refunds where a PS account wasn’t available but people bought the game and oh well we just won’t port our games to PC at all then, and so on.
Like. There’s way more to it than Valve good, Sony/Nintendo bad.
- ms.lane@lemmy.worldEnglish5 hours
It might be better to just go back to the drawing board on that one if even possible-
Scrap the board as is, go for Strix Halo but give it a big fat 150w PPT, give it 4x DDR5 slots instead of soldered LPDDR5X.
Don’t sell it with RAM or an SSD.
- brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish4 hours
That’s not going to decrease the cost, as Strix Halo is expensive. See: the Framework Desktop.
And it needs LPDDR5X, though they could use SOCAMM modules. Framework tried, but I think they ran out of R&D time to work out the electrical gremlins.
At this point, try closer to $1200-$1500, and that’s for the BASE model.
- FatVegan@leminal.spaceEnglish21 hours
Pretty sure it always was. Tge steam machine was already fucked by the time aome random guy wrote an article that just randomly assumed it’s gonna cost 500 dollars for no reason at all
- lordnikon@lemmy.worldEnglish24 hours
Oof I mean I’m glad they are back in stock again but that stings. I do see valve being the only company that would lower them as soon as they are able though. Public shareholders wouldn’t let them if they were public.
Nah, that’s not true. All of these companies would absolutely love to charge less for the console up front so that they can get recurring payments out of you elsewhere. It was a regular occurrence for decades that console prices would drop dramatically over time.
- 23 hours
Less of an issue with Valve. They don’t have as much of a need for a hardware loss leader since they earn from Steam regardless of which hardware it’s running on.
As I understand it, none of the consoles are loss leading these days.
- Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldEnglish1 hour
Yeah I’ve got a ps5 and psvr2. I did spend a little money near the start of having the VR on a couple games I bought through their online store, but have since given Sony $0. No psplus subscription (or even much temptation to get one; I have no idea what it even gives you and don’t really care either way), no new game purchases, though I have given EB games some money for used games.
Not sure how typical of a user I am (eg someone else did buy all of those used games new at some point), but loss leading would have just been giving me cheap hardware for no other benefit to them.
It shifted into “fuck you no more money” when I broke one of the VR controllers and found out that there was no way to get a new one without buying a full VR set and getting it serviced involved sending the whole VR set to them. Ended up fixing it myself but the thing left a bad taste in my mouth. So greedy, wasteful, and/or lazy.
- 23 hours
If they structure their supplier contracts anything like the auto industry does, that would only be because they are on the back end of the product’s production lifecycle.
I think they lost the appetite for loss leading around the time the PS4 and Xbox One came out. I have no insider information, but this is what I tend to hear from those that do. Nintendo famously doesn’t loss lead, and that’s a long standing policy, but the latest word on Switch 2 is that their price increase keeps them profitable but with smaller margins than they had when it initially launched.
- ParlimentOfDoom@piefed.zipEnglish18 hours
Well, yeah, were a decade into the generation. If you’re still manufacturing a console at a loss 10 years after release you fucked up huge somewhere
- SparroHawc@piefed.worldEnglish22 hours
Also, by virtue of the fact that the Deck and Steam Machine are de-facto PCs, if they made those products loss-leaders, they would get bought up to use for non-gaming purposes and reduce availability for their intended audience. The same thing happened to the PS3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster
- barnaclebutt@lemmy.worldEnglish21 hours
I guess I’m not buying the steam machine. It sure seems buying technology is an investment now.
- 19 hours
When the US “banned” the sale of routers, I went out and bought one I didn’t need as a backup. Not so much an investment as it is an insurance policy against technofascism.
- TheGoldenV@lemmy.worldEnglish24 hours
Holy hell what a jump! Yeesh, I’m glad I got one in January, but there’s no way I’d be paying 1k for it.
- thlibos@thelemmy.clubEnglish20 hours
LOL. I mean imagine paying such inflated prices for such little storage capacity before the our vile AI overlords decided that silicon was for AI not humans? There is no way I will ever buy anything going forward other than an entry level smart phone and a single Linux PC until China stabilized silicon chip pricing. There is no way I am replacing even those two items before we see how things play out over the next couple of years. Leased computing with thin client device that connects and uses an ISPs servers for computing power? Nope, go fuck yourself.
