Tech Won't Save Us - The RAM Crisis is Coming for All Your Tech w/ Chris Person

Episode Date: July 2, 2026

Public ire toward AI keeps growing as the data center boom continues to hit people’s pockets. Chris Person joins Paris Marx to discuss the soaring cost of consumer electronics, including why prices are unlikely to fall anytime soon, and how people can experiment with homespun cyberpunk tech.Chris Person is a co-founder of Aftermath and makes Highlight Reel.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Kyla Hewson. Support the show on Patreon.Also mentioned in this episode:You can now pre-order Paris’s new book Hyperscale.Chris mentioned the BC250, an e-waste machine he’s written about recently.Chris also wrote a review of the Steam Machine.Xbox and Apple both announced price hikes this month.Stock prices for memory companies like SK Hynix are hitting record highs.Support the show

There's no, there's nothing coming to save us with this one. You know what I mean? And, and I urge you if you have a, if you're a PC builder and you haven't done this already, go on a little website called PC Park Picker and figure out exactly what the components of your computer are. And type it in there. And you will, you will hug your computer tonight. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us made in partnership with the Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Chris Person.

Chris is a co-founder of Aftermath and makes highlight real, a, a video series on YouTube. I'm sure for the past few months you have been hearing about the increasing prices of RAM or memory and how that has been fueled by the AI industry and basically the need to have these things for data centers. You know, these massive tech companies that are trying to develop generative AI are buying up all of these chips and that's making it a lot more expensive for everyday people and the kind of personal consumer electronics that we use, whether that's video game consoles or,

you know, personal computers, right? and other things that would use these chips. And so we haven't really dug into that in great depth on this show before. But last time Chris was on the show, back in January, we started to kind of talk about that and mention it. And I figured this would be a good opportunity to have them back on the show because back then he mentioned this thing called the Steam Machine, this new product from Valve that was supposedly coming out,

but we didn't know when because, you know, in part, you know, the components have become so much more expensive. And I think the company was trying to figure out what it was actually going to do with that product. and how much it was actually going to have to price it at in order to not lose a lot of money, right? And right before we went to record this episode, Apple announced that its prices were increasing. And as we were recording, so we don't talk about this in the actual interview, but Xbox announced that its prices were increasing another $100 to $150 as of August 1st. And so all of these companies are raising prices on consumer electronics.

And I figured it's a great opportunity to have Chris back on the show so we can dig into why this is happening, what the implications of it are, if there's any prospect of this, you know, maybe slowing down or like not happening in the future or for these prices to be rolled back, but, you know, it's really tough to see it. And really, it's just another way that this pursuit of AI at all costs is costing all of us in so many different ways and so many different parts of the world. And, you know, there are interesting stories that come out of that, but also a lot of frustrations and rightfully so. And so I think that this is a great episode with Chris where we dig into a really important issue that, unfortunately, so many of us are

feeling and, you know, being affected by. If you do enjoy it, make sure to leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. You can share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work, that goes into making tech won't save us every single week. So I can keep having these critical, in-depth conversations with, you know, experts who understand so many different parts of the tech industry and are willing to share that information with you. You can join supporters like Kate from Newcastle in the UK or Jana in Melbourne by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Chris, welcome back to Tech

Won't Save Us. Hi. How are you? I'm good. Thanks. It's great to have you back on the show. I was thinking, we talked earlier this year, right? And we were talking about your interest in hardware and, you know, the kind of interesting reporting that you're doing at aftermath. And one of the things you said was that the steam machine was, you know, a piece of hardware that you were, really interested in. But, you know, there were questions about whether it was even going to come out, what it was going to cost if it did, you know, all these kind of questions because of, you know, this kind of escalating issue with the prices of memory and the prices of chips more broadly that was taking hold at the time and has really taken off since then. And so, you know, when I reached

out, I was like, okay, I want to start by talking about the steam machine, but then right as we were about to hop on this call, we saw that Apple has announced that it is increasing the prices quite significantly on a lot of its hardware. And it feels like that is like, a really significant moment in this story. So I actually wanted to start us there. As we see increases of $100 on the new MacBook Neo, $200 on the base MacBook Air, and significant increases basically across the product line,

what do you make of what we're seeing here with these increases from Apple? I mean, I said this actually in my review of the Steam machine, but basically like this is what computers cost now. This is straight up. And we actually kind of knew this was going to happen because, you know, Tim Cook was like, yeah, it's going to happen. He said it more, I think I thought it was like more it's going to happen in the fall and not now or something or whenever, I guess. Is it like sudden? Is it like right now?

Yeah, I believe so. And he was also warning back in, back in April, you know, of the kind of increasing memory prices that they were seeing, how it was eventually going. going to affect the product line. But yeah, I believe these increases are like immediate. You know, it's not like coming sometime in the future, right? So he, if I remember correctly, like the canary and the coal mine there for at least Apple was like they had basically pulled the entry level Mac mini. And I have a Mac mini because it's really good at not consuming any power and doing like

little tiny tasks. But not, you know, a lot of people were using it for like OpenClaw, which I fucking hate. I think that's boring. I think you're a boring person if you do that shit. I'm really sorry. And the, you know, like I use it for like video encoding, laser disc encoding. And they had this entry level one. You could upgrade the memory. It was really good. And it required like, I wrote a piece about that where you would go and get like, because the memory is weird and keyed in a really weird way because of how the chip works, you had to go to like a Chinese company who would sell you like an aftermarket like SSD or something like that that worked with it. And at the time,

I was like, this is a bad deal. The Mac's memory is a bad deal. You don't have to do that. And now it's like, man, I don't know anymore. Like, Tim Cook's Mr. Supply, I mean, like, that's what he added. His value add was, I understand logistics. I'm able to get everything locked down. And, like, we're hitting a point where, like, even Apple's like, yeah, I don't know, man.

