The memory manufacturers don’t do contracts like that. There was no way to lock any price. Check out the Gamer Nexus steam machine benchmark video, it has a segment where they interview Pierre-Loup from Valve.
He says they had to call a guy and either they buy at the price the guy says or they never hear back from him again.
look, i am not asking them to predict the future 8 months ago, ok. they had steam machine in development for years, it would be natural to arrange it for production before they announced it, right? and to setup production, it would be natural to secure some parts. had they done that, they would have avoided being caught in the ram apocalypse.
they didn’t need to predict the ram price would skyrocket, they just had to do what a reasonable hardware manufacturer would naturally do.
Apple’s hardware sales are probably a few orders of magnitude higher than Valve’s. Do you suppose that would give them some options a small time hardware vendor wouldn’t get?
Memory OEMs only offer those contracts to megacorps, primarily data center providers. Even the massive consumer giants like Dell and Lenovo are second tier and only get the leftover contract deals from the first tier which they often mix with spot price purchases. Everyone else has to buy at their spot price.
It’s why Micron shut down Crucial and Samsung isn’t even providing to its own consumer division. They saw the AI moneybags and ran as fast as they could.
Which leaves SK Hynix as the only OEM which is the the RAM used in the Steam Machine.
What they could have done was stash stock as much as possible before the big panic buy happened but I’m guessing they didn’t react in time.
China’s production also won’t catch up for at least another year to make a dent in the massive lack of supply (and therefore the price), otherwise they could have followed Corsair and gone with CXMT.
Why they didn’t lock in memory contracts before they announced it I will never understand.
The memory manufacturers don’t do contracts like that. There was no way to lock any price. Check out the Gamer Nexus steam machine benchmark video, it has a segment where they interview Pierre-Loup from Valve. He says they had to call a guy and either they buy at the price the guy says or they never hear back from him again.
That was after the memory apocalypse happened though. Before that memory was abundant
So the trick is to stay ahead of the curve and order stuff before an entire market segment is decimated.
look, i am not asking them to predict the future 8 months ago, ok. they had steam machine in development for years, it would be natural to arrange it for production before they announced it, right? and to setup production, it would be natural to secure some parts. had they done that, they would have avoided being caught in the ram apocalypse.
they didn’t need to predict the ram price would skyrocket, they just had to do what a reasonable hardware manufacturer would naturally do.
That’s just not how it works
Yeah, Apple did it. Although it’s close to expiring or already has.
Apple’s hardware sales are probably a few orders of magnitude higher than Valve’s. Do you suppose that would give them some options a small time hardware vendor wouldn’t get?
Memory OEMs only offer those contracts to megacorps, primarily data center providers. Even the massive consumer giants like Dell and Lenovo are second tier and only get the leftover contract deals from the first tier which they often mix with spot price purchases. Everyone else has to buy at their spot price.
It’s why Micron shut down Crucial and Samsung isn’t even providing to its own consumer division. They saw the AI moneybags and ran as fast as they could.
Which leaves SK Hynix as the only OEM which is the the RAM used in the Steam Machine.
What they could have done was stash stock as much as possible before the big panic buy happened but I’m guessing they didn’t react in time.
China’s production also won’t catch up for at least another year to make a dent in the massive lack of supply (and therefore the price), otherwise they could have followed Corsair and gone with CXMT.
Oh, why didn’t they think of that!