Shrinkflation is the diminution in product quality and/or volume to resist raising prices due to inflationary pressure. This has been happening in the USA since roughly 2001. Gadgets largely improved anyway though the market transitioned from metal and wood casings to brittle plastics, and there were other sacrifices made.
This, however, isn’t shrinkflation. This is supply chain, demand, and uncertainty.
It feels to me like the nadir of gadget material casing quality was around 2010. Back then _everything_ was cheap ticky tacky plastic. Now the midrange of everything seems to be metal and glass, or at least a high grade, solid-feeling grade of plastic. The low end range of goods is obviously allowed to be as cheap as it is my using much cheaper materials.
> Shrinkflation is the diminution in product quality and/or volume to resist raising prices due to inflationary pressure. This has been happening in the USA since roughly 2001.
This has been happening in the USA way before 2001:
> In 1967, the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act (FPLA) was enacted to ensure that consumers had enough information to make an informed choice between competing products. The Act requires each package of household "consumer commodities" included in the FPLA's coverage to have a label that includes the net quantity of contents in terms of weight, measure, or numerical count (measurement must be in both metric and inch/pound units).[10]
> In fact, it was the humorist Art Buchwald who was among the first to sound the alarm. In a column entitled “Packaged Inflation” published in 1969, he lampooned the growing tendency to conceal price increases. Tongue in cheek, he praised American industry for “devising new methods to make the product smaller while making the package larger.”
[…]
> In late summer of 1974, for example, Woolworth’s offered a packet of pencils at its back-to-school sale for 99 cents – same price as the previous year. But as a sharp-eyed reporter at The New York Times observed, the packages only contained 24 pencils, six fewer than the previous year. The same strategy affected packets of construction paper (24 sheets, not 30).
Yup, one of Ea-nāṣir's other tablets complains about small blocks of copper in large crates that mislead about their size. The table is held in the Museum of Northern South Yorkshire, but you try and tell the young people of today that and they won't believe you.
I think at its root, the general idea of shrinkflation is that some desirable attribute of a product - quantity or quality - is slowly eroded while keeping the price the same. As a way to either increase margins, or preserve the price point. With there being some insinuation of malice, where the company is theoretically (...probably fully intentionally...) hoping consumers don't notice, at least for a while, that the deal keeps getting altered.
I think that’s right, with the ire coming from the perception of being cheated somehow. There’s a fair group of people who think anything other than changing the price or the product name is deceptive, and they’ll keep talking about it that way even if other people don’t see it as worse than a price increase.
The ire comes from the actual deception. Why do companies make products worse rather than bumping the price? It's not because they think that's what people prefer. It's because they hope that at least some buyers won't notice the change. People think it's deceptive because it is.
No, you’re combining two different concepts. Shrinkflation is the price remaining constant when the quantity decreases. Enshittification is when the quality of service decreases while prices remain constant or rise.
My definition of shrinkflation doesn't require its purpose to be "resisting price inflation". Rather, I would bet that more often than not it is just a cheap lever to boost margins.
It’s partially that the value of the dollar has been diluted a lot over the decades, and people are in denial about it. Earning 100k is no longer „a good salary“.
100k is almost double the average. That makes it a great salary even today. We in tech so easily forget how hard life is for the vast majority of workers.
People might not be in denial, but too many are clueless/uninformed about inflation and its effect.
You'd be surprised how economically iterate average people are. I had highschool colleagues who couldn't calculate VAT/sales tax out of a price on the whiteboard.
Sure, people have heard of the word inflation, they know this word exists, but they won't be able to explain how it works and its effects throughout the economy.
If you ask a random person on the street what inflation is (and what it is not) and how a 1950s dollar compares to today and what lifestyle the average single income household affords you then vs now, you’re going to get a wrong answer in both cases.
I mean: If you came up to me and asked about how the value of the dollar and average lifestyles compare between the 1950s and today, I wouldn't be able to answer that either. If you forced an answer on the spot, then I'd have to guess at it -- and that guess would probably be a wrong.
I simply don't know the specifics because that was 70 years ago and I wasn't around back then. I do feel confident that I could eventually produce a good answer (or perhaps even a great answer), but I'd have to do some homework in order to produce that answer.
But without that homework, it's just not something that I can relate to because my present perspective does not include it.
