In general, one can swap in custom outer shells for controllers if one has a particular look in mind; there are stores that sell these.

In the case of the Steam Controller 2, Valve published the CAD files for the outer shell to actively try to encourage this, so I imagine that there will be replacement outer shells.

Well, it’s slower than what one could theoretically achieve if you could run that much at that rate. I believe that the MT rating is per stick and the memory is used interleaved, so it’s not that you put in 128GB and the overall throughput spanning all sticks drops, but rather that you won’t get the throughput that the more-expensive memory is rated for.

I have a Framework Desktop that’s running 128GB of soldered memory at 8000 MT/s. In contrast, my desktop can only manage 3600 MT/s on 128 GB of slotted DIMMs.

$ sudo dmidecode -t memory|grep Speed
	Speed: 4800 MT/s
	Configured Memory Speed: 3600 MT/s

Do I just take the plunge and spend €1800 on 128GB of 6000MT CL40 RAM?

Even if your DIMMs are speced for high data rates, you may not be able to achieve it with a full 128GB with the current crop of processors if you’re using slotted DIMMs rather than soldered memory.

Well…but @MangoCats@feddit.it isn’t asking about the spike, but about the absolute price.

PC Part Picker’s memory trends page unfortunately only shows the past 18 months. But we can hit archive.org’s Wayback Engine.

First of all, here’s a current level for DDR5-5200 2x16GB:

So about $500 for DDR5-5200 2x16GB.

They only started tracking this category back in early 2022-ish. It looks like it was about $380 then. Adjusted for inflation, that’s $435.14 in 2026 dollars. So it’s probably never been that expensive.

However, that was also when DDR5 was pretty new, and it looks like it started out expensive.

If we look at DDR4, which might be more interesting, since we can go back further and avoid the initial spike:

Looking at DDR4-3200 2x8GB, it’s come down a bit, but looks like it peaked at about $190.

Inflation-adjusted, that’s $144 in 2019 dollars.

It looks like that was about April 2019 when DDR4 exceeded the peak from the last few weeks.

I don’t have familiarity with the standard, but one bright Californian engineer who I knew who was into auto computer hacking — much more into automobile technology than I am — had a pretty strong position that California’s auto emissions requirements were unreasonably stringent.

That same guy also had a history of making correct technical claims that I didn’t I didn’t initially believe, like that USB device-to-host transfers had to be triggered via host-side polling, and that there’s no device-driven interrupt mechanism (he was right), so he’s got a pretty good track record in my book.

That’s a separate issue from whether-or-not there’s a legal basis for the Trump administration to revoke California’s waiver, or of whether market fragmentation on emissions standards is an economic concern, which are also factors here.

Kind of straying from the original point here, but you might consider Blu-Ray 4k/UHD versus streaming in general if you’re specifically after the highest quality video that you can get. My understanding is that generally, commercial, streamed 4K stuff is heavily-compressed enough that quality suffers relative to the stuff on Blu-Ray 4k.

There are Linux challenges with the DRM stuff on Blu-Ray 4k too, but with an appropriate drive, most 4K stuff can be played in 2026.

I finally got around to getting a Linux Blu-Ray 4K setup, and I have to say that now, the limiting factor for a lot of film, especially the older stuff, is the film grain, frame rate, or the quality of special effects. Film grain you can often work around with temporal denoising, frame rate with frame interpolation, and special effects…well, no general solution for that.

Microsoft’s problem, I think, is in significant part that they are the big commercial player trying for a local AI play. Like, your local Windows machine does AI inference. In Anthropic’s business model, the inference is cloud-based.

Local is more hardware-intensive, because the capacity utilization of hardware is going to be lower for local AI. If you stick a piece of hardware in a datacenter and lots of people share it, you need less hardware, because when one person isn’t using that hardware, another can be. If you would use local AI hardware 1% of the time, then it costs only about one-hundredth the amount from a hardware standpoint to have people sharing parallel compute hardware in a datacenter as to do everything locally. So as long as hardware prices, like shortages of memory, are a constraining factor (or cooling, for that matter, or maybe power if you’re talking about laptops on battery, all of which have cloud-based approaches getting an advantage) Microsoft’s going to have a harder time of it than the cloud guys.

Microsoft (and local AI in general) does better if people really want low-latency or always-doing-work load, or reliably always-available services, or services where data privacy is critical. There, local AI has the advantage over cloud-based or at least erodes the cloud-based advantage. Right now, I think that that’s just not generally where the state of affairs is. Could change in the future, but I think that they’re just going to have a hard time of things in the near term. My guess is that Microsoft’s relative potential improves as memory prices come back down.

I think that running local LLMs would be great. But the simple fact is that for most users, it’s just too costly to make sense for a lot of applications with current memory prices.

I got a Framework Desktop, 128GB, specifically to do local generative AI stuff, in 2025. At the time, the system was $2,500, which is already going to be pricey for a number of people for a single-purpose computer. In the months since that shipped, the price on the exact same hardware configuration has gone up to over $6,500. That’s just not a price that a lot of people are going to be willing to pay for a PC. If component supply rises and prices drop back down, then I think that the calculus changes for local AI.

