RAM is so expensive, Samsung won't even sell it to Samsung

The RAM for that is basically ewaste at this point, yet it runs the workloads it needs to do just fine.

Also, it is frightening how close that is to current day minimum wage.

If you fast forward just a few years though, it wasn't too bad.

You could put together a decent fully parted out machine in the late 90s and early 00s for around $600-650. These were machines good enough to get a solid 120 FPS playing Quake 3.

In the mid-90s me and my brother were around 14 and 10, earning nothing but a small amount of monthly pocket money. We were fighting so much over our family PC, that we decided to save and put together a machine from second-hands parts we could get our hands on. We built him a 386 DX 40 or 486SX2 50 or something like that and it was fine enough for him to play most DOS games. Heck, you could even run Linux (I know because I ran Linux in 1994 on a 386SX 25, with 5MB RAM and 20MB disk space).

Either way, it was the 90s: two years later that was a budget CPU because the top end was two to three times the speed.

Pentium 60/66s were in the same price tier as expensive alpha or sparc workstations.

Example:

    > time du -sh .
    737G .
    ________________________
    Executed in   24.63 secs

    > time du -sh .
    304G .
    ________________________
    Executed in   80.86 secs

if you want to save even more money get the older Arc Battlemage GPUs. I used one it was comparable with an RTX 3060; i returned it because the machine i was running it in had a bug that was fixed 2 days before i returned it but i didn't know that.

I was seriously considering getting a b580 or waiting until the b*70 came out with more memory, although at this point i doubt it will be very affordable considering VRAM prices going up as well. A friend is supposedly going to ship me a few GTX 1080ti cards so i can delay buying newer cards for a bit.

Depending on salary, 2 magnitudes at $5k is $500k.

That amount of money for the vast majority of humans across the planet is unfathomable.

No one is worried about if the top 5% can afford DRAM. Literally zero people.

Even recreating it entirely with newer parts every single year would have cost less than $250/mo. Honestly it would probably be negative ROI just dealing with the logistics of replacing it that many times.

Yes. This is how we get websites and apps that don't run on a normal person's computer, because the devs never noticed their performance issues on their monster machines.

Modern computing would be a lot better if devs had to use old phones, basic computers, and poor internet connections more often.

>I buy the best phones and desktops money can buy

Sick man! Awesome, you spend 1/3 of the median US salary on a laptop and desktop every year. That's super fucking cool! Love that for you.

Anyways, please go brag somewhere else. You're rich, you shouldn't need extra validation from an online forum.

Prices are high but they're not that high, unless you're buying the really big GPUs.

25k/month? Most people will never come close to earn that much. Most developers in the third world don't make that in a full year, but are affected by raises in PC parts' prices.

I agree with the general principle of having savings for emergencies. For a Software Engineer, that should probably include buying a good enough computer for them, in case they need a new one. But the figures themselves seem skewed towards the reality of very well-paid SV engineers.

If, you are like every developer I have ever met, the constraint is your own time, motivation and skills, then spending $22k dollars per year is a pretty interesting waste of resources.

DOes it makes sense to buy good tools for your job? Yes. Does it make sense to buy the most expensive version of the tool that you already own last years most expensive version of? Rarely.

Most of the rest arguably shouldn't. If you have $10k/yr in effective pay after taxes, healthcare, rent, food, transportation to your job, etc, then a $5k/yr purchase is insane, especially if you haven't built up an emergency fund yet.

Of the rest (people who can relatively easily afford it), most still probably shouldn't. Unless the net present value of your post-tax future incremental gains (raises, promotions, etc) derived from that expenditure exceeds $5k/yr you're better off financially doing almost anything else with that cash. That's doubly true when you consider that truly amazing computers cost $2k total nowadays without substantial improvements year-to-year. Contrasting buying one of those every 2yrs vs your proposal, you'd need a $4k/yr net expenditure to pay off somehow, somehow making use of the incremental CPU/RAM/etc to achieve that value. If it doesn't pay off then it's just a toy you're buying for personal enjoyment, not something that you should nebulously tie to revenue generation potential with an arbitrary 1% rule. Still maybe buy it, but be honest about the reason.

So, we're left with people who can afford such a thing and whose earning potential actually does increase enough with that hardware compared to a cheaper option for it to be worth it. I'm imagining that's an extremely small set. I certainly use computers heavily for work and could drop $5k/yr without batting an eye, but I literally have no idea what I could do with that extra hardware to make it pay off. If I could spend $5k/yr on internet worth a damn I'd do that in a heartbeat (moving soon I hope, which should fix that), but the rest of my setup handily does everything I want it to.

