Mastodawn

The hardware shortages and price hikes are not going to end with the AI bubble

The cloud providers and the AI companies are the same companies, and what they have learned is that they can tie up all the high-end hardware for themselves and make it unaffordable for plebs

The hardware companies in turn will be happy to keep prices high even if raw materials are ever more easily available again and demand is (somewhat) lower

Show thread

Daphne Preston-Kendal 11h ago

Cloud providers will have identified self-hosting, community-organized services, and digital sovereignty campaigns as a threat, in the same way Microsoft identified free software as a threat in the 1990s and 2000s, and they will want to stamp out that threat. Keeping prices high to make self-hosting uneconomical is one way to do this

Show thread

Simon Zerafa 11h ago

@dpk

A used / reconditioned MacBook M1 might be better value and certainly no slower than the Neo 🙂🤷‍♂️

Show thread

Zimmie

@simonzerafa @dpk Depends on the variant of A14/M1. The M1 in the MacBook Air, early MacBook Pros, Mac mini, and iMac is 4p4e7g or 4p4e8g.

The A18/M4 in the MacBook Neo is 2p4e5g, but with much newer performance cores. It beats the base M1 in single-core, multi-core, and Metal performance. The M1 Pro beats it in everything but single-core performance.