The only brand currently on the market with > 96Gb DDR5 SODIMM memory modules which currently is a set of 128Gb (2x64) DDR5 SODIMMs is Crucial. At least here in the EU.
So if you're on the market for a current gen laptop or laptop based mini pc (e.g. AMD Strix Point - HX 370 and friends) containing a pretty fast AI capable iGPU with system shared memory (e.g. the Radeon 890M which is part of Strix Point), meaning you can allocate at most 50% of system memory = ~64Gb to the video card, you better stock up soon.
Damn … Crucial P3 plus and P5 plus support Opal 2.0 full disk encryption. This leaves Samsung standing nearly alone in the consumer market, except for some smaller names.
I frankly don't understand why RAM for consumers is a thing. I don't know of any other popular consumer good that is routinely built by the consumer out of individual components. You buy cars, phones, refrigerators, amplifiers, et cetera et cetera whole. Why computers are different, in the year of our lord 2025, is a mystery to me. This shouldn't be happening, and I am saying this as a hardware enthusiast who builds his own computers since Windows 3.1 days.
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 think this is because it's one of the few things commonly owned which is expensive enough to customize, but not pressed for space/weight savings. The inside of my PC tower is like 80%+ empty space, totally different than under the hood of a car. No space in there to make it easy to drop in a totally different engine with just a few hookups.
> No space in there to make it easy to drop in a totally different engine with just a few hookups.
It's not about the space, but rather standards and engineering. Old flip phone was as busy around the battery as is modern smartphone. It's hard to change a dying battery if its glued in behind a solid case, no matter the device.
It is about space, laptops don't really have the same luxury as PC.
Currently the trendy ultra small PC cases are going in the same direction with tightly coupled components, not in the connector spec, but dimensional fits.
"Why shouldn't it" does not answer the question, which is "what made desktop computers (and servers, to a certain degree) a unique popular product that customers routinely build out of parts".
I am not questioning repairs (which almost never happen, as PC hardware in general is very robust these days) or upgrades to factory-built PCs (which should account for probably 1% of the PC component retail volume). I am wondering why there is an entire industry selling colorful boxes (as opposed to brown cardboard with a part number) with things that are not usable in any way when taken out of the box and are only functional when combined with 10+ other things in somewhat nontrivial way. Forget about "why shouldn't it" and "it was like this forever" and look at this phenomenon with a fresh eye. This is ridiculous (in a factual way, not saying this judgmentally).
I don't know what kind of bubble you live in but it's wild reading this as someone who replaced parts of _literally all the things you listed_.
Just this month:
- Wifes friends laptop: installed new NVME and upgraded with additional 2.5 SSD, had to get SATA cable from china since no one else had it
- Replaced fuel hose on my old e34, need to replace fuel pump on the diesel before end of the year, replaced tires (summer to winter)
- Replaced charging flex cable on my Poco X3 smartphone
- Changed the door gasket on the office fridge
Last month I replaced peltier element in wifes makeup fridge, this summer a starting cap in the office fan, last year old caps in vintage amplifier I got cheap.
My father threw out almost new fridge few years back due to ripped gasket, wife almost got rid of the makeup fridge when the cooling element went out, her friend started looking for new laptop because "old" one had "boot device missing". If you don't care to fix/upgrade or don't know how, then yes, everything is a black box.
"Industry" is f-ing us over and people with your attitude are encouraging it.
What kind of answer would satisfy you? It seems that you're being dismissive of the very reasonable responses here.
In short, standards exist because IBM built the original PC in 12 months using off-the-shelf parts and published the full technical specs...obviously copycats took off with them and reverse-engineered the bios.
IBM did try to close it when they launched PS/2 with Micro Channel architecture (proprietary, with licensing fees). The industry formed a consortium and created an open alternative, which was bad for IBM.
The colorful boxes exist because there's a profitable consumer market for components, which exists because the standards remained open, which happened because the industry defended them against the company that created the platform. Maybe this clears things up a bit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
The only brand currently on the market with > 96Gb DDR5 SODIMM memory modules which currently is a set of 128Gb (2x64) DDR5 SODIMMs is Crucial. At least here in the EU.