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Meanwhile: If you asked random people on the streets of Anytown, USA about what they feel about price of a Big Mac or rent today compared to 5 years ago, it might be rational to expect to get some pretty direct and sometimes livid responses.
> It’s partially that the value of the dollar has been diluted a lot over the decades, and people are in denial about it. Earning 100k is no longer „a good salary“.
A "good salary" (or at least the median) used to be $5000:
As the 'dollar has lost value' people have demanded more dollars in their salary. (Whether the two have kept up with each other is a matter of debate/concern.)
OK, every time I see a comment about income on the internet, I have to assume that the person commenting has zero IQ if they mention nothing about COL.
The same happens when someone mentions something about the Average income as opposed to the median income. The average income is meaningless if the top 1% keep going up while the rest of the system stays the same. The average would look like people are earning more money when they're not.
Same thing with Market economics and the price of items. If I got a choice to sell a boner pill for $1 to a million people and $1 million to one person, those are equal value propositions. So whenever a corporation raises prices, they don't care how many customers they cut off as long as the remaining ones are whales. That's particularly sharp with all the AI costs being shoved into the pipe.
So, that is to say, you really shouldn't just produce a single number about anything and treat it as some benchmark across the world.
Technically even an income of 50k is really high for a person that just needs to pay property taxes and food (house is paid off for example). And if they live in Missouri, they are probably reaching "upper middle" especially if they already have savings.
So when the tub of ice cream decreases in size from 64 ounces to 60, 56, 52, and finally 48 ounces while the price stays the same (or even goes up), then:
That's not necessarily shrinkflation; that might instead be a result of having learned that consumers didn't need so much ice cream.
There's nothing "finally" about 48 oz. Some brands are edging smaller. What I've noticed is 32oz. cartons gaining prominence in grocery stores, while the 48's seem to be slowly getting phased out.
It is true that their packages don't shrink. There's one in a nearby city that I'm very familiar with.
But at those kinds of quantities, their prices are 50% more than the higher-end store brand at the store that's near my house. The hand-packed treatment then literally doubles that price. We're now at 300% cost and we haven't factored travel expense yet.
Besides, if I kept their ice cream at home, then I think that would tend to lessen my enjoyment of sitting down and enjoying a proper sundae at their shop -- and that's not something I wish to ever diminish in any way. :)
> Find a locally owned ice cream parlor, and asked for a hand-packed half gallon.
I could be wrong, but I'd bet that my local ice cream parlours would decline that request - unless you can show that you're e.g. a restaurant and can commit to a certain order frequency, they're just going to tell you to buy as many 19oz "pints" as you need for $40/4. (A discount over $12/each.)
Man. The old-school ice cream place I grew up with is happy to sell bulk ice cream, in any quantity, in single-unit volumes ranging from a pint to up to 3 gallons. (The prices for this are on the website, and also on the wall behind the counter in the shop, though I'm sure that negotiation is possible for particularly large orders.)
They're even happy to package it with dry ice and ship it internationally. They've offered this service for as long as I've been aware of the world around me (several decades, so far).
They make the ice cream in-house just as they have always done, and they offer these services to anybody.
And while this ice cream place that I'm familiar with certainly does charge plenty, I've got to ask: What's wrong with your own ice cream place, my dude?
> I've got to ask: What's wrong with your own ice cream place, my dude?
So you got me curious enough to try to call up my three local ice cream places.
Spot 1: No phone number on either Google Maps or their website.
Spot 2: This was the spot I had in mind with my previous comment - indeed, they do not sell by any quantity larger than 473ml pints (I typo'd previous comment - 16oz, not 19oz pints.)
Spot 3: Happy to report that they will sell by the 3 gal bucket (or half bucket) for $150/$75, respectively.
re: Spot #2 and your "what's wrong with" question - this is a trendy place that opened about a decade ago, and I expect they're just not interested in taking lower margins or complicating their offerings - it's simply "take it or leave it" on their pints.
If this were true, they could have learned it at any time before now.
When the changes are done precisely during a time of huge increases in the prices of all kinds of memory devices, it is hard to believe that this is a random coincidence.
Or (for some of them) they could have previously been chasing the stupid spec numbers for advertising and realized they can save money if they just stop doing that.
See Apple as an example, who really doesn't care about telling you the newest phone has 12GB of ram. It's literally not even mentioned on the tech specs page.