AI companies are acquiring more memory than the entire rest of the world uses. If we want to do the same thing that we could do in the cloud locally and have capacity utilization of 1% on that hardware, then we need a hundred times as much memory as we do with a cloud-based compute approach. That’s…a kind of staggering number.

EDIT: Oh, one major exception that could favor local compute, if R&D produces some major improvements in this direction. Right now, the way most models work, we have a very-expensive-to-generate model that’s static, unchanging. This model does not change as one does inference on it. This makes it fairly efficient for a single compute node in an AI datacenter somewhere to have this one model loaded onto it, and then be used by many users who are all wanting to use the same model.

However, if the same model isn’t being used by many users, then the (expensive) cost of loading a new model onto memory attached to parallel compute hardware for each prompt has to be paid.

If someone comes up with major improvements that can be derived from mutating a model, from updating it as it is used — and I would say with some confidence that human-level AI will require some mechanism giving it more ability to learn after the initial training phase is complete than is presently the case for LLMs as used in 2026 — this is something that may greatly shift the balance in favor of local AI. It’s something that we, as humans, do.

If I were Microsoft, I might seriously look into advanced AI R&D, where models are updated during use. It’s not just that it’s an area with potential, but that it’s an area that might advantage Microsoft’s strengths (control of the local computer, doing local compute) relative to other major AI companies. It only takes one major breakthrough that makes everyone very badly want to have an constantly-updated model to drastically alter the economics of AI compute.

Though…if that happens, as I point out above, that’ll likely set off an even greater RAM crisis than happened with cloud AI compute…

I don’t think that it will crash (well, okay, rather, it’s not why I’m making the statement), but 2028 is when substantial new memory production will be coming online (well, okay, absent unforseen disruptions like a war with China or another COVID-19 or something).

I think sitting on it does nothing

The thing is that once they release it, they freeze the specs, if they want to have a consistent target. If they wait two years, they can bump the specs up as part of that.

Like, if they ship now, then they’re really constrained to, in 2028, ship a two-year-old system.

In fact, IIRC from an article I was reading a while back, the very first industrial robot was used on an American auto assembly line.

searches

Yes, Unimate, and it was even on a GM line, same as here.

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

Unimate was the first industrial robot,[1] which worked on a General Motors assembly line at the Inland Fisher Guide Plant in Ewing Township, New Jersey, in 1961.

Devol, together with Joseph Engelberger, his business associate, started the world’s first robot manufacturing company, Unimation.[7] Devol’s background wasn’t in academia, but in engineering and mechanics, and previously worked on optical sound recording for film and high-speed printing using magnetic sensing and recording. Engelberger’s ultimate goal was to create mechanical workers to replace humans in factories.[8]

The machine weighed 4000 pounds[9] and undertook the job of transporting die castings from an assembly line and welding these parts on auto bodies, a dangerous task for workers, who might be poisoned by toxic fumes or lose a limb if they were not careful.[4]

True. And maybe there will emerge a new group of people who use a living room computer in a new way, and that might really mix things up.

But I still think that the principal market here is most-likely going to be people who are looking to use it in basically the same way that they have a console, and will probably have roughly the same price sensitivity.

EDIT: One factor in the Steam Machine’s favor is going to be the vastly-larger existing launch library compared to the other consoles listed. The Steam store currently has 115,106 items in the “Game” category listed. Hard to quantify the impact of that, since we don’t really have data points for anything on that scale (though maybe someone could still try to look for correlation between launch library size and sales — consoles have had varying level of backwards compatibility).

I think that they should have deferred it two years for component prices to drop. I had a graphic showing inflation-adjusted console prices a while back. Aside from the Atari 2600, no console has had a price near that level and been successful.

goes looking

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/92214dd2-8c37-4df1-8c80-7adb02e3ae4c.jpeg

The highest-priced successful console was the PS3, at $778 in 2024 dollars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3

At launch, the PS3 received a mixed reception, largely due to its high price—US$599 (equivalent to $960 in 2025) for the 60 GB model and $499 (equivalent to $800 in 2025) for the 20 GB model—as well as its complex system architecture and limited selection of launch titles. The hardware was also costly to produce, and Sony sold the console at a significant loss for several years. However, the PS3 was praised for its technological ambition and support for Blu-ray, which helped Sony establish the format as the dominant standard over HD DVD. Reception improved over time, aided by a library of critically acclaimed games, the Slim and Super Slim hardware revisions that reduced manufacturing costs, and multiple price reductions. These factors helped the console recover commercially.

But we’ll see.

I have been assuming they had stock set aside for some kind of Machine + Controller bundle.

Could be — I haven’t seen news along those lines and the Steam Machine description on their website doesn’t presently say anything about coming with a Steam Controller — but I suppose that it’s not unreasonable. But it’s also worth remembering that they’re probably aiming for the console market with the Steam Machine, and a lot of people use consoles for local multiplayer games and are probably going to want more than one controller for that.

Now, local multiplayer is less common among PC games than console games. But, especially with console ports, it’s definitely out there.

https://store.steampowered.com/search?tags=7368&supportedlang=english&ndl=1

That says that there are 7,933 games currently on the Steam store that are tagged as Local Multiplayer.

