££££ prices shocked me today

[LongLensPhotography]

Wow. It looks like you have to pay just over £4000 one way or another if you want a fairly high end truly modern machine. Macbook pro 16 with sensible specs. The new mac studio. AMD rzyn Halo. The nvdia Asus G10 which is only for LLMs. All of them land at 4k+.

Luckily my PC is still OK for another year or two but it does limit what I can do with it. Davinci resolves struggles a little, local LLMs are restricted to really dumb models. 32GB RAM is a little limiting and I wish I had specced 64 but really now this is all about VRAM or unified memory. The latter is much preferable. I could drop a 16GB GPU at exorbitant cost, 24 or 32 is multiple 4 figures... that would fix the resolve. 32gb is not that much for LLMs. 128GB is really the low end here.
I will just wait for now. But what would you do if things broke and you had to buy?

 

[Nikon f1.8]

You are in for a long wait as long as this AI bull is around, prices will not come down unless AI falls flat on its face which I hope happens.

 

[LancsMak]

RAM, SSDs and HDDs are all massively inflated at the moment and sadly likely to be for another couple of years. It's a bad time to be after a new machine.

 

[JohnMcL7]

At the moment it's looking like it's going to be a long time if ever that prices will come back down to the levels they were before now companies are seeing how much more people will pay for the parts, There's also considerable damage being down to other hardware like motherboards because there's been a drop in demand due to people not building as many PCs due to the high prices of components.

I'm just hoping no parts fail and I'll need to weigh up paying well over the odds to get a machine up and running again if something does go.

 

[skullfunkerry]

I'm still using my base spec M1 Mac Mini; I don't do anything with video really but it does everything I need for music and photo editing. If it died I'd probably look at an M4 model, or maybe even a Macbook Air.

 

[Barney]

You are in for a long wait as long as this AI bull is around, prices will not come down unless AI falls flat on its face which I hope happens.

Not to long I fear, the massive investment in data centers and consumption of memory and "chips" is horrific for those businesses, We all have learned that technology advances massively every two years or so, to invest a few trillion in a technology that will have to be replaced in a couple of years is mind bendingly irrational IMO, The big corporations will have to have "the latest and greatest" to stay competitive, or so they will believe. I will sit and wait until the second hand stuff floods the market, they will be giving it away.

 

[seaodyssey]

Not to long I fear, the massive investment in data centers and consumption of memory and "chips" is horrific for those businesses, We all have learned that technology advances massively every two years or so, to invest a few trillion in a technology that will have to be replaced in a couple of years is mind bendingly irrational IMO, The big corporations will have to have "the latest and greatest" to stay competitive, or so they will believe. I will sit and wait until the second hand stuff floods the market, they will be giving it away.

Just in time for Starmers Data Centres to have cost the taxpayers maximum £'s and the need to disappear