We can see this with the Lenovo Legion 2026 models. They literally perform worse than the 2025 models and cost more. Not only that, the build quality was cut for 2026.
I know Apple is escaping it due to their large contracts but I’m honestly not sure how at this point. They must have pre-purchased multiple years of memory or otherwise have a really insane contract.
But what’s puzzling about that is, why don’t other manufacturers have the same kind of deals? It’s not like Lenovo is a low volume supplier.
Obviously, the iPhone sells in volume unmatched by other devices. But still…I’d have to ask why other high-volume brands like Samsung have wildly expensive laptops.
It just seems like the other companies are asleep at the wheel and don’t have any passion for their strategy, to the point where a tiny company like Framework is overperforming just by caring a little bit. Sure, they can’t beat Apple on raw value but they at least they put together a laptop with a respectable trackpad and a CNC body. Where is volume leader Lenovo?
Apple doesn't only benefit from volume discounts on commodity parts, they also benefit from not having pay a margin on all the parts they designed in-house.
It's not like designing your own part is free, but Qualcomm charges a very healthy margin on top of their manufacturing costs.
Apple also invests in designing the tooling and processes used on their manufacturing lines.
For instance, they cut way back on how much CNC time was required to produce the Neo.
All big vendors will place orders some distance into the future. Lenovo does it, too.
You can't lock in prices forever, though. The more volume and stability you have, the more a vendor will be willing to enter long-term agreements with you. Lenovo has less volume than Apple and is not in as great of a financial position, so they don't have as much leverage.
The bigger factor is that Apple already had more margin in their products. The price premium for RAM upgrades on Apple laptops is large, as everyone knows. They could absorb more RAM price increases without being forced to raise retail prices.
I really don't understand why more companies don't emulate Apple in terms of line simplicity. Look at Dell for a great example of a sprawling product mix. I can't imagine having that many product varieties helps with profitability.
In the consumer space, I recently bought a Sonicare toothbrush, and the number of models and combinations is staggering. 1000x plaque removal, 750% plaque removal, it's ridiculous.
PC makers can't count on brand loyalty. If you want a PC and your favorite brand is missing something that a competitor has, it's easy to switch. If you want a Mac and Apple is missing something, it's harder to switch. Enterprise sales are a bit stickier, but not that much stickier.
So Dell, Lenovo, et Al end up trying to address every niche except the focused product catalog niche.
If you want a PC and your favorite brand
is missing something that a competitor has,
it's easy to switch
Yeah. Although, there's no "logical" reason for their for their psychedelically large laptop lineup with 50-100 base models. It's purely psychology I guess.
Like Dell Vostro, their "small business" line. Versus Latitude, their "business" line. What on earth is uniquely needed by a "small business" versus a... regular business? Why not introduce a third "large business" line? Maybe a "sole proprietor" line too?
It can only be explained as a psychology play. The dizzying array of options is designed to, I suppose, make you feel like Dell surely has the exact right laptop for you, even if that is bullshit.
It doesn't entirely make sense to me from a psyche standpoint either -- I have no idea why purchasers would possibly feel anything other than anxiety and analysis paralysis. But whatever!
> Like Dell Vostro, their "small business" line. Versus Latitude, their "business" line. What on earth is uniquely needed by a "small business" versus a... regular business? Why not introduce a third "large business" line? Maybe a "sole proprietor" line too?
My vague recollection is that Latitude were nice business laptops; coming with all the enterprise goodies, replaceable parts, service manual, next-day onsite support available and also the enterprise usual costs, lack of sexy displays, and slow model turnover.
Vostro was a lot closer to the Inspirons (sold for personal use); I think just badge engineering a couple selected Inspirons to have a bit longer of a product cycle and better parts availability.
Re: analysis paralysis, that's a real issue. I try to find some feature that really narrows the field and then it becomes easier to decide. If I required a wired ethernet port, memory slot(s), and a specific cpu family, it narrows the field a lot; then I can figure out from what's left. For laptops, off-lease entrerprise refurbs are pretty price competitive with new models targetted for personal use; then it's really a matter of what's available, and how they differ ... and then looking at the units with specific damage/defects to see if the compensating price drop makes sense; personally, I'd take several dead pixels for $100 off, cause I don't do pixel peeping work anyway.