I don't know what do you want to tell us. Fucking Apple. Like, Apple is doing that. And, like, the thing I'm worried about even more broadly than that is not like, we cannot get memory for a cheap price. I'm worried about we can't get it, period, and what that will do. I don't know if we'll hit that, but it's bad. It's really bad. No, absolutely. I completely agree with what you're saying. And I feel like one of the things that, you know, I was reading in recent months was kind of like, if you looked at, say, the steam machine,

you know, Valve is not a company that has these like long-term contracts for RAM and memory in the way that Apple would, right? And so it was kind of like understandable that their hardware prices were going to have to increase quite quickly to reflect the increasing, you know, prices of components that they were seeing. Whereas someone like Apple, it felt like, you know, okay, they can hold on for a while. Like, you know, they are a major buyer. They have these contracts with manufacturers. You know, it's something that they're going to be able to, to basically manage, right? And it really felt like when the MacBook Neo came out, they're, you know, what was that two or three months ago or something, that that seemed really significant that they were

releasing, you know, this kind of lower priced computer at a time when prices were going up so much. But now, you know, just a few years down or a few months down the line, we're seeing this massive increase across the product line, which, you know, really shows us where we are, I guess. Yeah. Also, it's really funny because, like, you know, I think there's a, valve's a weird company, like a really, really weird company. Even, and I kind of feel that way about like Gabe Newell, too. Like, we did a piece I actually quite like where it's like, man, yeah, he's a yacht guy, but he's a really weird even by yacht guy standards. You know what I mean? And I, they'll make it good. But like, that's the weird thing about this company is like, they make so much money. But the actual number of people who work there is relatively small. And like their hardware division isn't that big. You know, the way these like supply chain things work is like there's a pecking order and, you know, who will pay the most amount of money. And also like, you sort of cement these relationships in and like you know they're the biggest they're one of the biggest names in PC handheld space and that's not very big you know that's not a huge player

relative to like Nintendo or Sony or any of those and like Sony's had to raise their prices I don't think it's going to they're going to stop raising their prices I don't think anybody's going to stop raising their prices I think the steam machine was like I think an inflection point for a lot of people because they're like oh and I think also because they were fairly open about like, yeah, these are what the components cost and it's not great. Absolutely. And before we jump into the steam machine piece of this, like, do you think seeing Apple make this significant move because they are such a major player in hardware, does that kind of like, you know, open the floodgates to other companies, you know, just moving forward with

big price increases of their own, you know, companies that maybe we haven't seen actually be willing to do so much of it before now? Or have we already seen a lot of these? these other companies, you know, already hiked their prices. We've already seen it happen, I think, you know, like Nintendo had, I believe the Switch 2 got a price bump, but like the PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 Pro are now, but like the PS5 Pro I'm very worried about because it's $900, but it has a 2 terabyte SSD in it, if I remember correctly. And it's like, oh, pro, you could just soap that. That's like a lot.

And, you know, I wonder how much like supply they have. And that's the thing. It's not just RAM. It's like SSDs are also going up. Again, for the same reason, which is AI and AI servers and who gets first dibs and who's making the most amount of money and or who's worth the most amount of money, you know, like who's spending the most amount of money because they're losing the most amount of money to have their stock prices be high for data centers that may not exist or, you know, and for GPUs and, you know, HBMs and shit. But like, it's bad. It's bad. And like, there's a pecking order and like it's actually impacted like people. who make sticks of memory, because those guys don't make the memory. Like, those guys, like, G-Skill and, like, Coursair, I mean, like, certain, like,

component makers don't make the memory, so they just have to pay whatever they can get. And so their margins don't really change, but they themselves are, like, they have to do less volume because fewer people are like, yeah, I'm going to pay, like, 800. Like, the thing that's really annoying about this is that, you know, flash memory is one thing. it was always a little pricier just because memory is pricey. It used to be like sort of getting better. And then they all kind of cut their supply back and then it kind of creeped up a little bit. And then these things happened.

Not a lot of people make these things. You know what I mean? Like it's basically three companies, Samsung Micron, N.SK. Hynix that make like most of the RAM, for example. You do have like two Chinese companies making like Flash. and and RAM now, but they don't have like the same scale that those do, that those companies do. And they can't make like the really good stuff. I think one of them is making like DDR4 memory at this point.

And but I'd have to look into that. And it's just not there's no, there's nothing coming to save us with this one. You know what I mean? And and I urge you if you have a, if you're a PC builder and you haven't done this already, go on a little website called PC Park Picker and figure out exactly what the components of your computer are and type it in there and you will you will hug your computer tonight and maybe take a fucking insurance policy out of it because I did and the computer that I am currently podcasting from costs $5,500. It did not cost that when I bought it and made it. Like, that's not, it was like 54 something, not including like a really nice case. And I don't know how agro I went with like the fans and everything.

But yeah, no, it's not good. And like, it's going to, it's impacting PC builders, obviously. And everybody who cares about these things. But like, yeah, nobody's, nobody's safe here. Yeah, it's, I don't know. It's just been really shocking to see how quickly this is like escalated. And, you know, it's like, you know, there were little talks of it before. There were issues in gaming where people were feeling it in particular, but now very quickly

it has gone from being this niche concern to something that everybody is now feeling, all the electronics are going up because the chips are getting so expensive. And as you say, because of the demand that's coming from these AI companies. And so I want to come back to the steam machine, but I was wondering if we can get into why we are actually seeing these massive price increases in the first place. Like what is actually driving the price of memory, the price. of solid state drives and stuff like that up so much and such a short period of time. I mean, it's AI.