So if you're on the market for a current gen laptop or laptop based mini pc (e.g. AMD Strix Point - HX 370 and friends) containing a pretty fast AI capable iGPU with system shared memory (e.g. the Radeon 890M which is part of Strix Point), meaning you can allocate at most 50% of system memory = ~64Gb to the video card, you better stock up soon.
A 2 minute search on Amazon Germany showed this 2x64GB from Kingston:
https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Kingston-2x64GB-5600MT-Desktop-Ga...
Damn … Crucial P3 plus and P5 plus support Opal 2.0 full disk encryption. This leaves Samsung standing nearly alone in the consumer market, except for some smaller names.
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46137783
Maybe this will allow for ECC everywhere when the bubble pops
It will all be the wrong kind/obsolete.
I frankly don't understand why RAM for consumers is a thing. I don't know of any other popular consumer good that is routinely built by the consumer out of individual components. You buy cars, phones, refrigerators, amplifiers, et cetera et cetera whole. Why computers are different, in the year of our lord 2025, is a mystery to me. This shouldn't be happening, and I am saying this as a hardware enthusiast who builds his own computers since Windows 3.1 days.
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 really wonder why the PC is a different story. What is it that makes it special in this regard?
I think this is because it's one of the few things commonly owned which is expensive enough to customize, but not pressed for space/weight savings. The inside of my PC tower is like 80%+ empty space, totally different than under the hood of a car. No space in there to make it easy to drop in a totally different engine with just a few hookups.
> No space in there to make it easy to drop in a totally different engine with just a few hookups.
It's not about the space, but rather standards and engineering. Old flip phone was as busy around the battery as is modern smartphone. It's hard to change a dying battery if its glued in behind a solid case, no matter the device.
It is about space, laptops don't really have the same luxury as PC.
Currently the trendy ultra small PC cases are going in the same direction with tightly coupled components, not in the connector spec, but dimensional fits.
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.
"Why shouldn't it" does not answer the question, which is "what made desktop computers (and servers, to a certain degree) a unique popular product that customers routinely build out of parts".
I am not questioning repairs (which almost never happen, as PC hardware in general is very robust these days) or upgrades to factory-built PCs (which should account for probably 1% of the PC component retail volume). I am wondering why there is an entire industry selling colorful boxes (as opposed to brown cardboard with a part number) with things that are not usable in any way when taken out of the box and are only functional when combined with 10+ other things in somewhat nontrivial way. Forget about "why shouldn't it" and "it was like this forever" and look at this phenomenon with a fresh eye. This is ridiculous (in a factual way, not saying this judgmentally).
I don't know what kind of bubble you live in but it's wild reading this as someone who replaced parts of _literally all the things you listed_.
Just this month:
- Wifes friends laptop: installed new NVME and upgraded with additional 2.5 SSD, had to get SATA cable from china since no one else had it - Replaced fuel hose on my old e34, need to replace fuel pump on the diesel before end of the year, replaced tires (summer to winter) - Replaced charging flex cable on my Poco X3 smartphone - Changed the door gasket on the office fridge
Last month I replaced peltier element in wifes makeup fridge, this summer a starting cap in the office fan, last year old caps in vintage amplifier I got cheap.
My father threw out almost new fridge few years back due to ripped gasket, wife almost got rid of the makeup fridge when the cooling element went out, her friend started looking for new laptop because "old" one had "boot device missing". If you don't care to fix/upgrade or don't know how, then yes, everything is a black box.
"Industry" is f-ing us over and people with your attitude are encouraging it.
r/buildapc has 2.9M weekly viewers for a reason.
What kind of answer would satisfy you? It seems that you're being dismissive of the very reasonable responses here.
In short, standards exist because IBM built the original PC in 12 months using off-the-shelf parts and published the full technical specs...obviously copycats took off with them and reverse-engineered the bios.
IBM did try to close it when they launched PS/2 with Micro Channel architecture (proprietary, with licensing fees). The industry formed a consortium and created an open alternative, which was bad for IBM.
The colorful boxes exist because there's a profitable consumer market for components, which exists because the standards remained open, which happened because the industry defended them against the company that created the platform. Maybe this clears things up a bit.
None would satisfy them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’m not even going to bother trying to make sense of what you wrote. I just want you to know it was dumb.
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