After Nearly 30 Years, Crucial Will Stop Selling RAM to Consumers

It will all be the wrong kind/obsolete.

Why shouldn’t it?

Why should we have to buy a whole new computer if we want to upgrade one thing?

The car example is also telling. Yes most people buy pre-built, but the vast majority of pieces can also be bought to repair or replace.

PCs are one of the few things we build ourselves because it's one of the few goods that have standardized and commoditized parts.

If there was a large degree of interchangeability between engines, transmissions, bodies, dashboards (etc) the auto enthusiast community would for sure be building cars from scratch out of parts. But realistically the pieces are tightly coupled and you can't pick and chose.

It's the same with coffee machines - if there were interchangable pumps and boilers and group heads etc, I bet building your own coffee machine would be the norm in a certain crowed.

And to be clear there's good technical, aesthetic, regulatory and business why most large machine's are made of interchangeable parts. I'm not saying car and espresso machine manufacturers have done something nefarious. Just that PCs happen to be free of a major constraint.

I’m not even going to bother trying to make sense of what you wrote. I just want you to know it was dumb.

It's not any different. You can buy a whole prebuilt PC like you can a car or a fridge and most people do. You can also go out a buy car parts and fridge parts to replace things that break in either of those.

I can go out and buy a new steroe, new muffler, new seats, etc. for my car and replace them, just like parts in a desktop.

I built a PC for the first time a month ago, it was very fun and gratifying to see it all come together. And most of all, I was very impressed at how the standards made it possible to combine all those different pieces in such a way that almost everyone is able to do it.

Why would you want to take this away from me and everyone else? It's one of the few areas in tech where interoperability and customization is doing fantastically, it's crazy to look at this and say "ew, this shouldn't happen, people shouldn't be allowed to assemble parts".

> and I am saying this as a hardware enthusiast who builds his own computers since Windows 3.1 days.

Was this supposed to be an argument from authority? Because to me this just reads as pulling up the ladder: "I had my fun building computers, and now I don't want you to have that same fun".

Bicycles are an odd duck where this is concerned -- you go to a department store (no, actually don't) or a bike shop and buy a whole bike as a single assembly. But because there are standards, as others have pointed out re: computers, it's very feasible to just buy all the parts individually and piece together the bike that you want (which is what I do). Honestly, working in a hot (or cold, it is Minnesota, after all) garage, sometimes I question my sanity when I'm assembling these things...but the ability to fine-tune what you want and not be beholden to the standards of some marketing department or the cost-cutting assholes that run private equity funds is quite nice.

Ultimately, I'd love it if there were enough standards out there where I could spec out a car, and have it built up from parts...or just buy a stock one, if that's what I wanted. I feel that way about a lot of products that I interact with -- appliances usually have shitty UX, car software is usually garbage, and I'd love it if I didn't have to rely on DJI for a drone (good luck getting them in the U.S. anymore, anyway).

I think that with any product there's a subset of people who are like, "Eh, good enough," and willing to buy whatever the big manufacturers are pushing, but there's a smaller subset that wants to really dial-in something that fits their needs.

well you can and do swap out components for all of the listed above.

Just like car people buy off the shelf cars the customize them, many of us will buy off the shelf computers and upgrade their RAM, SSD, GPU, or CPU. Maybe all 4, or more. For desktops that aren't Macs, I usually buy used and plan on bring my own SSD and GPU at a minimum. For laptops (again that aren't Macs), I also tend to buy used and plan on upgrading the RAM or SSD or both.

Huh (Britney Spears head tilt)? Consumers have "built" PCs since the 80s. I was very upset when Apple started soldering RAM to motherboards in order to edge out the competition. Also, people modify and repair cars, I fixed my refrigerator when the water solenoid part failed. Isn't repair and upgrade a normal aspect of everyday life?

I might not have built my car myself; but have made several after market upgrades to it. My current car features an after-market head unit and tire pressure sensors that I installed myself.

Computers are just the most obvious example because they are expensive, easy to assemble, and have a high markup (which can be obscured on Tim's like now, as there is a larger lag time for component price increases to effect them).

I'm not going to get too far into this argument, 'cause... just no thanks, but I will say that one reason we don't assemble things like cars ourselves is... it's fucking hard. So are pretty much all the other examples you listed. On the other hand, computers are basically giant LEGO with how plug and play they are.

I strongly suspect that if we had phones that were as modular as computers, they'd be very popular.

At the time PC's came to market, High Fidelity music systems still were built from components such as preamps, amplifiers, turntables, FM tuners, tape decks, CD players, and speakers.

A PC was similarly a collection of base unit, monitor, printer, keyboard, mouse, and other components connected via interface cards plugged into a standard bus. Memory was also originally on cards plugged into the bus.

wait, what? i buy a motherboard, I buy ram for it. am I supposed to exist in the total vendor-lock-in world? where I have to get a special license to get RAM / SSD?

how is this even an idea

A 2 minute search on Amazon Germany showed this 2x64GB from Kingston:

https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Kingston-2x64GB-5600MT-Desktop-Ga...

Relax, the market will adjust. First resellers will gladly provide imported modules for a special price, eventually manufacturers.