Don't get me wrong, I've bought hardware for work before (e.g., nobody seems to want to procure Linux machines for devs even when they're working on driver code and whatnot), and it's paid off, but at the scale of $5k/yr I don't think many people do something where that would have positive ROI.

Yes, you are crazy for saying that.

> but compared to revenue it seems silly to be worrying about a few thousand dollars per year delta.

There is a very wide range of incomes of people using their computers, and, more to the point, $5k/yr on hardware is way past the point where, for most people using their computer for income, additional hardware expenditure has any benefit to income generation.

> Even if you don’t go the overkill route like me, we’re talking about maybe $250/month to have an absolutely top spec machine which you can then use to go and earn 100x that.

Most people using their computer to earn income do not earn anywhere close to $25,000/mo ($300k/yr), and hardware expenditures aren't the limiting factor holding them back.

Also, the minimum of $5k/yr you suggested is not $250/mo, but more than 1.5× that at $417/mo.

> Spend at least 1% of your gross revenue on your tools used to make that revenue.

Median annual wage for a US software developer is ~$140k per most recent BLS numbers, and that's one of the higher-paying fields of work that people use computers for. Neither your original $5k per year nor even the $3k/year suggested by your later $250/mo suggestion are warranted by your 1% on tools rule for most people earning income with their computer, especially on hardware alone, as that is far from all of the "tools" that are relevant to most computer work.

It's when you find ways to spend the minimum amount of resources in order to get the maximum return on that spend.

With computer hardware, often buying one year old hardware and/or the second best costs a tiny fraction of the cost of the bleeding edge, while providing very nearly 100% of the performance you'll utilize.

That and your employer should pay for your hardware in many cases.

======== COMPUTER ========

I feel no pain yet.

Browsing the web is fast enough where I'm not waiting around for pages to load. I never feel bound by limited tabs or anything like that.

My Rails / Flask + background worker + Postgres + Redis + esbuild + Tailwind based web apps start in a few seconds with Docker Compose. When I make code changes, I see the results in less than 1 second in my browser. Tests run fast enough (seconds to tens of seconds) for the size of apps I develop.

Programs open very quickly. Scripts I run within WSL 2 also run quickly. There's no input delay when typing or performance related nonsense that bugs me all day. Neovim runs buttery smooth with a bunch of plugins through the Windows Terminal.

I have no lag when I'm editing 1080p videos even with a 4k display showing a very wide timeline. I also record my screen with OBS to make screencasts with a webcam and have live streamed without perceivable dropped frames, all while running programming workloads in the background.

I can mostly play the games I want, but this is by far the weakest link. If I were more into gaming I would upgrade, no doubt about it.

======== PHONE ========

I had a Pixel 4a until Google busted the battery. It runs all of the apps (no games) I care about and Google Maps is fast. The camera was great.

I recently upgraded to a Pixel 9a because the repair center who broke my 4a in a number of ways gave me $350 and the 9a was $400 a few months ago. It also runs everything well and the camera is great. In my day to day it makes no difference from the 4a, literally none. It even has the same storage space of which I have around 50% space left with around 4,500 photos saved locally.

======== ASIDE ========

I have a pretty decked out M4 MBP laptop issued by my employer for work. I use it every day and for most tasks I feel no real difference vs my machine. The only thing it does noticeably faster is heavily CPU bound tasks that can be parallelized. It also loads the web version of Slack about 250ms faster, that's the impact of a $2,500+ upgrade for general web usage.

I'm really sensitive to skips, hitches and performance related things. For real, as long as you have a decent machine with an SSD using a computer feels really good, even for development workloads where you're not constantly compiling something.

For starters, hardware doesn't innovate quickly enough to buy a new generation every year. There was a 2-year gap between Ryzen 7000 and Ryzen 9000, for example, and a 3-year gap between Ryzen 5000 and Ryzen 7000. On top of that, most of the parts can be reused, so you're at best dropping in a new CPU and some new RAM sticks.

Second, the performance improvement just isn't there. Sure, there's a 10% performance increase in benchmarks, but that does not translate to a 10% productivity improvement for software development. Even a 1% increase is unlikely, as very few tasks are compute-bound for any significant amount of time.

You can only get to $15k by doing something stupid like buying a Threadripper, or putting an RTX 4090 into it. There are genuine use-cases for that kind of hardware - but it isn't in software development. It's like buying a Ferrari to do groceries: at a certain point you've got to admit that you're just doing it to show off your wealth.

