I personally never really considered “Chinese knockoff” a negative term because those products still fill a niche that is beneficial to the consumer, usually very low cost entry level offerings the “brand name” companies don’t bother making. Now that the “brand names” have straight up said they don’t intend on making entire categories of consumer products anymore, this could be a great opportunity for Chinese companies.
There’s a stereotype of Chinese brands being “low quality” which obviously isn’t always true to begin with, but even if we assume it is, given the choice between a maybe lower quality product you still get to own and none at all, I think the decision is pretty clear, at least for me.
With shortages of things like GPUs, third party Chinese manufacturers can’t easily jump in to fill the gap because those chips are complex and proprietary both in the silicon design and the interfaces/APIs they need to work with, so the barrier to entry is quite high. Even if they straight up reverse engineered and “stole” Nividia’s designs (which I personally don’t even consider unethical), they’ll have a hard time legally selling them in Western markets because Nividia will sue them. And even then China is making incredible strides at developing their own GPUs from the ground up. Meanwhile, DRAM and SSDs are much simpler than a GPU and there are already Chinese offerings of both on places like Aliexpress and even Amazon (not just using brand name chips on their own board, though that’s still more common, I’m certain there are also in-house Chinese DRAM and flash chips from small firms), I don’t see a reason they can’t just ramp up production and cash in on the shortage in the West. Though there could still be details I’m not aware of, the way I see is that all they have to do is offer something reasonably reliable and less expensive than the ridiculous prices “brand name” parts are going for nowadays (not to mention when the existing stock sells out and are no longer restocked) and I can’t imagine them not getting customers looking to build custom PCs for cheap.
Again, I personally don’t give a shit if they “stole” designs from the brand names or not, because I consider stealing intellectual property from billion dollar corporations to be morally neutral.
So, people more knowledgeable on how electronics manufacturing and supply chains work, do you think we’ll see Chinese brands becoming more prominent in the Western consumer computer parts market now that the likes of Samsung, SKHynix, and Micron straight up don’t even want to sell to consumers anymore? Or is the paradigm of buying parts to build your own computer just cooked?
Why should any Chinese build RAM end up in the hands of consumers, instead of Chinese data centers or AI server farms?
why not both?
I hope China sanctions the USA to keep their RAM and SSDs and technology in general away from the US.
don’t worry, they will block china off their market to try and prop up their crumbling industry.
There’s a stereotype of Chinese brands being “low quality”
That used to be how things marked “made in Japan” were stereotyped. Basically all the major industrialized nations carried that stereotype until they were able to develop. So China will eventually get to the point of the stereotype flipping at the rate they have been moving. They will still have plenty of truly cheap crap due to being so large in volume of factories and being super willing to make really really niche things. Always fun (and cool) to see the wild motherboards/PCs out of e-waste old parts.
The only thing I hope to see is a push to stop outright ripoff stuff like the “2TB USB drives” that are really 32GB (or lower) with firmware that deletes data that is larger than the flash storage. I am fine with knock-off stuff as long as it is able to do the core thing. A knockoff bag that is able to still hold the same amount of things is fine and allows folks that want the look to be close enough. Even if the flash storage on a knockoff USB drive is super slow, it should be the real capacity.
The real question is how long before they end up being banned in the west like we already see happening with Chinese phones and EVs.
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more broadly than ram, from what i’ve been reading, they are already gearing up to do just that. semiconductors are one of the few industries they are behind on and it wouldn’t even be wise to depend on their rivals for their computing.
whether or not they will be able to pull it off before the couple of years it would take for western manufacturers to meet demand, or the ai bubble to burst is anyone’s guess, but i don’t think so.
a bit of speculation but i don’t think they would hate to be the gatekeepers of rented cloud computing to recoup costs after ai busts either so who knows, maybe we do need china to come sooner rather than later and flood the market with cheap computer chips.
stealing intellectual property from billion dollar corporations to be morally neutral
i consider it to be beautiful and commendably moral to steal back what they basically made us do for money/survival then claimed as their secrets only they can profit from, causing the whole predicament we are in in the first place.
I’d say there’s at least a strong opportunity if the US giants just continue to fellate each other into an AI-induced death spiral.
There’s a stereotype of Chinese brands being “low quality” which obviously isn’t always true to begin with,
This was still debatable 10-15 years ago, but today? Huawei or Redmi do phone which compete in the same league as Samsung, BYD is leading the electric car market. (I even have a made in China Eastman guitar, for the price of the Taylor everybody has, I got a way better guitar, and that Taylor is damn great)
Sure, there is still tons of cheap, low quality stuff on Ali Baba,it’s great for hobby crafting but China has moved toward high quality products.