It's the old General Motors product philosophy of "A Car for Every Purse and Purpose". That market segmentation and badge engineering approach worked great for decades and allowed them to earn huge profits. But eventually customers figured out that there was no actual difference between a Buick versus a Pontiac, and more focused competitors ate their lunch.
Many moons ago, we used to buy Dell Dimension desktops at work. They were fine. They were very quiet, robustly-built, and were expandable to fit individual users' requirements as things changed. They were usually easy to work on when that was necessary.
Dell also had the Precision line, which was very posh. These cost a lot more.
The Vostro line eventually showed up. They were noisier, and lighter/flimsier, less-expandable, and harder to work on. But they did cost less to buy.
---
I would never buy a Vostro computer for myself. I think that buying cheapness as a primary feature is dumb. Given a choice between good/better/best, I tend to pick "better." I like being able to get what I think is a better design, even though it generally costs somewhat more. I don't want the cheapest car tires, the cheapest hand tools, or the cheapest PC.
But the company chose to operate as cheap-at-every-expense. The Vostro line was a perfect fit for their buying proclivities, so that's what they started buying. (I didn't like that, but those decisions were above of my paygrade.)
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Was Dell wrong for offering several different classes of computer back then?
Are they wrong for doing so today?
Why? Why not?
(Remember: In the insatiable quest for the bottom dollar, the company kept buying Dell computers. We could have began giving those dollars to one of their competitors instead, but we did not do so. This suggests that the model is not bullshit at all: After all, they are in the business of selling computers, and we kept buying them.)
We're not on the same page at all. I don't think anybody is doubting the tried-and-true good/better/best split.
What I and others have always questioned is how far beyond that Dell goes. It's not good/better/best; it's Vostro/Alienware/Precision/Inspiron/Latitude/XPS/etc... which all have their own array of models and internal good/better/best subdivisions.
We could have began giving those dollars to one
of their competitors instead, but we did not do so.
This suggests that the model is not bullshit at all:
After all, they are in the business of selling computers,
and we kept buying them.
There are a lot of variables at play there. Pricing, branding, perhaps even your CIO's solid golfing relationship with the Dell sales rep... or their not-so-nice relationship with the HP sales rep.
Which variables helped? Which hurt? Was the dizzying model lineup a pro, con, or neither? The only thing we can conclude from the facts you presented is that the proliferation of Dell's models was not a dealbreaker for your particular company.
Dell has a lot of other things going for them. Namely, their name. They have been around for ages and their products are... fine. Nobody ever got fired for buying Dell. PCs are commodities; by definition one PC can't really outshine or outprice another too much on any technical level because they're all using the same core components. So name really matters. I think that is the overwhelming reason why people buy them, not "I love that they sell 100 different laptop models at any given time."
> There are a lot of variables at play there. Pricing, branding, perhaps even your CIO's solid golfing relationship with the Dell sales rep... or their not-so-nice relationship with the HP sales rep.
No, there's really not. I've already explained the main variable here: Price.
The other driving variable, which I left to implication, was inertia.
We didn't have a CIO. Nobody from Dell or HP was taking anyone from this company out for golf outings, dinners, strip clubs, or nose beers. We merely bought and used computers, with perhaps 50 desktop systems at peak that slowly rotated over time as needs ebbed and flowed.
We could have switched to HP or Acer even some box-builder with a non-English name instead, and maybe we would have done so if Dell hadn't introduced cheaper products. Who knows. That version of reality never happened.
It sure seems like the introduction of the lower-cost Vostro line strengthened our inertia. I don't know if that was good or bad for us, but it was almost certainly better for Dell this way than in some alternate reality where it went in some other direction.
---
Anyway, I looked at Dell's laptop lineup after I read your previous comment. It's a damned mess. But I'm not sure that this mess qualifies as 70 or 100 (or whatever) base models: It's plainly evident that there's a lot of overlap within this list. :)
Apple has a unique market position due to their OS. A buyer shopping for a Mac can't visit multiple vendors and compare models.
Dell and Sonicare do not have that luxury. They are competing with other PC vendors and other toothbrush vendors.
The strategy is to produce so many models that you appear to serve every price point and need without requiring the user to shop around. You can find something in their lineup that fits your budget or requirements if you look long enough and you don't feel like you need to go looking around at competing vendors as much.
