It sounds conspiratorial to say it seems like they are trying to crash the consumer market so that computing will be entirely dependent on their services, but I mean…
It’s classic rent seeking. We will own nothing, just lease a low-powered client device from our phone carrier or ISP and do everything in the cloud with AI.
That seems to be the plan from these megacorps anyways.
If the demand increases enough, more factories will be built. Right?
Except most people think it’s a bubble, so won’t risk building and the cost to build factories that technical is so large that most big companies outsource it, never mind new entrants.
I suspect instead well move more towards a data on demand kind of thing. We don’t need the same thing stored in millions of copies worldwide. Cheaper connectivity and containerization should help, I’d think.
It will start with rarely used large files like isos, which are already pretty efficiently distributed but then move to more and more, like cdns do for web already.
I’m just hypothesizing…I’ve nothing to base it on, but it seems redundant to have so much duplication.
I was thinking on that yesterday.Mass local storage affordable? No no no, better to drive those prices way up so that we can sell you “cloud” services instead.
My company is needing to go away from external storage for local only backups, as 2,4" 4TB HDDs are shit and unreliable and 4TB SSDs (like Samsung T5 Evo) are going from 200€ to 600€ (per disk. And we need 3 of those).
Instead we are pivoting to S3(-compatible)-Cloud as the main off-site storage.
I am certainly not thrillee but on the otger side, customers arent willing to lug around 3,5" HDD cases so…What else is there?
They are trying and they are succeeding. But the bright side is - it’s about resources. Storage, computation. You can run most useful things on an RPi. I suppose home PC market will become more similar to 80s again. Less power, more dreaming.
I think that seems obvious, not conspiratorial.
They want to make their services cheaper for them to run, and they want to sell them for more money, while buying up hardware so nobody else can compete with them or not depend on them.
It’s because the average USA citizen is economically irrelevant. The money is in the top 10% and the big corpos, especially AI with all the money sloshing around there. The 90% consumer market doesn’t matter as much these days.
As the wealth divide continues to grow, the richest will continue to care less and less about the rest of us. We believe in our foundational myth that they’ll always need us somehow, even as they go out of their way to make it utterly obvious that they won’t be happy until they can replace literally everything us dirty poor working class people do. When they no longer need us, they will start to dispose of us. Arguably, they’ve begun doing that already. War is good for business, and for population control.
The thing is, if they collapse the economy, and nobody can afford to buy their overpriced products, they’re going to suffer too - which is good, it shouldn’t be only us suffering.
Are they going to suffer? That’s what we’re supposed to believe, but remember that money is a human-made concept that only has value because we collectively give it value, and the economy is built on that very important principle.
That situation you describe is real, it will disrupt their efforts a little and protect us in the short term, but in the long term, the meaning of money and economy is changing. they’re doing everything they can to use automation to build a new post-scarcity economy based on ownership, membership, services and control. And beyond that, it frankly doesn’t include us or even think about us.
That’s what the wealth divide is. It’s the way that money, as an economic representation of their values, is telling us that their motivations are not about making all existing humans on this planet more comfortable and productive and independent. In their vision of this future economy, they are instead hoarding humanity’s collective efforts for themselves, reinvesting it into their own technology, They focus their efforts on what they personally consider important for “progress”, chasing their own utopian ideals for the specific goals and groups they consider the best and most important, while the rest of us that aren’t part of those goals or groups are pacified and left behind and, if you really think it out, eventually eliminated. After all, a utopia won’t include teeming, growing masses of humanity using up all the available resources, that would be a plague, and they eventually will decide to cure it if they haven’t already started. Their vision of the future only needs to have enough room for them and the more utopian they make it the less of us there will be. They want to be the main characters, we’re just nameless extras who do chores and fill in the background for now and can be ignored to go wherever extras are supposed to go when they’re no longer on the screen.
Their view of humanity is abstract, and they believe what they are doing is right, all the way down to the core of their being. They simply don’t value humanity’s rich tapestry of lived experiences or the sanctity of every individual human life. They’ll never make it a priority. They care more about making sure humanity has become “advanced” or is multi-planetary than they do about making sure every human has a home, or food. That’s their vision. It’s about humanity as a whole, not about individual humans. We can all be sacrificed so the species becomes safer. Scientifically, I can’t even say they’re wrong. But philosophically, I hope we can all agree that this is deeply wrong and morally bankrupt. We need to start to reclaim our individual humanity and go back to putting people first. We need to care about people in the present, and always, not just the abstract idea of humanity’s future. We need to take our money back and use it for a different kind of progress.
I’m saving up now to afford the lease on a nice certified pre-owned Dell in a couple years. My buddy Dave works over at the dealership so I should be able to lock in a good rate. And hey, with their super lease-to-own options maybe I’ll be able to keep it at the end! That’d be nice you know… something to hand down to the kids when they’re old enough for their computing license. Fingers crossed! 🤞
I wish all of our infrastructure weren’t built around needing computers. I’m lucky my small community is typewriter-friendly, so I can get most of my daily tasks done without ever getting behind the wheel of a mouse.