To answer your question, I expect to see a Chinese company entering the global Ram, FPGA and GPU market. Especially considering the US embargo forbidding Nvidia and Intel to export their high end products in China. Looks like a quick way to push China to grow their domestic production
It was never that Chinese stuff was bad, it’s that American companies outsourced their bad things to China.
Not just America - all Western countries did.
We made it expensive to manufacture goods due to labour costs and well-meaning but crippling environmental protections and couldn’t compete on price.
It’s less that and more that as capitalism turns to imperialism, it outsources all it can while trying to maintain a tech monopoly, creating “high value add” industry. The problem is that this “value add” industry doesn’t actually add any more value than other kinds of industry, its just kept as a tech monopoly, but China’s been able to break into that tech monopoly and fight those monopolist prices.
Or rather it has always been you get what you paid for.
People buy the cheapest option China can offer and surprised it’s has the cheapest quality they are offering.
I mean I’m sure it was a mix. There are a lot of stories out there about how if you didn’t stay on top of your outsourced factory they would look everywhere to cut corners to save a few extra cents here and there.
You (used to?) have to constantly check production quality and make sure nothing was changed out for a low cost part or lower cost source material. Otherwise your product quality falls off and you’re losing money on warranties and repairs and losing customer goodwill.
The other thing that happened is these factories, once they had your design, would make the same thing with lower cost parts / materials as a knockoff and sell it unbranded, as they don’t care about US or European IP Laws. Word might get around that “hey you can get the same brand X product as brand Y or from Aliexpress and save 50%”. Now they’re undercutting you, and you lose customer goodwill because people think your product is overpriced. Then the knockoff fails and they are happy they never bought your product in the first place because they think yours would have failed too. Through word of mouth people say “oh that broke after a month” not realizing the offbrand was made with shoddy materials, less screws, cheaper batteries, an inferior screen, literally anything they can do to save money.
The big problem with cheap Chinese knockoff crap isn’t that it’s crap, but that it’s that it’s highly variable. With some things, who cares? Getting a spatula for half price that will, even at the worst quality, do basically the same job and last years, won’t be a problem. Getting a badly made computer component that fries some other component, or a storage drive that craps out after 6 months and takes your data with it, is a different matter. You won’t have any recourse. Same with cheap batteries that either ruin the experience by needing constant charging or by being actually unsafe. QA is expensive, but it’s worth it when the object is also innately expensive.
You could be like me and buy name brand (Samsung) and lose your data in month 12 of owning your drive anyway. Fuck Samsung
And then to warranty it you need to take the nvme completely out of your computer because they left a single character off the end of the serial number that’s on the box… Fuck Samsung with a rusty claw hammer
At least there’s a chance to warranty it. If you buy the knockoff stuff, you can go back a month later and that manufacturer no longer exists under that name so they have no responsibility to service a warranty.
Yea that’s fair. Sucks that there are no reputable products anymore. Everything gets enshittified
The answer is no on the immediate timeframe because current market prices already include Chinese manufacturing capacity. It will take years to build the factories that can bring prices down.
i was a systems administrator back in the 1990’s and i remember holding $40,000 worth of RAM in my right hand; somehow we’ve gone back to those days again.
Do you remember how much RAM it was?
i don’t remember exactly, but i know it was less than the laptop that i’m using to write this (64gigs).
this was back in during the original pentium days when 16 megabytes of ram (not gigabytes) was considered decent.
As a AI user, quality = china.
I’ve been looking forward for full chinese ARM computers for a while, especially now with all the work being done to run games and x86 applications in them. I’d buy a cheap, energy efficient Chinese computer to put some linux in it in a heart beat!
And i think that would put some pressure in the American tech firms that have been growing a little too comfortable and anti consumer for the last decade.
put some pressure in the American tech firms
to lobby for banning the devices, probably
I don’t even live in America, so the fact that the bans don’t affect me color my opinion, of course. I currently have a Huion tablet and a Huawei phone among a wider bunch of Chinese devices and they have worked well for years and were very cheap. The phone, with a cheap plastic protector has fallen twice from roofs and it doesn’t even have a crack on it; And the tablet has no scratches in 5 years compared to my dead Cintiq that was full of scratches in it’s first year; In the end competition is good for the consumer. But we are finding out America was never about competition.
and same as american devices they watch everything you do
being surveilled is always bad. difference being one of them are constantly starting conflicts and meddling with foreign elections, the other haven’t been at war for decades.
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Yeah it’s not like they’re mass-producing the best electric cars in the world or anything🙄
you should stop being a racist piece of shit. that or you should go practice learning how to breathe underwater
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i sure do wonder which slur that was. please chug a septic tank
Did you time travel from the 90s
I’ve been using RAM and SSD of Chinese brand (Gloway) for three to four years. Consumer grade. No issue so far. No data loss or kernel panic.