It's really easy. It's just, it's AI. It's data centers. It's, you know, you know, GPUs. It's, they have wafers that they can sort of allocate, like, stock to. And those are not like, oh, yeah, if you, by the way, if you think that the, the bad part is if you think the data centers are like going to be like, okay, well, they all went up. Let's take the sticks of RAM out of there. Nope.

That's not how that works. Unfortunately, that's not how that works. Unless you do some like, okay, side tangent, there's a guy called DOS dude too, I like, and he was the guy who would like take like individual like nans and stuff like that and like des solder them on Max. And I love that guy. You interviewed him. He's really, he's doing like high level soldering.

And like so people who do electronics are like, oh, that's quite good. Unless you do some like wakadoo shit like that or figure out a way to get this extremely specific memory, like salvaging it or something like that, it's not going to help. You know what I mean? It's we either have to like wait for the industry to tank or wait for these commitments to tank or whatever. And then hopefully they'll come back like, hey, we're sorry. You know, like Samsung and S.K. Heinz will be like, hey, so about that, you know, like,

they always fucking do. But I mean, like the really evil thing, by the way, is stock prices. I mean, like, would you like to look up the stock price for, like, Samsung? It's gone up a ton, right? Yeah, a lot. It's fucking a lot. It's just, like, static until the beginning of 2006 and then just shoots up to, like, 10 times it's worth. Seagate, anything involved in the storage sector is, like, going straight up.

And, like, these companies are often very corrupt, like the memory industry, at least, is very corrupt. and has been, you know, has been investigated and whatnot. And I don't see them doing anything soon in this regulatory market, unless I don't know, like the EU gets involved because it's just they're making too much money. Like even if they weren't making the money that way, they're making their stock prices. That's the really annoying thing is that spinning disc prices are up too. Like the fucking platter ones, like the ones in servers. it feels like less organic even than just Sam

oldman buying a bunch up for like whatever that pretend like mega data center thing he's making which what was it called? Yeah, Stargate. Yeah, the Stargate. What was it? There was that one headline where they bought up like 40% of the of the RAN supply for this one thing that like by all accounts doesn't really exist in a real way or is like not going to happen or I don't know.

But yeah, it's it feels like there's. this other layer and I don't think this has been either reported on but like I would love to hear people more investigating like the stock element of this because they are it's like a straight line. It's really really not good. Yeah, I feel like

the one like upside of that is was the story of seeing like the Samsung chip workers like get these massive bonuses because they threaten to to strike. But it's still wild to see right. And I feel like my understanding of it from from looking into it a bit was kind of like, as you were saying, you can't just take this RAM that's dedicated to

data centers into AI and shift it back to consumer uses because what they're really doing is like changing production lines that have been making consumer RAM and memory and, you know, SSDs and stuff and switching that over to a completely different, you know, type of production that is meant to go into these data centers and these enterprise applications that they can sell for a lot more money, right? Which is kind of what has driven this shift and whether it's not the, you know, as you're saying, whether there's not the like capacity to meet the demand in the consumer market anymore because they feel like they can make more in the enterprise market. Yeah. For the record, S.K. Heinex, who is the second biggest, I think, memory supplier,

their stock price in the last year went up 895%. That's wild. This is wild. That's definitely, I mean, I think you should send a guy kind of territory. I feel like everybody's like kind of just getting in while the getting's good because they know it could collapse tomorrow. It kind of, it has a sort of like there's like a, I don't know how any way described, like frenzy that is that is like smash and grabler. They're like, this is a scam. We all know this is a scam. Just fucking go for it. Just go for it. And then we'll worry about it later. And I, and it feels, it feels bad. I'm sorry. I feel like I'm reiterating that. I apologize. guys. It makes me really upset.

I think it's a point that deserves a reiteration, though. It makes me think of, you know, like what, a year or two ago when Jensen Wong was like selling Nvidia shares and people were like, oh, he thinks it's going to crash in. It's like, no, man, that guy's just like making sure he has some cash in his bank account for when something happens, you know, because the stock has gone up so much. Yeah. He needs to have like 50 different horrible leather jackets. I saw a video of him. I mean, I've seen a bunch of videos.

I think Ed Zetron posted the one of him doing a wallet inspector thing where he just like signed. What was he signed a dollar and then like took some money from the person's wallet and they gave it back to them or something like that. And the other thing I remember, I didn't want to repost it because I wasn't sure if it was AI or not, but it was too specific where I think he was in Korea, which I think he seemed, it seems like people fucking love him in East Asia. because they just don't have the same relationship to AI that I think people in the West do. Or it's not articulated the same way because I think it's making a lot of money. It was him in like South Korea and he was towling himself off in like like ass level soul heed. And he was just taking a single like napkin from an aide whose hand was out and just dabbing himself, not taking the leather jacket off because he can't take the leather jacket off.

But it was just an aid lazily holding out like a piece of a piece of paper or something like that. I want to believe that's real because it's just really embarrassing because he's an embarrassing man. I can see that being something accurate, you know. But like, you know, when we think of the RAM prices, like, why is it that they really started taking off like end of last year early this year? Is it just because the demand from data centers became so high that like the chipmakers just eventually had to switch everything over? Like, why did this happen earlier in the AI race? Do we have an idea of that? I mean, I don't know.

