The RAM price and availability situation is going to worsen as Micron pull their Crucial consumer business

Quoting: TightRope

Quoting: ChuckaluphagusI've bought Crucial RAM for decades, and quite a few Crucial SSDs over the past fifteen years. A shame to see it go.

I have bought Crucial products for decades and they were always reliable. Too bad I will have to switch to another brand.
How many people will go back to Crucial when the bubble finally bursts and they need real customers? This is probably a bad long term business decision.

Yeah I was thinking how I've always liked their products, I have a few crucial ssd

But when/if they come back into consumer market it will make me think twice about my purchase

This has actually the potential to be the best news ever for Steam gaming - depending on what Valve has negotiated with their distributors.

Nobody is able to buy PCs & RAM usage of games must be frozen at status quo - the Steam machine suddenly looks interesting.

@Eike

Quoting: Eike

Quoting: ElectricPrismIn the near future, possibly the year 2030, you will not be allowed to own a modular computer as we know it now.

That's nonsense.
I offer a bet for 100€ to be paid on 1.1.2031.

"as we know it now."

2005 is unlike 2025

Gone:
☑ Removable Batteries on Laptops and Phones
☑ Optical CD/DVD/HD/BluRay Drive on Laptops
☑ Ethernet Port in many cases gone necessitating USB-C Hub
☑ Anything outside a single USB-C
☑ Removable MicroSD Storage on Phones
☑ Ability to open devices with a screwdriver, Screens are glued.
☑ Increasing un-affordability of Modular PC Parts eg: after 29 years in business, this article: "The RAM price and availability situation is going to worsen as Micron pull their Crucial consumer business"
☑ RAM Soldered to Silicon
☑ Phones, Tablets, and Laptops as SBC where no parts are removable or replaceable, or difficult to repair

Some tech people have "Stockholm Syndrome" for Big G, Big A, or Big M.

If we don't demand moldularity, consumers will no longer able to mix and match hardware outside of niche hobbyist markets.

Now if you'd like to move the goal post, go ahead. The facts are the facts regardless of arguments, opinions and speculations -- things are not getting better, they're getting worse, again the compute world especially with regard to modularity in 2030 will not be "as we know it now."

The RAM situation is bad enough, just imagine what your power bill will look like as AI eats needs double the power output we currently have now and everyone got the genius idea to shut down their nuclear and coal.

The West is cooked.

Damn. The two 16GB kits of DDR5 RAM in my PC that I built back in 2023 are Crucial; they've been unavailable for months, I noticed. Between that, and the two 2TB SATA SSDs from Crucial I've bought in the past two years, I really lucked out not needing to buy any components this year.

Crucial was a good brand. This is absolutely a shitty situation for consumers.

I hope the RISC-V and HomeLab/Modders are paying attention, because compute is about to be dramatically reduced due to the strangulation on price of electricity, and economic warfare against the peasants.

The direction that RISC-V and ARM seem to be moving in also support the notion that locked-down systems will be replacing today's PCs. Both of those platforms appear to require a ton of proprietary extensions to be able to serve as the CPU of a PC. That doesn't bode well at all for the (farther) future of desktop Linux, needless to say.

The relative 'openness' of the x86 PC platform really was a historical accident, the result of IBM scrambling to make a late entry to the 'micro market'; and they did try to take some measures against it, but failed ultimately.

Quoting: ElectricPrismIn the near future, possibly the year 2030, you will not be allowed to own a modular computer as we know it now.

Quoting: walther von stolzingThe relative 'openness' of the x86 PC platform really was a historical accident, the result of IBM scrambling to make a late entry to the 'micro market'; and they did try to take some measures against it, but failed ultimately.

To be fair, we are already extremely lucky that the IBM open PC architecture (for the young'ns, that is the ATX and subsequent *TX form factor standard layouts) is still in use today. The IBM open PC architecture, devised in the 80s! Still in use in 2025! That is incredible staying power.

If you'd asked me whether *TX desktops would still be popular in the 2020s, even as recent as 2015, I would probably have pessimistically thought "no way!". My reasoning would have been the relative surging popularity of mobile phones as primary devices. But here we are. I can drive to a store and purchase *TX standards compliant parts of just about any variety.

With that in mind, I'd say let's not be so pessimistic. May the open PC architecture stick around for another 3-4 decades yet.