Having may models isn't a high cost because they share so many parts. I bet if you opened multiple Sonicare toothbrushes they'd share many main components like batteries or motors. Dell has a few laptop and desktop lines but they're different combinations of parts within a shared chassis.
Dell's claim to fame when they started was they could manage the complexity of a large product mix to get you want you really need. It is a lot of work, but their ability to manage that complexity it what makes them profitable.
> If lenovo is buying a billion chips a year, why can’t they lock in like Apple?
Lenovo controls less of the stack than Apple: CPUs (Intel/AMD), BIOS, operating system, etc. While ostensibly Apple and Lenovo are both selling personal computers, Lenovo is in a (sub-)segment of the market that is commoditized with Dell, HP, etc.
If you need to run Windows and associated (Windows-only) apps, what's special between Lenovo/Dell EMC/HP/etc? How much of a difference is there between Coke and Pepsi?
A lot of vendors hitched their wagon to the Wintel duopoly, and now they're all riding (or being ridden) herd.
They can lock in. However that is risky too - if prices go down they are locked into the higher prices.
More importantly, if you have a locked in price you can sell your products for more profit - or you can sell the things that you have locked in and not have to make the rest of the widget at all. Sometimes someone will give you a good deal to buy out your locked in contract.
Because people continuously underestimate just how good Apple engineering and supply chain management is. And since iPhone and portables is such a juggernaut for them, it goes downstream into every other product line that uses the same architecture. That’s why it was so critical for them to pull off the ARM MacBook transition - the only other alternative for them essentially would have been to exit the market or run mostly at a loss.
I'm not even looking at Lenovo's profits. I'm comparing their revenue to Apple's profit just to emphasize the difference in scale.
By the numbers, Apple is a smartphone business that has a casual side hobby of also being the #4 PC maker. Their PC sales are ~3x less than Lenovo's, but their smartphone sales are 10x their PC sales. There's plenty of commonality so the massive smartphone business surely helps with supply on the computer side of things as well.
But if you read their actual financial reports they have never indicated in any way that their hardware is a loss leader. They disclose this information publicly since they are publicly traded. Yes, the services revenue is higher than Macs and iPads combined and is at a higher profit margin, but hardware also makes a lot of money.
Apple’s only structural advantage should be their custom silicon, but I don’t think that’s a cost advantage as much as it’s a performance and battery life advantage. Apple is still buying huge dies from TSMC and designing them custom themselves which is not cheap. Lenovo shares the cost of designing an Intel, AMD, or Qualcomm chip with dozens of OEMs. Same deal with software: I wouldn’t be surprised if macOS costs more per unit for Apple than Windows costs for Lenovo considering all the employees Apple hires directly to develop it.
Apple in theory should be paying a pretty similar amount of money to make the rest of their systems. They don’t make camera sensors, displays, keyboards, DRAM chips, or anything else themselves.
>But if you read their actual financial reports they have never indicated in any way that their hardware is a loss leader.
Right, I'm just saying they could afford it if it came down to that. They also have enormous margins on their higher-end systems, so they've got plenty of room to lose some profitability before it comes down to that.
Apple prioritizes price stability over price competitiveness. They will happily charge formerly eye-watering prices for extra RAM and their customers will less happily pay them. On the other hand, Apple rarely change their prices after release except in cases of extreme currency devaluation. They simply raise the price when the new model comes out.
They do this for their own reasons but it's helping them in this crisis. They can simply accept lower margins in the short term, in the knowledge that in the long term these price fluctuations even out.
From the perspective of the producers Apple are a consistent purchaser with deep pockets. AI companies may be willing to pay more for RAM in the short term, but Apple is a safer customer. The current AI bubble may or may not burst, but people will keep buying iPhones regardless. The producers do not want to freeze Apple out because Apple is their hedge against the bubble bursting.
Lenovo may not be a low volume purchaser but they are not at Apple's scale nor are Lenovo's customers willing to pay the premium that Apple's customers are.
I don’t think we’ve seen the lower margins in Apple’s financial reports.
Also, their computers have been getting more storage/RAM competitive as time has gone on. Literally just by time passing and prices staying the same.
