Comment by cosmic_cheese

I think it's probably for the best, the hyperconsumerism around electronics was getting out of hand. Computers are fast and have been fast for a while now. An iPhone 12 is probably more than fine to do iPhone things, if Apple didn't sabotage their old phones with poorly-written poor-performance software.

There also seems to have been a major shift in strategy from AMD / Intel / Apple / NVidia due to this, as I was used to CPU / GPU / chipset upgrades coming out more regularly with double-digit percentage improvements each year, but that seems to be basically over for the consumer space now that everyone is just trying to build as much AI hardware as fast as possible for enterprise markets.

I also used to rebuild my desktop every 1-2 years and upgrade laptops every 2-3 years, but I'm currently a bit past that and have no plans to refresh anything in the near future. I'll probably wait another CPU and GPU generation or two to even consider it, especially with prices being this ridiculous.

I'm fully anticipating AI hardware demand to dry up once Anthropic and OpenAI start tanking financially in a few years after missing earnings and investors and banks wanting their loans paid back combined with more folks realizing that LLMs cannot achieve AGI. After that, I would hope that the demand that's driving this pricing spike will fall along with it, but I also fully expect hardware companies to be as greedy as possible, so maybe a 32TB HDD will just cost $1000 going forward and the era of "a decent gaming PC made up of the tier of components one step below TOTL costs ~$2000" we've been in since the 1990s is fully over, and it's just going to be more like $5k going forward.

I have a 2021 M1 pro and see no reason to upgrade it... ever?

I do web & general java work on it and it's plenty fast even using a memory hog like IntelliJ (which is typically disk bound anyway). Claude tells me that a new macbook would feel about 1.8x faster in my CPU-bound cases, which is not common.

If memory prices returned to normal and if local inference gets over the hump, I could see upgrading for local AI agents, but I'm fine waiting for a good long while on that.

I say all this as someone who, five years ago, was a perpetual upgrader: immediately bought new product and got excited for next product. Wonder if the future will see the end of that culture in tech and, looking back, it was a little silly and wasteful anyway.

I'm also using an iPhone mini 12 and it's fine.

It's wild seeing so many comments about updating every 1-2 years.

When I build a PC, I pay a little extra because I want it to last a long time. I aim for 5 years, and in reality it usually ends up 7 years (life happens, need the money, etc).

I am now in year 8 of my current PC. I only had money to replace it this year, and am now stuck with it due to the RAM prices. It's going to really suck for me if my RAM fails in the next few years.

I'm running a 12 year old i5 3.2ghz CPU with 16 GB of memory, an SSD and an AMD RX 480 (8 GB) GPU. Currently using a 100% scaled 4k monitor and a 2nd 1440p monitor. I keep the machine on 24 / 7. It's great for software development along with video + image editing and casual gaming. Everything feels fast and snappy.

I will use this until the hardware stops. There's a 0% chance I'd buy hardware at the current prices.

I've always done 5-7 year cycles on machine I've owned, but this time around its getting quite complicated as my last refresh was 4-5 years ago. So I'm kind of stuck wishing my current hardware both meets the requirements and just survives another half a decade, or my next upgrade, even if only partial, will be VERY expensive...

I run Qwen 3.8 at just under 2 tokens/second on a Mac Pro 2013. Why? Because I walked 8 miles to school in the snow, uphill both directions, every day.

There isn't much to upgrade to if all you want is a desktop for gaming, a non-workstation work box or just a decent laptop. Much like smartphones, there just hasn't been much innovation of late. A midrange gaming desktop from mid 2023, something like rtx 4070 and ryzen 7800x3d, can still play pretty much any video game on max settings and high framerate at 1440p, and has sufficient performance for most workstation-esque tasks as long as you have enough ram. Similarly, the only thing my spare macbook m2 lacks compared to m5 is hardware av1 decoding - the performance is worse, but I don't really notice it in normal usage, and macOS 27 runs perfectly well on it.

Local AI will crush any machine, of course, and if you need a 512gb ram box you'll probably need to sell both kidneys, but you're well past the average consumer territory with those.

So, fingers crossed nothing breaks down and that some of the funny money goes into R&D which will eventually trickle down to consumer devices in a few years (16TB gum stick SSDs at sane prices pretty please) instead of endless datacenter GPUs and SSDs that will be tossed into a shredder in x years.