You do you, but in all honesty you'd probably get a better result spending that money on a butler to bring your coffee to your desk instead of wasting time by walking to the coffee machine.

Proper calculation is: cost/ performance ratio. Then buy a second from the list:)

I’m struggling to buy hardware already as it is, and all these prices have basically fucked me out of everything. I’m riding rigs with 8 and 16GB of RAM and I have no way to go up from here. The AI boom has basically forced me out of the entire industry at this point. I can’t get hardware to learn, subscriptions to use, anything.

Big Tech has made it unaffordable for everyone.

A bit like Toyota putting a GM engine in their car, because the Toyota engine division is too self-centered, focusing to much on efficiency.

My understanding is that the Exynos is inferior in a lot of ways, but also cheaper.

International models tended to use Samsung's Exynos processors, while the ones for the North American market used Snapdragons or whatever.

AI doesn't deserve it more than we do, but also we shouldn't be required to have $300 in RAM for basic functionality. We shouldn't have to deal with RAM scalpers because businesses don't want to develop good software.

Instead, we the users are forced to pay for more and more memory and CPU and disk because some rich asshole doesn't want to spend the money on developing good software. The costs are pushed to us. And since resources are now unimaginably expensive, it's still our problem and we still have to foot the bill a million times over.

Seriously though... I think most uses of LLMs are pretty stupid, but it seems like we're in the bubble and the only way people can continue to make money is by doubling down on AI spending. Or at least that's the only way they think they can make money.

So... sorry for leaving you with that impression. Maybe the only way to get to the post AI hype world is to give AI companies everything they want so they fail faster.

"Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders!" ( see https://economicsociology.org/2014/10/07/yes-the-planet-got-... )

Does anyone deserve RAM though?

RAM pricing segmentation makes Apple a lot of money, but I think they scared themselves when AI took off and they had millions of 4GB and 8GB products out in the world. The Mac minimum RAM specs have gone up too, they're trying to get out of the hole they dug.

code:data, by and large I bet that content held in ram takes up the majority of space. And people have complained about the lack of ram in iPhones for ages now, particularly with how it affects browsers.

In the past this has resulted in stuff like Samsung Display sending their best displays to Apple instead of Samsung Mobile.

"If you’re a typical HN user in the US you might be out of touch with the reality that costs going up $10/week can be a real hardship when you’re raising a family on limited income.".

Skill issue. Oatmeal is very cheap and filling. The aforementioned yogurt. Nothing, yeah nothing, because the average person is obese here and nothing is exactly what they need for breakfast. A piece of fruit like the perennial classic banana for breakfast. Complaining about egg prices comes from the camp of "I tried nothing and nothing worked".

Let’s check their books and manufacturing schedule to see if they’re artificially constraining the supply to jack up the prices on purpose.

You want to tame their cartel like behaviors? Just get into their books and it would be clear as day if they’re artificially constraining the supply, and I’m not even talking about spending extra billions.

You cannot manufacture something that modern life depends on and not get government scrutiny.

You can ramp up production in limited capacity, make long term contracts, or pass the manufacturing rust to the buyer. When we needed a vertical stabilizer for a legacy aircraft we paid for an entire production like to be built just to manufacture two tails, so there are tons of ways to do this if you want to be competitive. But instead this is a cartel like market where manufacturers colluded before, so they’re more likely to collude than spend billions doing anything.

Just open their books and schedules with a competent auditors and see if they’re artificially manipulating things or not.

What will they do when people continue to not pay for this crap and investors demand their pound of flesh? Because uh, nobody's paying for this, and when people are gambling with trillions of dollars...

>Markets can't adapt overnight to tons of data centers being built all of a sudden but it will adapt.

Which data centers?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_price_fixing_scandal

Sometimes that materializes.

Here the narrative is almost the opposite: pay for our expensive infrastructure and we’ll take all your jobs.

It’s a bit mind boggling. One wonders how many friends our SV AI barons will have at the end of the day.

I'm kicking myself for not buying the mini PC that I was looking at over the summer. The cost nearly doubled from what it was then.

My state keeps trying to add Data Centers in residential areas, but the public seems to be very against it. It will succeed somewhere and I'm sure that there will be a fee on my electric bill for "modernization" or some other bullshit.

The 96GB kit I bought (which was more than I needed) was $165. I ended up buying another 96GB kit in June when I saw the price went up to $180 to max out my machine, even though I didn't really need it, but I was concerned where prices were going.

That same kit was $600 a month ago, and is $930 today. The entire rest of the computer didn't cost that much