Just expend some more compute time on doing compression and we’ll get those filesize numbers to a workable level.

$ stat -c %s enhance.png 
276773
$ convert enhance.png enhance.avif
$ identify enhance.avif
enhance.avif AVIF 1164x558 1164x558+0+0 8-bit sRGB 14391B 0.000u 0:00.000
$ stat -c %s enhance.avif
14391
$

zoom and enhance

$ identify enhance2x.avif
enhance2x.avif AVIF 2328x1120 2328x1120+0+0 8-bit sRGB 32448B 0.010u 0:00.000
$ stat -c %s enhance2x.avif 
32448
$

zoom and enhance

$ identify enhance4x.avif 
enhance4x.avif AVIF 4656x2232 4656x2232+0+0 8-bit sRGB 50758B 0.000u 0:00.000
$ stat -c %s enhance4x.avif
50758
$

Okay, that last one took 17 minutes to upscale on my GPU, so I’m not going further. But I’m using SD Ultimate Upscale, which is tile-based, so in theory that could be farmed out over a collection of GPUs and parallelized. Just need more compute hardware.

But as to filesize, that’s under 50kiB.

Matrix Games. They’re a publisher that specialize in wargames that I frequent to get some of my more-serious milsims from (though availability has improved on Steam). They also run an online store. The above three stores are the only places that I’ve bought video games for a long time. Well…tries to remember actually, I did get a few things on itch.io, and IIRC I bought Starsector directly from the company that makes that.

Well…

https://www.pcgamesn.com/pc-retro-tech/ega-graphics

Pity the poor PC of 1983-1984, before EGA graphics changed everything. It wasn’t the graphics powerhouse we know today. IBM’s machines, such as the IBM PC 5150, and their clones might have been the talk of the business world, but they were stuck with text-only displays or low-definition bitmap graphics.

The maximum color graphics resolution was 320 x 200 on a CGA graphics card, with colors limited to four from a hard-wired palette of 16. Even at the time, you’d have a hard time convincing someone that this was really the best graphics card you could buy. Worse, three of those colors were cyan, brown, and magenta, and half of them were just lighter variations of the other half.

You can see in the screenshot from The Secret of Monkey Island below that 16 colors make all the difference, with EGA on the left and four-color CGA on the right.

However, EGA had one big problem; it was prohibitively expensive, even in an era when PCs were already astronomically expensive. The basic EGA card price was over $500 (around $1,400 today), and the Memory Expansion Card cost a further $199.

Go for the full 192KB of RAM and you were looking at a total of nearly $1,000 (approximately $2,900 in today’s money), making a top-end EGA card way more expensive than the GeForce RTX 4090 today. What’s more, the monitor you needed to make the most of it cost a further $850 (approximately $2,500 today). EGA was a rich enthusiast’s toy.

When they initially went on sale, apparently scalpers flooded the thing. They put a reservation system in place for the Steam Controller to aim to defeat scalping. This new shortage is with that reservation system in place, limit on two Steam Controllers per account and the Steam account needs to be in good standing. Now, I guess it could be possible that scalpers went out and figured out how to defeat that, like having a number of people collude to purchase two each, so one can’t say that there’s no scalping…

EDIT: It looks like the going rate on eBay for a sealed-box Steam Controller 2.0 is about $300, so I imagine that that’s what market rate is at current levels of supply. Some lower prices get down towards $200. Valve’s selling them for $99.

I mean, they aren’t going to stop making them if there are people buying them. I’m sure that, at some point, there will be enough manufactured to catch up with demand.

2026 has been a pretty exasperating year to try to get ahold of a lot of pieces of hardware, I have to say.

I’m wondering if — assuming Valve still is trying to release the Steam Machine this year, which according to the last news I’ve seen, they’re still saying that they’re going to do — this shortage is gonna dick up their Steam Machine sales. I mean, the Steam Controller is a nice-to-have on a regular PC, but for people with a Steam Machine in the living room, they probably are going to want it even more — like, there it’s a lot more important to have the touchpads to replace a mouse, remote power-on capability, etc.

https://music.youtube.com/channel/UCoAHfpcD9nLJ6FZwe3BnTQg

Yeah, that’s true. But…if a website derives its revenue from ads, a non-ad-viewing user — and users who switch browsers so as to use an ad blocker would presumably be blocking ads — loses that website money rather than generating it. Like, for such a website, the issue would be how many Firefox users that do view ads would be lost if their website didn’t work on Firefox.

Those of you who remember the early 2000s, when Internet Explorer had very high marketshare, probably remember a number of websites that didn’t work with other browsers.

I think that the concern is whether a number of websites might stop working with Firefox if Chrome users consistently represent ad revenue and Firefox users generally don’t.

I use Firefox, but it has relatively-limited marketshare in 2026. A lot of people just browse on mobile devices and on Android devices, and there Chrome’s probably the default browser.

https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/

Chrome at 70.25%.

Safari at 15.72%.

Edge at 5.14%.

Firefox at 2.19%.