I think they just bought up a bunch of them. And then they're like, hey, that's a good idea. I mean, like, it's just switching production lines. I think also, like, COVID, they overbuilt a little bit. I mean, this is kind of the thing. Like, RAM traditionally was the cheapest part of your build. It was expensive for a little bit in COVID, if I remember correctly. And then it kind of dropped back down.

And then I think they sort of curtailed like some production. if I remember correctly, but I'd have to double check. I think part of it is just like, nobody ever thought the RAM would ever cost this much because it was always assumed to be kind of like, you know, should I get 32 gigabytes or should I spend like slightly more and really go in on like 64? It would cost like $100 more. And now it's like that kit costs like obscene amounts of money. Like I think it's just like people finding new frontiers of where they can like get the money in.

Like spinning disk drives are the really weird one. And I've seen if you ever follow the like R slash data hoarders subreddit because like I keep seeing Cigate trying to like raise their retail prices on like on their research. But then you'd go to like server part deals, which is where I would normally go. And like the recertified drives there are still they're like bad, but it's like 2x and not like 10x or something like that. But then you'll go to like a retail place and it's like yeah, here's like a Western digital like portable and it's like an obscene amount of money. So that one feels like they're trying, but it isn't working as well or it's like weird. But I think it's just they're finding new frontiers of stuff to buy and then to sell. You know what I mean?

And like to sell, they're like, hey, I didn't think we could fuck people over like that. And when you were talking about also the Apple price increase, the one that really struck me was the like not the PCs, but like the Mac, like the AirPod mini or the HomePod mini. and like the Apple TV, because those do include RAM, but it's like, it's not like, you, you don't think of it as that. It's very minuscule, right? Yeah, I mean, I can't imagine it's that much, but it, but it's a little computer. So it's, it's, it's subject to this. And it's like $30 increase on that just because of the RAM.

And it's bad. Yeah. And I think, I think like the Apple TV was something like 129 to $1.99, like in the U.S., which is like, that's a huge jump for. a small device like that that has been out for quite a long time as well, right? Like, it's not like this is new cutting edge hardware or anything like that. It's got four gigs of RAM. That's four gigs of RAM.

And, you know, and that matters. And so one thing about the steam machine, I won't get into this too much, is that they were trying to ship it with two sticks of eight gig RAM initially, because it's dual channel that works a little bit better. It's a little easier to sort of get higher speeds that way. They're shipping it now, even outside of this, and we can get into this in a second. They're shipping it with like 16 gigs on a single stick instead because they can't get 8 gigabyte sticks.

And the reason they can is because higher production stuff is being shifted upwards. And so it's sort of, I mean, it's not a huge difference in the performance, but it's like not an insignificant one. And I guess you could say like the upshot of that is if you want to upgrade it because it's an upgradable machine, you can get that one stick of. 16 gigabyte RAM for $220 and like put it in there and now you have a, you know, a slightly more capable machine. They had to make a choice that they didn't want to make on calculus they never would have thought about a year ago. Yeah. And I guess if we're getting into the steam machine, maybe we can take a quick set back.

And can you explain like what the steam machine is and like why this is a significant thing for for Valve to be doing? So for people who don't know Valve software, they are the de facto store that you're. buy PC games on. There are other stores. Some of them are like proprietary and usually involve like one big game. But for the most part in the, or like then you have like epic and

like third parties that aren't as successful but are like a little more curated. But Valve is like this is the marketplace. We had, they had Half Life and Team Fortress and then they built an empire on that. And the thing that's interesting about it is they take a pretty high cut. They take 30

percent. It's a little onerous, but whatever. And they have, they moved into like hardware, hardware with the Steam deck. I mean, they previously tried to make a Linux machine for people to play on and a controller to match with it like 10, 12 years ago. And it failed. I mean, the controller was weird looking. It was like too big, like, like, I don't touch pads that and like it's it's people who love that control love that controller but their attitude with we're going to put Linux on things and the developers are going to come and we're not going to we're not going to lead with the hardware we're going to have like third party developers doing it and it just like it was a mess and people didn't talk about it but

then eventually they came back they invested a lot of money in what's called proton and a lot of development in basically making it so that instead of having to do Linux native games or games that are, you know, run well in Linux and, you know, are developed in Linux. They said, let's just build on wine, make wine really good and, like, create this, like, compatibility layer that makes it so you can just run a Windows game in Linux. And it works. It works really, really well. And part of that was they made a handheld that was just based on that concept.

It's like, here you go. Here is a handheld that will play all your PC games. Might not play all your PC games. You might have to check compatibility. But, like, for the most part, it worked. And it's been a really huge success. And I think people have also, if not installed CMOS on their handhelds have, like you are able to install Linux on it quite well. It's been a really big success.

I've moved most of my computing over Linux now because like, you know, that's that I just want to. I fucking hate Microsoft. I think we've both talked about this a lot. Yeah. I don't ever want to work in Windows unless I have to. And, you know, the interesting thing is. is the steam machine was them being like, okay, let's try this again. Because the first one was called the steam machine.

This is also called the steam machine. They're like, we noticed a lot of people would take their steam deck and just keep it docked all the time. So we were like, why don't we just make something that was like a slightly nicer version of that? Not even like trying to compete with the consoles, literally just like, hey, why don't we just have one that's docked all the time? Because people were doing this. And I think they targeted something that was like more affordable, more meager. and shit changed. It's a really nice...

I mean, I have it over there. It's quite nice. It's very quiet. It's, you know, realistically, it's hard to sort of talk about performance on something that isn't done yet, really. But they targeted things that were much more, like, lower spec.