This is how cloud-only systems that the LLM industries are creating the conditions for will happen. Good luck not owing anything.

My desktop PC turns 20 next year. I've never seen any need to upgrade it, went out of my way to build it with silent parts and it rarely if ever goes outside a single-digit CPU load (before anyone asks, software development and a bit of CAD work). I'll upgrade it when something in it physically fails, which means I'll need to replace it with new hardware with 5-10x the specs just to get the same performance.

My laptop is currently about two years into a typically 5-year lifespan, limited by when the keys start to fail rather than any need to upgrade it just because. The RAM in it is now worth more than the rest of the laptop.

My issue is my digital hoarding. I've always said it I "collect" things digitally vs. physical, so I can scratch that itch without causing a disaster for my life. A half rack of JBODs is a lot cleaner and overall less expensive to operate than deciding I need to collect every single Lego Technic set ever produced or something.

The problem is I also operated under the prior "storage always gets cheaper over time" and was right at about 80% full when all this insanity hit. I'm now at 90% on my largest ZFS array (~280TB) of spinners... and I get to decide if I want to drop a few paychecks on the next vdev upgrade, or start deleting things.

Not to mention I've been holding off replacing a bunch of old 1TB SATA drives (19 years old now!!) as my scratch partition, as I was going to wait until 8TB SSD got really cheap and just buy two of them for a RAID1 for the use. And now I need those drive slots to upgrade the mass storage pool.

Talk about backing oneself into a corner at the wrong time!

Earlier this year I finally bit the bullet and grabbed myself a 5080 for my gaming PC. I wanted to push things a bit more than my 3060ti allowed, and I figured it probably won't get any cheaper any time soon.

The PS5/Xbox Series console generation is supposed to be wrapping up soon even though it barely feels like it got started. I don't sense there's appetite for more powerful consoles anytime soon (I don't believe the PS5 Pro made waves like the PS4 Pro did), and jumps in console performance are what determine when games start targeting higher system requirements. So I like to think I can get a good number of years of use out of this.

How do you know they weren't faulty? Blip flips are usually silent unless you have ECC memory or are actively testing for faulty cells.

Somewhat recently, Firefox implemented memory testing in their crash reporter and found 10% of reports were due to bit-flips[0].

If it weren't for reading that HN thread, I would never have being prompted to check and find the faulty memory in my laptop. It would have gone undetected and continued to corrupt whatever was stored in the affected cells. I did run memtest86 not long after I bought the laptop, so sometime between running that first memtest86 and the 12 months after, it developed the fault.

Non-ECC memory sometimes fails and there's a good chance you'll never know.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47252971

Most devices never test their memory and don’t have ecc, so you generally never know. Random instability can be fixed by restarting and your program not being in an area with bad bits anymore.

Anecdotally, RAM failures are more common than they used to be in previous decades, I assume due to increased capacities and smaller process nodes. Looser manufacturing standards may also play a part.

The component category I've never seen fail is CPU.

I have had a RAM stick start frequently failing ECC checks after a couple years use. I also had the VRAM on a GPU fail, but you could blame that one on overheating from the nearby compute core. I agree is rarer though.

I've seen every single component of a system fail, the least I've seen fail has been the CPU itself (I've only seen one fail out of thousands).

Memory seems to fail pretty commonly overall, less common than harddisks but more common than motherboards.

The issue is that I'm used to using ECC ram, which fails loud when it's actually bad.. consumer memory won't tell you unless you can't boot.. and everyone disables the startup memory testing too.. (in fact, I think it's disabled by default for the last 10 years because people want to boot quickly).

I recently had part of a 32 gig DIMM go bad on a 128 gig system. One of the larger VMs was spontaneously rebooting for no apparent reason. I was able to find the addresses with MemTest86 and map out 512 megs of the affected DIMM with the Linux kernel memmap option.

I've had a RAM stick fail.

Granted, I've been building my own computer for 30 years and I've only seen it happen ONCE.

But I've seen plenty of other failures:

- Two hard drives -- One got dropped on the floor, so it was no surprise, the other was showing degraded performance and SMART showed some scary numbers and I was able to replace it before I lost data.

- One GPU, replaced under warranty.

