As it turns out, I did not use my big camera to capture a picture of the hawk that was in my back yard. Not for lack of trying, mind you. Fully charged battery, check. Bird lens, check. I grabbed my memory card out of my card reader and went to slam it into my camera, and. Uh. It wouldn’t go in.
Instead I took an exceptionally lousy picture through my landing room window which is not terribly clean at the best of times, and through the screen, with my phone.
I have no idea where the lock switch for that card is. I can tell you exactly where that busted off piece of plastic was: Inside my camera’s card slot, trapped by the pins at the bottom of the socket. Hence why I could not get this card or indeed any card to go in far enough to lock, let alone connect. No amount of shaking, tapping, or smacking would dislodge it. I had to retrieve my pair of exceptionally tiny tweezers which naturally were in the garage, which meant going out the back door, which meant scaring off the hawk.
In other news, a direct replacement for this thing now costs three times more than what I originally paid for it, because of course it does.
Gods damned Rampocalypse.
While I wait for my replacement to show up, the largest spare I have on hand that’s not already gainfully employed in some other device is apparently a 128 meg one from who knows when. Some time around the turn of the millennium, I’m sure. In case you were wondering, my R10 reckons can fit twenty six full quality exposures onto this card. It’s like I’m back to running around with a roll of film.
Needless to say this has rather cramped my style for the last couple of days.
It’s kind of hard to sell the idea that there is some sort of silicon material shortage or that the commercial SD card circuit printing machines are being changed over to produce something else. If the SD cards aren’t being consumed directly then the price rises are purely due to wholesaler price manipulation.
On the other hand, a lot of memory circuitry components are interchangable and the only real difference is with the pins.
Probably all are true to varying degrees.
There was already an issue with sand smuggling and sand theft before the AI chip buyouts. Sand is the source for the silicon that gets made into wafers. There is a limited amount of input to produce silicon wafers, and increasing scarcity (and the supply purchasing competes on the market with concrete manufacturers and glass makers, among other industries).
Chip fabrication (lithography) machines can cut any pattern into the surface of a wafer (within the limits of their resolution). Changing the pattern to make a different circuit on the wafer is not very complicated. More complicated would be shifting the supply lines for peripheral components to produce SD card circuit boards vs whatever boards the DRAM chips are being assembled on - but as I understand it the major issue is that the AI companies have bought out the chip fabrication for future production runs (for the chips, not actual completed circuit boards) so the supply line part may not be relevant to the price increases. The issue is that all the chip foundries are making DRAM for AI contracts and not much else, so there is a shortage of other types of chips.
And at the same time, there is greed. As prices rise in some areas of the electronics market, suppliers see an opportunity to raise their prices even if their products are not directly impacted by the shortages.
I suspect that a lot of electronics manufacturers have been wanting to increase their prices for awhile, but the market was largely settled on the prices of things and no one could raise their price too high without losing a lot of sales. The disruption has removed the equilibrium, costs are no longer stable, companies are taking risks with high bids and still having no trouble finding buyers, prices are moving all over the place. There’s fortunes to be made and blood in the water. Consumer electronics are the lowest priority for every manufacturer at every level of the process.
I feel like stealing sand would be more of an issue of opportunity and greed rather than any sort of necessity. Silicon is rocks and dirt, higher base purity is quartz, it’s almost everything you walk on regularly and it makes up the vast majority of solid material in the earth’s crust, though technically oxygen is the most abundant element.
Right, so that’s why I included the Wikipedia links:
This isn’t just opportunism, it is massive international organized crime on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars. Chinese ships with dredging equipment don’t just show up at beaches in Indonesia because they were out for a jaunt.
Sure, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is ease of use, not prevalence in the environment. Chip fabricators generally aren’t operating rock crushing industries. They need input material that is already finely ground and nearly pure. The closer the collected raw material is to that, the cheaper it is to use. If the material has to be extracted from larger stones, that increases the cost over dredging up beach sand.
Do some reading before you draw conclusions.
I fail to see how that argues against it being opportunism? Because of the sudden price increase from 1995 to 2005?
And it was still more profitable to transport 300 Million Tons illegally than it was to operate said rock crushing industries: opportunity and greed.
I thought all these NAND flash chips came from the same silicon wafers, no?
That’s what I’m saying. The supply has changed from consumer electronics towards datacenter electronics. Meaning the total silicon consumed hasn’t change much. Or do you mean to say the wafer AFTER printing is the same? Could be, I’m not expert, but I doubt it.
No, I mean that the base materials are now being gobbled up by data centers meaning the supply for consumers is less while the demand is the same, causing prices to increase.
It’s just that the bottleneck is at the number of machines capable of making semiconductors, of etching silicon, not the amount of silicon wafer itself. Silicon is literally melted down rocks and dirt. Plus, most of the equipment capable of reaching 128GB SD level of density are export restricted which further controls the supply.