Lenovo is beyond Apple’s scale when it comes to PC sales. They are #1 in volume. Apple is #4. Apple sells more iPhones but Lenovo does also own Motorola which is not nothing. We can also look at Samsung: a wildly high volume company who has their own production lines of major components like RAM and displays but they still sell their 2026 laptops at eye watering price increases.
Lenovo is beyond Apple’s scale, sure, but Apple has relatively few product lines. I imagine that makes it so the few parts they end up doing they have massive volume on.
The article is wrong with their Apple example. The cheapest Mac mini with the smallest amount of RAM is no longer available, but the next larger config is available at the same unchanged price point.
So I randomly ended up buying a lot of computer gear last year because I killed a perfectly fine 4 year old PC and couldn't decide what I wanted to replace it. I thought at the time "this is an expensive mistake" but you look at the prices I paid for parts a year ago and it's mind-blowing eg:
- 4TB Samsung Pro 990 SSD for $150 (now $940)
- 64GB DDR kit for a laptop $180 (now $700)
- 64GB DDR5 CL30 kit for a desktop $200 (now $950)
- 9800X3D/5070Ti PC $1800
- 2TB Samsung Pro 990 $95 I think? I honestly don't even remember why I bought this
It's really depressing now. Normally at this point in the NViida product cycle we'd be expected a 50x0 Super series. I think it's all but confirmed we won't see those until next year. I think the 50x0 series will last a lot longer than the 40x0 series.
So it's going to be interesting to see what happens when this hits phone makers who also need RAM. There certainly won't be a RAM increase this year and there'll likely be a price bump. Apple may be able to absorb this to some degree because of anyone I expect them to have long term contracts.
Still, Apple has temporarily delisted the base 16GB Mac Mini and removed the 512GB Mac Studio so they aren't unaffected.
But I think this SSD/RAM price hike has basically killed the Steam Machine, which is sad. Valve obviously didn't lock in long-term contracts before announcing it. Woops. The Steam Deck is also a hard find as a result.
We've seen an almost unprecedented price hike on the PS5, which is an almost 6 year old console at this point. I wouldn't exxpect a PS6 before 2028 at the earliest.
We've had RAM price spikes before, usually because of supply crunches (eg years ago I seem to remember a fire taking out one of the major suppliers).
I honestly don't expect any of this to get better until we have an increasingly likely global recession and the AI bubble pops. OpenAI and Anthropic may not be able to cash out in time to avoid all this.
As much as I love my Vita having access to Chinese handhelds with decent screens that can emulate almost everything under the sun (including PC, Switch and some Vita!) is pretty damn awesome!
The MacBook Neo proves that gadget "shrinkflation" is largely a choice. I own an Neo and I continue to marvel at how capable, nice, and yet inexpensive it was.
If a brand decides to release a budget version of their expensive product with a value-for-money proposition ... that is not shrinkflation IMO. (whether that value-for-money proposition is mere marketing hype or well received and is closer to reality ... is secondary)
If seemingly the "same" product -- in this example say 'MacBook Pro' base model for current year -- delivers less goodness, less value compared to its price year-on-year. If the price appears to stay more or less the same but the product is made weaker in service of higher margins for the seller. THAT would typically qualify as shrinkflation ... in my understanding.
This is more objectively measurable in comsumer goods where you can see the packaging being tinkered with over time so consumer thinks they are getting the same SKU but this year's packaging has less of the product tghan last year's, at similar price point so it doesnt register as price inflation.
You have to keep in mind, the less capable you are with computers, the more computer you need. You might get by just fine on 8 GB, but Grandma, with her three anti-malware suites, two active malware infections, corporate spyware, and fake version of Google Chrome which reports all browsing usage to the Neilsen corporation, is going to slow to a crawl, at best, even on 16gb. Normal people computers are different than yours or mine.
Shrinkflation is when a product for the same price gives you less while pretending to be the same amount, e.g. get 450g of pasta per pack instead of 500, same price, sold in the same boxes.
This is the same product at 5x the price. It sucks but it's not shrinkflation
Anecdote: The ‘zfs send’ capable accounts at rsync.net have always had a 5TB minimum size because they require a full blown virtual machine with resource guarantees and IP address, etc.
We just changed that minimum to 10TB last week and it was specifically the RAM prices that forced us to re-calculate that value proposition.