- One AIO water cooler, replaced under warranty. Somehow, the water vanished from the loop. I'm guessing a microscopic leak that evaporated as fast as it leaked.

- Two power supplies -- One randomly exploded. Just started making popping noises and shooting sparks out the back. At autopsy, I determined that the fan failed (it was hard to spin manually) and it overheated. The other was just being overloaded. I had just gotten a new GPU and the PSU wasn't big enough for it.

- Several case fans.

Never seen a CPU or motherboard failure, even when my AIO water cooler was failing and my CPU was constantly at thermal limits. Never had an SSD/NVMe failure.

I had a 2012 mac book pro that burned out 2 different crucial memory sticks. Would have bricked the machine if it was the soldered-on type, but it was the last model apple sold that have swappable memory. Crucial had a lifetime warranty so they replaced them for free.

I used to game on it and I think the design just couldn't handle the cpu and dgpu being active for long periods, it would get extremely hot in the area close to where the memory was.

Anecdata: a coworker found a single bit flip corruption in a file he wrote in his computer. He ran memtest86 on his memory, and which found one of the two sticks was defective. The computer otherwise ran perfectly fine for years; and we would have never noticed if the file format didn't have built-in checksums.

I also have been using PC's for a long time, thirty years. The only time I have seen ram fail during use was within the last 5 years. My 10th gen platform and 32 gigs of ram DDR4 and one of the sticks failed, this was before the ramapocalypse of course, the sticks were replaced under warranty. But I have had systems in my shop with failed ram. it happens, but its rare, unless its cheap ram, less rare.

Well, you’re lucky. I had to change laptop memory sticks a few times. Though not since they are soldered directly to the motherboard

Oh well, it's fairly common.Maybe not in a singular/several rarely used (and not monitored) desktop computers, but.... it's common once you have quite a few under your care.

Same, it's either bad to begin with or it's basically immortal.

This isn’t true anymore beginning with DDR4 speeds.

on older PC bios would perform a memory test - you may remember those - and that's where it would mark a bunch of pages dead/unusuable and it was not uncommon at all.

i've seen ram fail, some of them are bitflip, some of them just refuse to boot.

The only thing i've never seen fail is the Case lol. Air cooler too if you don't count the fan.

I've seen some fail. Might have had to do with the fact that the computers were literally flooded (river came up faster than the sandbaggers could keep up) while running.

You may literally be the only one.

I've had a few RAM sticks fail, but the ECC usually caught it first. Also had one case that somehow the stick slightly unseated itself; dunno how but it was out of service for months until someone opened it up and reseated the stick.

...granted though I've also seen a backpane on a server fail. I didn't think that was even possible until that point.

> I've been using computers for more than 40 years now and the one component I have never seen fail is RAM.

I think over the decades I got one RAM disk fail. And another one didn't fail but, although I bought a pack of four sticks (2x x2), was detected (by memtest, when building the rig), as having another model name than the three others: even the shop who sold me the RAM was confused (don't know how that happened).

The usual component that I've seen fail the most would be the PSU? (before I started buying quality ones). One NVMe drive (an "ADATA") died on me even though it was nearly new.

PC assembled with quality parts usually last a very long time.

Interesting, I've had two fail already in much shorter time. One was brand new, another quite old.

I used to work in IT recycling, and let me put you at ease, RAM goes all the time.

Common scenario:

200 PCs at least 6 years old, often over a decade old, come in on pallets.

We pick up the first 50, stack them on benches, and power them on.

At least 10 wont post.

Of that 10, reseating memory and other little jobs fixes 5.

Of the remaining 5, replacing or removing memory gets 4/5 them to post.

Testing those sticks in other PCs confirms the RAM is dead.

Into the scrap it goes.

The remaining PC is dead mobo, PSU or needs a new CMOS battery.

I've seen plenty of DIMMs fail ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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I’m running PCs with 13 and 15 year old motherboards/CPUs/RAM. I wouldn’t worry about seven years.

same-ish. In 2023 128 gigs of RAM and a 4090 and 4x 4TB ssds. I just looked up prices and 4090 alone is like 2/3 of what I paid for the whole system. Crazy times.

DRAM fabs are multi-billion dollar investments which take years to come online. That's the whole reason we're in this situation, there is no quick fix available.