“I’ve been saving for months to get the Corsair Dominator 64GB CL30 kit,” one beleagured PC builder wrote on Reddit. “It was about $280 when I looked,” said u/RaidriarT, “Fast forward today on PCPartPicker, they want $547 for the same kit? A nearly 100% increase in a couple months?”
Indeed awful. AFAIU, it is stockpiling HBM memory ahead of next generation “GPUs”, rather than existing product volume. I’m especially disgusted that prices in non-tariff countries are higher than in US. If this were to last, gddr5/6 computer ram would start to make sense. NVIDIA has been behind starving memory supplies for competing platforms (usually AMD) in the past.
This pricing is both huge inflation, but also huge drop in sales, because we have to wait for it to get sensible.
The non tariff nations getting hit with higher then us prices just shows how little they think of customers. They assume we will pay, they feel entitled to our money. The products have stagnanted, the prices are made up and clearly based on nothing but good old fashion “fuck you pay me” logic. My guess is they are assuming “AI” companies will just buy whatever they make.
If people keep buying however they will keep doing this. If the market drops out from them (AI bubble bursting at the same time people cut back on buying new systems) then they will likely ask for bailouts (your money again).
Apple specifically is provably charging countries without tariffs: https://iphone-worldwide.com/
Have the world subsidize US sales, just because they’re used to paying a little more. Not surprised that other goods would use same strategy.
Its just naked greed, the sooner the world can move away from america and these companies the better.