Comment by alpha_squared
2 hours ago
> Isn’t Apple potentially under a lot of pressure due to the DRAM prices as well as having to compete with AI for fab capacity?
I'd qualify this with for now. It's not entirely clear what happens in the event the AI industry implodes, but I do think there will be a glut of memory and hardware up for grabs. It very well could crash the consumer hardware market as a result. The AI obsession and investment has burrowed so deeply across the US economy that I can't think of a single industry that won't be impacted, including agriculture.
> It very well could crash the consumer hardware market as a result
Tbh, I hope it does. Prices are outrageous, and I'm a firm believer in personal computing/having access to powerful hardware, privately and locally, is hugely important.
On a more selfish note, I miss the days of being able to build an outrageously powerful desktop for myself for relatively cheap. For now I'm still holding onto my AM4 motherboard w/ 64GB DDR4 and an aging GPU, praying my 7 y/o GPU holds up long enough for prices to drop again.
64 GB! you are lucky :) sitting there with 16GB, a GPU that already shows the signs of strain, and AM4 Ryzen 5 5600G. (MacBook Air M1 equivalent in single-threaded tasks.) apparently the CPU requirements slowly crept up across the line. and then there is looming AVX512. why "looming"? because at some point enough people will move to it that software will require AVX512.
Maybe a year from now we'll all be using MI300As and EPYC 9600s to read e-mails. Or Nvidia Veras, maybe AWS will sell some of their Graviton stuff in an effort to offset their capex.
Unfortunately, I don't think IBM Cloud will suffer enough for me to play Tux Racer on my very own Z17.
> including agriculture
in fact, agri sees its share of impact now! all of this investment has to come from somewhere, which means that money is getting sucked up into AI from the entire economy. job cuts in tech are part that, part general "de-bloating" of post-COVID tech. retail investors are a lot more likely to invest into AI than any other industry, although there are signs that big players already consider risks of overexposure to AI.
not to mention, agri saw a "bubble" of its own, surrounding Agtech, which peaked at 2021 and has been cooling ever since. scare quotes here because it was nothing like AI bubble