LTT was only speculating, they did not know the actual price as far as I remember. (They had a video doing some educated guesses, or maybe a WAN show, can’t exactly recall).
No doubt the price was lower before this hardware shortage, but the $800 is not a reliable number afaik.
In their video today, they said they asked Valve the original pricing, and they said (paraphrasing) "we can't tell you exactly - but the increase we recently had on the steam deck is about how much the pricing for machine increased" - which is how they came up with the $800 number
Why would it be the same percentage increase? RAM is only one component of the whole machine. "We were going to sell our airplane for $10 million, but one screw doubled in price so now we're selling it for $20 million."
Because of the proportion of the two critical component increases as a part of the whole. It's not like a screw, more like the propeller or something. I just bought ram at retail price, and in my currency it went from $100 to $600CAD for 32Gb. I can't even justify a nvme drive at this point, the prices are comical.
I built my current computer in 2020, went from part-time junior engineer to full-time senior engineer, and I couldn't afford to replace that computer at the same specs today. It's unbelievable.
I couldn't afford to replace my current NVMe drives (which is why I'm very happy I set everything up with the Samsung 970 Pro, as they're 2-bit drives that will outlast even my grandchildren).
I actually had to RMA some RAM yesterday, and even that has gotten so expensive that it now costs more than my entire computer cost in 2020.
Ya that all sounds about right. Crazy times. Ironically, I followed a similar progression with slightly different variables. Maybe intermediate engineer in 2020—certainly not fresh anyway—but because of the volatility in the job market I couldn't bring myself to spend on a new PC then, so I built a piece of crap out of used parts I literally found on the street. Fast forward to now, finally stable and earning decently, decide to pull the trigger on these recent (modest) upgrades, and then bam, fired. At least I'll have a gaming rig to kill time for the next two years of unemployment lol
Well none of them actually went out and pretended to buy the entire world's supply of silicon. So no, Altman gets most of the blame personally in this case and the silicon fabs for taking the fake order like absolute tictacs. Demand would be high otherwise too, but that's what got everyone panic buying and resulted in this mess.
Even taking into account all their fuckups majority of their content is accurate and well sourced. I dont know why people do this thing where they point to a few instances and then extrapolate that out.
They literally paused uploading videos because they had an insane amount of wrong data in their videos. It got better for a few months when they decided to slow down video releases but now they are back at it. I dont know why people do this thing where they ignore factual data because they like a creator.