And so you're talking about like PS5, slightly more than a PS5, less than a PS5. I think that like when you involve FSR 4.1, which is rolling out to it now, it'll be a lot more charitable. But, you know, it's, it's, it's quiet. It's really, really quiet.

It's a really weirdly designed piece of hardware because they're using, like, a fin stack that's like shaped like a server fin stack, which is like kind of closed off on the side. And then they use these like high pressure, low flow fans that they made with like really strange blades and a plastic shroud to basically push everything through one big heat sink. And it's small, but most of that's just the cooling. and it's like 28 dB. It's like really, really, maybe 25. Quiet as the grave. I love it.

I think it's great. $1,050 is not a good price for it, you know, for the entry. Without a controller, you know, not great. Controls your cheap now, I will say. But yeah, it's the thing that I was excited about is that it's probably going to be like the biggest PC shipping Linux out there. like outside of the steam deck. Like, that's huge. That's so important.

We super need to, like, get people acclimated to not being on Windows. And I think the thing that's really interesting about it is, you know, like, playing a PC in a living room setting sucks. I say this to somebody who has a PC in his living room for, like, well over a decade at this point. It's not fun. It's not intuitive. It rocks if you can get it to work. But then you're the guy who has to be like, all right, I'm just going to boot into a desktop environment. And they kind of solved a lot of those issues with this.

You know, HDMI, CEC works. Although I think I've gotten it to work in other distros as well. Like, it's weird. Linux development is very strange because you'll get like, like, like, SteamOS doesn't support like Nvidia graphics. GPU drivers right now. It's basically just AMD. And I think they're trying to like be more cautious and make sure things are like tested.

But like Bazite will run GPUs that are in video. they're getting into a good place now. And just to be clear, when you're talking about distros, that's other versions of Linux, Bazite being one of those. Yeah, yeah, Bazite and Cashy were the big gamer ones, I would say. I remember when the Steam Machine was like first announced, like, you know, a lot of the discussion was on what this might mean for the

consoles, right, and what this might mean for PC gaming. And is this going to make things more accessible, right, to kind of get into PC gaming without needing to worry too much about putting together your own PC or all this kind of stuff. It's just a plug and play, kind of easy to get into sort of a thing. But it's interesting to hear you say that actually one of the things that makes it more

compelling or appealing to you is actually the fact that there's Linux on this and this is going to mean that a lot more people are going to come in contact with using Linux more regularly where maybe that kind of opens them up to considering it more is there like regular personal computer too, do you think? Or what do you think about that?

I think so. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people just don't like interacting with Windows at all. It sucks. It's not fun. And switching to Linux is really nice. I have I have Bazade on a bunch of things. Without getting too much into the weeds in that one,

it doesn't matter which distro you choose, really, at this point. Like, they're all kind of the same in certain ways. And it just depends on, like, how you approach these things. Like, most of them are running plasma or, you know, like, as terms of, like, desktop environment. and plasma is the one that is basically the most like Windows. And if you know Windows, you probably know how to deal with this. I like Bazate personally because I don't like breaking my computer.

And I have had enough latex machines where like you break something accidentally. And this is sort of what's called imbutable. They would go with the term atomic. I think that's more accurate. That's kind of how SteamOS works is it's like, hey, why don't we make it so that the user can't just completely fuck up their computer? which a lot of Linux people like because they like breaking their computer instead of using it. Arch people love doing that.

I like arch people, but they love breaking their computer. And so, yeah, like, they've made, that was the really nice thing about CMOS. It's like, it's pretty easy to understand. It's pretty straightforward. Does it sort of like the Fedora version of that? And yeah, like, I think this would be one of the biggest contact points. I don't think it's going to solve a lot of, I don't think they're going to ship a lot of volume. is the thing. You know what I mean? I think that the problem is that they in addition to just

the RAM costing a lot of money, they straight up couldn't get a lot of it. They couldn't get a lot of storage. And so I think volume is going to be bad for the next few years. But like, yeah. Which I guess changes like the conversation on it a little bit, right? Especially from like those early discussions of like, you know, the kind of major impacts that it might have. But then the RAM increases or, you know, the lack of, you know, the lack of, you know, the lack of, availability paired with the higher price point, you know, limits kind of like the consumer, like maybe

willingness to pick it up, right? In the sense that you were talking about the handheld, the steam deck, which they have as well. And that suffered significant price increases just like last month or the month before as well, right? Just like we're seeing in so many other, in so many things, right? It used to be such a good deal.

It used to be like 350 bucks for the LCD. And I think like, what, $6.6.50 or something like that for the OLED. And I have the OLED in it I use it like every day. It's so good. I use that thing so often. Because all my games are on there.

Because I have all this big library of like weird indie titles. And like that's the other thing that's really nice about. And it makes the calculus of like how how useful is something that is like relatively underpowered. It's like, okay, it's relatively underpowered. There's like hundreds and thousands of games that you're just never going to touch on any other platform that you can on there. And something I find is that like, and also they'll just like let you install shit on there. I really do favor that like quite a bit. Like you can just do whatever you want.

It's your computer. And like that's the annoying thing about like PS5 and and all of these things. It's just like if you install an emulator on a switch to the fucking, they'll fucking send the cops or something. Not literally, but you know, they, they're, they're, they're, you don't own that thing. You know what I mean? Like you own the ability to play their games on it, which like, you know, they, they spent a lot of money on it. They don't want to lose money on it. They're a Japanese company.

