RxBrad@infosec.pub 2 days ago
People are now conditioned to need INSTANT GRATIFICATION FOR EVERYTHING ALWAYS!
“I want a Steam Deck! I can’t actually afford these new prices! I’m buying it anyways!”
Then retailers see the insane prices people pay for stuff without blinking. Steam Decks sell out after a 40% markup. RAM & SSDs & HDDs sell out at 4x what they sold for a year ago. So the prices never go back down.
And everyone goes full surprised-Pikachu-face when everything is now always goddamn expensive.
Show some fucking restraint for once, people!
Goddamn.
As we have seen, they won’t and never will. This is arguing for gravity to stop pulling so hard.
The mechanism to fix the problem you’re describing has broken long ago and everyone stopped trying to fix it. Your money needs more choices of where to be spent, then businesses will force each other to price things reasonably. If anyone can name all the companies that make a type of product, then that is not enough companies.
I posit it’s a consumer culture issue.
Look at Temo, Tiktok, Amazon, YouTube; people are bombarded with “buy this on impulse!” every day, 24/7, through notifications. They’re urged to buy high by dozens of influencers.
So they do.
And now that’s the culture. Competition isn’t going to fix that, and doesn’t naturally arise in that kind of environment anyway.
I think that’s true. I think that stems from the fact that a large percentage of global consumption is American in origin, and since at least the Industrial Revolution, that country’s culture has been led around by the nose by business magnates to the point that our national culture has remained relatively shallow compared to other nations and is largely centered around buying things, as you point out.
It got so shallow, though.
A long time ago, homesteading was the American dream. “Buy your own property, buy stuff for it, build your own life,” and that ethos extended to industrialization, post WWII (with the suburban boom), and even the 80s/90s.
I feel like that slowly broke with the rise of social media.
The “American urge” went from home/lifebuilding to encouraging short term, FOMO thinking. “Who cares about the future, look at this beatuful person, they’re using this thing and you need it NOW!” is what basically all modern ads say. Though there are some oldschool holdouts like Berkshire Hathaway, most big buisnesses seem to have adopted that mindset, too.
The thing is… I’m lucky enough to be able to afford all of this. In part, because I avoid terrible-value purchases. When the price of something goes up 40 to 400% percent, I say to myself, “Wow, it’d be really stupid to buy that thing RIGHT NOW.”
Too many people apparently lack that critical judgment, and just have FOMO in its place.
Yep, you can’t fix stupid.
So the prices never go back down.
So, the bottleneck here is really the memory prices, and while Steam Deck sales do affect memory prices — as with anyone buying anything with memory — my guess is that it’s a pretty small factor relative to other devices using memory.
According to WP, the Steam Deck has 16GB and sold uh, 4 million units over its entire lifetime as of February this year. It’s been out for four years. So figure ~64 petabytes of DRAM over its lifetime, or ~16 petabytes of DRAM per year.
For comparison, in a single year, looking at smartphones:
wifihifi.com/1-25b-smartphone-units-produced-in-2…
1.25B Smartphone Units Produced in 2025, Apple & Samsung Tied for Tops
counterpointresearch.com/…/Global-Smartphone-Aver…
Global Smartphone Average DRAM Hits Record 8.4GB in 2025
8.4 GB is the per-phone average, including older phones, so this is probably a conservative estimate, but assume for 2025, that meant that phone manufacture consumed ~10,500 petabytes of DRAM in a single year.
People really underestimate how much money other people have. $950 is expensive, but there are so many people out there who can afford that.
People are now conditioned to need INSTANT GRATIFICATION FOR EVERYTHING ALWAYS!
you haven’t read anything about credit cards and the 20th century, have you? how old are you? like 19?
I was 19 in the '90s.
When nobody paid $20 to have GrubHub deliver their $5 McDonalds order from down the street to their house.
you mean when people were so impatient that they spent money to call an actual person to demand a pizza delivery in under 30 mins, then demanded it was free if it was one minute late?
We tipped the delivery driver a few bucks for deliveries.
I’m saying that there weren’t businesses where the entire model was: “Pay 2-3x what this food’s worth in-store, and some rando will deliver it. They may even give you everything you ordered.”
Our economy has been running on debt for a long time now, and debt is a bottomless pit.
Also I speculate that these were almost definitely picked up mostly by scalpers.
We don’t live in a progressive society that almost universally pans impulse buys, unfortunately.
SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
There are plenty of people in the world who can buy these things without it affecting their financial stability. The US has 20+ million millionaires. Around half if you remove their primary residence. These people won’t blink an eye by this price increase.