Comment Re:Memory prices (Score 1) 9
One of the nice side effects of the AI boom is that it does make reusing older devices a lot more valuable. One of the unfortunate side effects of industrialization is that when something becomes incredibly inexpensive to produce, it becomes relatively more expensive to repair leading to people to dispose of existing goods and replace them with a cheap replacement as opposed to fixing it.
I think it would be interesting to see companies adopt designs where chips could be taken from phone logic boards and placed onto a server board. With the performance and efficiency gains on newer nodes being much less than they were historically, a six year old CPU isn't dwarfed by the latest and greatest as was historically the case. The SoCs in phones are already designed around efficient power utilization so there shouldn't be the usual concerns of higher long-term costs compared to newer silicon.
Smart phones have been good enough for while now to keep beyond the typical two year contract cycle. The main limiter these days is the software and security support more so than the hardware. My phone is about six years old now and a faster chip isn't going to meaningfully change my experience. Higher prices are only forcing people to do something they could have been doing for almost a decade already.
I think it would be interesting to see companies adopt designs where chips could be taken from phone logic boards and placed onto a server board. With the performance and efficiency gains on newer nodes being much less than they were historically, a six year old CPU isn't dwarfed by the latest and greatest as was historically the case. The SoCs in phones are already designed around efficient power utilization so there shouldn't be the usual concerns of higher long-term costs compared to newer silicon.
Smart phones have been good enough for while now to keep beyond the typical two year contract cycle. The main limiter these days is the software and security support more so than the hardware. My phone is about six years old now and a faster chip isn't going to meaningfully change my experience. Higher prices are only forcing people to do something they could have been doing for almost a decade already.