I get it. But like, that is a nice thing. I think there's also pushback. The reaction has been interesting because there's like different groups of people. There's people who are like hardware people who have been like paying attention. And those people look at this thing and they're like, yeah, it's kind of underpowered. Wow, they did a really good job with it. But it is a little underpowered.

yeah, that is what that costs. And that's where I'm at. And then you have people who are like, console people who are like, why aren't you subsidizing the cost of this? And it's like, I don't think they can do that. You know,

I'm going to be honest. I don't think anybody can do that right now. I don't think that's as common as people think it is. And also like, I don't know, that one is very funny because it just sounds like they're saying, well, Gabe has a yacht, please give me money.

And I think I would respect it more if people just said that. You know what I mean? As opposed to like, as opposed to like, hey, instead of like kind of breaking even, why don't you lose money? It's like because that's their business still. I'm sorry.

And I feel like that was the model for like console gaming for a long time. You know, like the, especially in the, in the beginning years of a console, like it would be, it would be priced below the cost of production and they would make it up on like, you know, selling the games and all that kind of stuff. But even now it feels like with the regular consoles that, you know, they're also making sure that they're breaking even on selling like the PS5 and the Xbox series X and stuff like that, right? Yeah, I think their costs are. actually like a little, well, I mean, I don't talk about Xbox making or losing money.

But like, but PlayStation's like, you know, they didn't get this way writing checks. I think that they are not in the red with these as much, but it's, it's, I think they're having more. I think even they're going to have more difficulty. They had to raise their prices. And that's the other thing. It's like, this is like the third or fourth indignity. Because like even at this is after like day minimis and like the Trump admin just like making it so that everybody had to like, reconfigure their supply chains so that it was like technically in Southeast Asia so it didn't have

the China you know just like and then the tariffs lifted but maybe they didn't but like it to the point where like I think people just were like we're just going to assume this is expensive and that you we don't know you know like I I kind of stopped paying attention to whether or not what we were doing with tariffs at this point just because it's like so annoying and we went back and forth and I think but like this comes at the heel of all that other shit happening and this isn't healthy for this industry. Like it makes it really, really hard to have an environment where people buy

games, you know what I mean? Like, where people can afford anything. And it's a bummer. Yeah, no, it definitely is. And I wanted to ask you that too because like, you know, thinking about the steam machine and this as you know, this alternative way, I guess, to play games for people that is more PC like, but is structured a bit more like a console. So you can easily put it like in your living room and things like that without the difficulties of having a PC as you were talking about. But on the regular console side,

like we've seen a PS5 go from, I think, $500 at launch to $6.50 now. You know, the Xbox has gone up, I believe, a similar amount. The Switch 2 is going up in September by, I think, $50 or something like that. And so what does that mean for gaming then? If, you know, all of, because I feel like gamers were hit early by like the increased cost of GPUs.

You know, they saw that during the pandemic, but also more recently with Aon. and it feels like that is like a sector that feels it earlier than the other parts of, I don't know, consumer electronics, I guess. What does it mean for gaming if the cost of getting in becomes so hot? It's fewer people, you know, fewer people. Although the really weird thing I will say is you keep occasionally just seeing like, because these prices are so high, occasionally you'll just see like a really weird flash sale.

Because like people are like, what do we do? Nobody wants to buy this thing. Shit, I don't know. You're on sale for a day. And so you'll occasionally be able to get a deal as though that's good, but like, it happens intermittently. And you just kind of have to, like, jump on it like a grenade with a helmet. You know, like you're just like a band of brother's shit or something. No, it's going to be bad for everybody.

And actually, something I'm writing now, I think you might find this interesting, is in addition to doing this, I also already had a living room PC. So I switched that over to Linux or to Bazite. And then I also got something that like other people have been tinkering with, which is the BC 250 that does not stand for British Columbia 250, which is a crypto mining card that was a cut down PlayStation 5. It's a, it's basically the chip from PS5, but it didn't pass QC or something like, or they had extra. And so they just cut off a bunch of the cores or the compute units and like cut off some of the CPU cores and said, okay, we're going to put these in a server rack and go to town. And then crypto died, or at least crypto mining died. And then crypto is not doing well either.

And so these have made it onto the secondary market. They were never meant to be used in a personal computing way. But they have 16 gigabytes of DDR6, GDDR6, I think, RAM on there, that you can't desotter. And, you know, it's not a, it's not the most powerful thing. but people have figured it out. So people are just 3D printing cases around this, putting weird fucking things to it. And it's like the, it's the e-waste steam machine.

And I have one in my house. The wildest thing about this, by the way. So they remember those fused off compute units and whatnot. Like a month ago, they were like, hey, we found them. We found the compute units that they fused off. And not only that, we can turn them on again. And so there's like, oh my God. So not only do you have.

to do this whack-a-do shit where you like 3D print a case, figure out cooling. And also like the cooler is meant to be done in server layout, actually kind of like the C machine ironically. So you have to do this thing where you're either like just zip tying a case onto it and hoping for the best thermally or 3D printing like a blower at the end of it or removing it doing what I did, which was very silly, which is removing the entire cooler, 3D printing out of ASA because that's like thermally what can withstand those heats. 3D printing a bracket, taking a stock cooler onto it.