We’re going backwards in time. Computers use to cost multi thousand dollars and you needed a loan to buy one.
A function of popularity. There are common tides that raise all boats - roles of things in the economy.
We’ve had a wonderful period where home computers were the place where many things happened.
Now it’s supposed to be ending (supposed by people who hope to have the awesome power), but I don’t think it’ll end.
A home computer is a wide term. One can remember the times and places where those didn’t even necessarily have HDDs, and people were joggling floppies with two drives attached. Perhaps a bit of ascese and small mobile media, like floppies (not floppies, of course, just something cheap to produce), as the alternative to big immobile media, like HDDs and SSDs and so on, would be good to reinvigorate home computing. Some kind of very cheap memory cards tossed around like paper sheets. The whole operating system loaded once and not requiring permanent media while running. As it happens in Star Wars EU, I think UX is an important part of any technology, and the world moves after Star Trek UX, while Star Wars UX seems smarter for me. Perhaps when SW is as old as ST, we’ll see improvement.
OK, this was incomprehensible. I meant that the limitations on components’ prices coming now are also an opportunity for development. Everything non-corporate in culture is being pressed out from the ecosystem. That’s good, reduces the incentives to play along with that ecosystem.
I’ve read a few articles on optical base for computers and companies working on that. That’s a thing that allows lesser degree of miniaturization, but far bigger frequencies (due to latency in optics) and more distributed production (gigantic foundries like TSMC make less sense).
So we might eventually (100 years perhaps) have two very different computing cultures, one for those people owning huge DCs and pushing “content” from their centralized systems to terminals carried by suckers, and the other for what I’d want. Including production, standards and everything.
It seems like I’ll soon have to use my DVD burner yet again. Now only if I found one for my ThinkPad, as it’s one of the last models that still had an option for it.
How tf are hdds going up in price
Did the data centers somehow buy up all the sdds and decided nah we need more, lets buy up all the hdds too
Like ???
At this rate i gotta start grabbing my old drives to reuse because apparently 2010 equipment is back on the plate or smth
It’s all about the Pentiums!
Guess im keeping all my dvds and vhs tapes then
prepare yourselves, nerds! buy your woodworking and farming tools now before those go up too!
if we all just turn off from the internet and technology in general, AI won’t have content to steal from or a market to sell it to.
this is the way.
Hosting a federated site on calculators and old gaming consoles to become trendy
Is this like the last wave before the entire thing collapses or what?
Oh my sweet summer child
I’m just gonna say, check out shucks.top, just got two 14tb drives for 160 each.
If they are SMR, they are basically DOA (for my use case)
None of the WD 14tb have been SMR as of yet. Neither have the two 18tb drives I’ve shucked.
Like 2 years ago that was just a normal price ffs
Are they used HDDs? Nothing worse than buying something that’s on the brink of dying.
Used HDD aren’t on the brink of dying some them could last decades.
Nope! They’re brand new shuckable (you can take out the hdd) external drives. I have 10 14tb drives in my nas that all came from this. And if you keep the enclosures, you can still warrenty them.
Economic policies will start shifting to inflation reducing by raising interest rates. This is purely inflationary in all economies and it’s hilariously going to tank stock trading.
Guess I waited a hair too long to pull the trigger on a NAS setup
My thoughts exactly, but it’s only going to get worse :/
I needed to buy another 20TB drive. I paid 100$ more for THE SAME MODEL i bought two years ago.
Optical drives next I guess lol
What’s even going on anymore
Enshittification, but on a massive scale.
resulting in cheapflation, and shrinkflation eventually.
All of this just to automate the process of enslaving the world.
Due to “human rights” laws, we have to pay the slaves these days!
In Antique Mediterranean it was pretty common to pay slaves. They needed money to feed themselves, after all, buy clothes and tools, do other stuff. Would be a bother to manage centrally for the owner, and you didn’t have to fear social condemnation of slavery, it was normal. So slaves were just like lifelong employees, except they were slaves. Slave teachers, slave scientists, slave engineers, slave artists.
So… Just like now?
More formal layers. Similar amount of real ones.
Slaves also could own their own things, which were not owned by their own owner (oof). So they could buy their freedom. It’s complicated.
Free people could carry weapons, participate in politics.
I was waiting for them to come down in order to get another for my NAS. Now they’re gonna go up again instead. Fuck me
This isn’t a huge increase. It’s not on the order of what just happened with RAM.
According to a report from Digitimes Asia (quoting Nikkei), HDD contract prices jumped roughly 4% quarter over quarter in Q4 2025.
First SSDs and now HDDs too?
Well if you can’t get SSDs, what are you going to use for storage? I doubt tape drives are best as daily drivers.
My old pack of floppy drives is going to make me rich!
