Comment by TacticalCoder

> I’ve already started buying cheap old business PCs just in case I’ll ever need to have simple barebones machines to run things on.

Hmmmm...

That's a bit dramatic. I did buy a few SSDs when RAM prices started going up for I didn't want to be facing a shortage of SSDs but China is already very busy at producing cheap server motherboards: gone are the days where he only option for a server motherboard was a $1000 one. There are ultra cheap, and fully functional, chinese motherboards now.

I'm totally convinced China is not going to sit doing nothing: if RAM prices goes up and there's a business opportunity, China is going to seize it and start producing lots of RAM.

We did see "RAM price quadruple in no time so nobody had time to adapt", that's for sure.

But I'm really not sure it's "RAM prices goes 4x and then the world stays as it is and nobody adapts for decades to come".

Also as to used servers: people ordering years of compute hardware in advance aren't hoarding five years old servers.

Heck, a ten years old Xeon machine is plenty capable and the usual people are buying stocks of those (from companies updating their fleet), refurbishing them and reselling them one by one on the usual marketplace, at the same prices (OK maybe instead of 150 EUR it's now 200 EUR if there's 64 GB of ECC RAM).

My usual seller is doing its business as usual although we're well into the memory craze.

Just to put things into perspective: the "PC sales crash" from 2021 to 2024 saw, what, a 20% drop, 10% of which already recovered. In 4 years more than a billion PCs were produced.

A PC is not a rare thing. We won't run out of PCs, just like we won't run out of cheap used ten years old Xeon servers.

But OK you got me: I may contact my seller and hoard two or three more just in case.

Sheesh is HN full of paranoid people and, darn, is it contagious.