So it's just like, it looks like you put a tower cooler onto a graphics card. And then just building a computer around that using like all like secondary parts. And then you unlock the core. And also, sorry, in order to reset the bios, you have to like take the coin battery out for like a minute. It's just it's it is so much fun and so annoying at the same time and once I actually got it going It did like 1080p no fsr that's no upscaling Cyberpunk at high settings 54 frames a second not bad that's like not with that's without any of the like doing fake stuff you know what I mean

the steam machine does like 76 It's not bad um it's not bad um it's It has more compute units if you unlock it than the stock PS5. It's not as optimized. The PS PlayStation is very, very good at that. But you can do pretty good things for something that costs $170 plus whatever you're adding to it. Do you think that like all of these price increases for memory for SSDs, you know, as we've been talking about will kind of lead people to experiment more with computers and stuff like in the way that you're talking about and trying to kind of, you know, put. things together that maybe they wouldn't have otherwise considered because it was just relatively

affordable to buy a computer because prices were like coming down so regularly. Like as I hear you describe that, one of the things that comes to mind is, you know, the people experimenting with these like low powered computers that called Cyberdex where like their 3D printing cases and stuff and just building like, I don't know, computers with like interesting and weird designs. What do you think about that? I'm a little bit too about Cyberdex because I don't think they're fun to use. I'm a little.

I'm a little. They're not. No, but it is very, like, the BC250 is very cyberpunk in the, like, true sense of it, like, in the Gibsonian sense. It is very, like, you took E-waste and you have to go on a Russian YouTuber's, like, English language channel devoted to this. This guy named Old Lamer, and he uses GPT, like, imagery on everything. But other than that, he seems like a nice enough guy. And he's just like, here is how you unlock Kori. in B.C. 250. And it's just like, I'm so with you, homie. So here. I mean, I think this is still a

very niche thing. I think it matters for people, like, not in the U.S. in particular, because, like, as much as it hurts people in the U.S., this is kind of occasionally how computing has been for a lot of people. I think it's still a very niche thing, but I think that, like, the thing I take away from it is that, like, this kind of development is only possible when you have an open platform. And so the things that like happened with Bazite and like steam like enable this kind of stuff. Do you know what I mean? And so cash EOS and all these like these like things like these are things that are like happening out in the open and people are like, all right, I don't have any money, but I got a lot of time

on my hands. What can I do? And you you have people like helping each other. There's like a discord. The case I used, I talked to this guy named Gadget. I think he's a guy. I don't know. This person named Gadget who's first.

French, I believe. And it was just a month-long conversation of me being like, that doesn't work. Because Gadgett's French. And so Gadget's parts selection was different. The cooler that they used can't be bought in the United States legally because Deep Cool got sanctioned by the United States government for selling to Russia. So I had to buy a secondary one on eBay. But they do have, oh, I would say, there is another company with suspiciously similar hardware right now called Sudk, who has been selling recently. And it's just, it's very much like when Mo throws Homer out and you just see him from,

or was it, Barney out and you see Barney come up behind him two seconds later. Yeah, I don't know. I think it's fun more than anything. I think that like the ingenuity of people developing in the open is the thing I really enjoy about this. I don't think it'll be super common,

but I do think something you're also seeing is people playing PC games on their phones. because you have, in addition to the steam machine, you have what's known as Fex, and Valve has been doing this for the Steam frame, which is their VR headset that's coming forward because they want it to be a headset that is something you can do remotely, but also play on the headset.

And it uses an arm chip, and Fex is the translation layer that lets you do X8664 stuff on arm. And that's really hard. but it's gotten very, very far right now. And so you're seeing people on like really nice Android phones and handhelds like the iron Thor, which is really good. It's like a 3DS, but it's like really powerful. It uses a Snapdragon.

They're just playing like fallout New Vegas on that now. It's nutty. You can kind of get Final Fantasy 7 rebirth running on a handheld that like you get from China now. And that's what I think is actually like really important. It's like getting that shit to run on a Mac, getting it to run like natively on cell phone hardware, because that's something that you,

you can like choose to game or not on your PC. You don't have a choice to have a cell phone. And that's where cell phone hardware is. And so if they can really blow that up, I think that will benefit them tremendously, provided we're able to afford cell phones. Yeah. Yeah.

I can't remember the iPhone prices jumped in Apple's price increase, but maybe I'll have to check that. You know, I'm wondering hearing you talking, but all that then. You know, obviously public opinion in Western countries is very much against AI and data centers already, right? Do you think that people are making the connection between seeing their game consoles and their MacBooks increase in price and what is going on with AI? And if so, like, how does that contribute then to public opinion of the tech industry, of, you know, the AI industry in particular? I think a lot more people are cognizant.

like even six months ago that this is happening. I think it's becoming common knowledge. Actually, if the steam machine does anything, it might just radicalize people against data centers even more because they're like, fuck, this is making my cell phone cost more money. In the same way that like, you know, like, you would see tech people try to like rationalize water usage and be like, oh, it's getting better, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And like, you know, you can have that long, annoying debate on someone's substack or whatever. But it's harder to get the electricity thing. rationalized and even they're understanding that. And now the sort of like, well, you've made my iPhone cost a lot of money. That's bad, dude. I think that that will backfire on them. I mean, like, not that like public opinion matters so much anymore with like the

construction of data centers or, but like, I can't imagine it will be good for them. And I think it's like becoming much more common knowledge. Like, you know, a lot of people were like, oh, I'm never buying that, blah, blah, blah. I can make a pre-built, you know, for the steam machine. By the way, you can do that if you want to make a pre-built. You can make a pre-built that costs roughly the same amount of money and performs slightly better. And that's way louder and way more annoying for like roughly like 1,050. If you use like really fucked up parts, like if you use a power supply that costs like $30.

But I think that like people, it's the first time I've seen a lot of people being like, man, fuck Sam Altman. at a console price being raised. Like, it used to be like, fuck Nintendo, fuck PlayStation. This is the first time, and maybe it's, you know, Valve's relationship and the fact that they're much more open about this, that they, that, that, that I think people are really connecting what's happening. Um, because before it was Trump tariffs and whatnot. And now it's like, no, we have, we have an enemy. It is, it is Jensen Huang. It is these fucking people who just like, do not give a shit what your personal life is like.

And, and, and if you have, we have. money to like for a computer you need for work. That's the other thing. It's like it's not just, if it was just gaming shit, that would be one thing. But like people need these to live. People need a fucking computer to live. The MacBook Neo was that for like two seconds. For two seconds, it was the like $600, $500 computer like that outcompeted everything.

Now it's what, like $7.99, $6.99 something long. I think it's $6.99, right? Bro, not good. And then like even before this, the Mac Mini, like they knocked up. the price out on that too. And it's just like there is like the one thing Apple had was like, well, at least we have affordable hardware. No, that lasted like two months. Yeah, yeah. You just can't keep it up anymore, right? And I am interested, you know, what you were saying about the Sam Altman piece and people really connected it to him because

I feel like Valve in announcing the price of the steam machine and the availability was also like very upfront about this is why it costs so much as it does. You know, this is the issues we're having with, you know, procuring memory. And so it was very much not just like, here's the price, you know, deal with it. But here's the price. Kind of like, sorry about this, but this is the reality of what's happening right now. So you understand it, you know. I mean, I think they had to. Like, they think that's the correct move. I think it's the honest move. They didn't have another choice. And I asked them actually, like, how much would this have cost? And they were like, well, we can't tell you that one, because I don't think they actually know because that would have been theoretical.

and it's counterfactual. But the thing they basically said was take the recent price bump with the Steam deck and then just subtract. And you would have had roughly that range, which would have been like, you know, like $7,800, maybe $8.50. And I mean, that's still more than a PS5 and it's still like less, way less power than like a PS5 pro for roughly the same price. But that's like, for something that's your computer, that's a much more attractive. active deal. And yeah, I think they made the correct call. It'd be like, yeah, our hands are tied because like they literally don't have any other option. Yeah. It's, it's really frustrating to see how this is all increasing and how, you know,

how we have to pay the cost for the kind of, you know, the push for generative AI in so many different places, right? We pay it for gaming consoles. We pay it for consumer electronics. We pay it in energy prices. And, you know, I would not be surprised at people. kind of like water bills have gone up as well in certain parts of the United States in the world because of this. And it's like, you know, again and again, there is a price that regular people have to pay for this

pursuit of trying to push generative AI on us and build out all these data centers. And it just feels like every few months, there's a new one that kind of gets added to the toll at a time when people are already struggling to pay, you know, for everyday needs, right? For food and housing and all that kind of stuff.

Case-shaped economy. It is, it is housed and has-n-n- the haves are doing very well, at least in a stock per sense and have-nots are not. I mean, like, that's, that's just how, how, like, you get this whenever people try to do the like, well, the economy's doing actually really well thing. And it's just like, the people who aren't doing well aren't doing well. And things are expensive. Like, you can't massage that all you want.

That's the reality of the situation. And yeah, no, it's they don't give a shit. I mean, like the people who do this don't give a shit. They, they are, if not sheer cultists, deeply greed. and and there's no regulatory way of stopping them, at least in these states, because they're all their evil friends. So, I don't know. Sam take steam machine. It's a grim moment.

And I assume, you know, my final question, there's not really any like signs in the near term that this is going to going to lift, right? Like there's not a ton of like memory capacity coming online that's going to cause the prices to go down or anything like that, I imagine. Oh, no. No. I mean, again, like, I think the, there are a couple of Chinese factories that are like scaling up. I think China recognizes that this is a, not a growth sector, but like a liability. And so they made like investments in their own production facilities. And so, so there are a couple of manufacturers that are spinning up now.

But like, but no, it's, you know, unless, unless something really bad happens to like data center construction and and then even then, it's going to be a long tail and we're just going to have to suffer of this. And so, yeah. It's grim. It's not the kind of thing that you want to hear, but that's the reality, unfortunately. And again, like you're saying, it's the AI industry that we have to blame for this. I mean, I think you can still get a PS5 for, you know, Grand Theft Auto. If you get one on sale, snag it.

I am interested in how this impacts, like, gee, I hate, I hate being this person because the whole fucking game industry has just become like a, like a cargo cult around like rock star. but like I do really wonder like what the net impact of this is to the largest game like a load bearing economic game release because if it if it really impacts GTA 6 that's bad that's really bad you know like I don't know to what degree it will I think people will just buy that shit regardless you know and I mean a lot of people and PS5 is pretty decent it's all base at this point but like it's rough yeah you could see the the units affected you know Not that not that they'll do fine I don't know They'll do fine It's fine

Whatever it costs a shitload of money to develop But I think if it's less than people I'm more worried about like it's scaring It causing external factors And I don't care about it I mean I do care about the game Because it's like disgusting and weird But like

I don't really worry about the health of that company I worry about like What that means for the industry Of course The broader signals that sends and how other companies then react, you know, as a result of seeing what might happen. Yeah, no, I totally get that. Chris, it's always great to have you on the show and to get your insights on this stuff.

Obviously, you know, the RAM prices is something that we've been hearing more and more about recently and, you know, seeing the steam machine come out and then the Apple increases, I felt like it was the time to really dig in and understand what's going on here and the implications of it all. And they're not great. So, yeah, I appreciate you coming on to talk about it all. I wish I had better news aside from, hey, you can make like a computer out of e-waste. And that's pretty cool, I guess, but like, you know, it's not, you know, it's not good.

But thank you for having me on. Absolutely. Great to talk to you. All right. Thanks. Chris Person is a co-founder of Aftermath. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Kylie Houston.

Tech won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to Patreon.com slash Tech Won't Save Us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening. and make sure to come back next week.