And then Google is moving at full speed to lock-up the whole Android experience (bootloaders, OS, app store, etc.) so that even tech-savvy consumers are forced to get new, crappier devices when the old ones start slowing down. Enshittification at its highest level
Bubble popping, useless AI hardware sold off to creditors and scrapped to RAM sticks in SSDs for actual real world use case ? And eventually maybe later in a few years some actually useful and profitable real use cases for the current LLM generation are found.
Alternatively "AI" gets such a bad name regular people will go and burn it all down as long as it has "AI" even just in the name.
We squeezed everything we could squeeze over the last decades, getting better products / quality of life (in the west at least). Now that there is almost no one left to abuse (ie people on the other side of the planet willing to work for pennies) we'll have to get by with shittier products, more working hours, later retirement, worse public services, etc.
Many product segments peaked and the only way left to extract more money from us is to either lower the quality so that it's cheaper to make/break faster or subscriptions/ads.
Almost every global graph tells the opposite story. There are far fewer people in poverty. There are much better average outcomes on basically every metric you can imagine. Almost all directly attributed to global commerce
Despite decades of expanding global commerce and industrialization in the developing world, the data shows that extreme income inequality between nations has remained stubbornly entrenched, and between-country inequalities still account for an overwhelming ~80% of total world income inequality.
By the end of the twentieth century, these decades of development and industrialization had primarily succeeded in consolidating world inequalities in income and resource use, while accelerating environmental degradation to unprecedented levels.
When corporations relocate manufacturing to the imperial periphery, they successfully export the social contradictions of mass production (like class conflict and labor unrest), but they do not relocate the wealth that historically allowed high-wage countries to afford social safety nets and high living standards.
Then why are global living standards rising rapidly?
I also don’t think inequality is intrinsically bad. Depending on type and timeframe it may even be good. Especially if the inequality is increasing while everyone is also doing better than they previously were. (note that internal US inequality is actually shrinking)
A 10% increase on a larger base will produce more inequality than a 20% increase on a smaller base. However, I don’t think the smaller base person would prefer neither of them get an increase.
Since the 1980s, the United States has experienced a profound shift in wealth concentration toward the top of the economic ladder. The bottom half of American households controls just 2.5% of the nation's wealth.
That's 50% of the nation leveraging 2.5% of the purse-strings. That's not what I call "representation."
How can you tell such blatant falsehoods?
Edit: just because it's ridiculous the way some people pretend it's complicated or nuanced:
====================================================================================
U.S. HOUSEHOLD WEALTH VS. POPULATION: 10 / 40 / 50 SPLIT
====================================================================================
Legend:
[$] = 1% of Total U.S. Wealth
[@] = 1% of U.S. Households (Population)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Top 10% of Households (90th - 100th Percentile)
Wealth (~68.0%):
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
Population (10%):
@@@@@@@@@@
Next 40% of Households (50th - 90th Percentile)
Wealth (~29.5%):
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
Population (40%):
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Bottom 50% of Households (0 - 50th Percentile)
Wealth (~2.5%):
$$
Population (50%):
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> they successfully export the social contradictions of mass production
Because the West used to have tons of manufacturing and unusually large amounts of social unrest? Shitholes are gonna shithole. No one is stopping them from being the next South Korea or Singapore (if they really wanted it, lol) except themselves.
Why do we have to get by as you say? On whose command?
Why do we always act like there's an immutable social obligation to march right along believing the prior generations had freedom to start marching in that direction, but we are forever locked in to such a direction.
You know all the people that made those choices are dying and future generations have zero obligation to carry on linearly from where they left off?
Women would not have the right to vote. We'd all be speaking Latin.
Two things that would remain true if society of the living was tightly coupled to exactly how the past worked.
The original comment has conflated every ill into "have to", combined with political fatalism. Not unreasonable given the way things have turned out, but yes it's not inevitable either. It's just the direction of travel that the majority chose.
Certain "have to" are imposed by the physical world. The world will have to use less oil in 2026 than in 2025, because production has been so heavily impacted by the war. What happens beyond that .. well, only a fairly small number of people get to make that decision. Next US presidential election is in 2028.
>> That can’t continue as the rest of the world is catching up.
This has already been happening quietly in several industries.
I remember many years ago when I was working in a bike shop (early aughts) and the Specialized engineer was talking about how Taiwan used to be the brunt of the jokes in the bike world for decades. He went on a rather long rant about how over that same time, they had essentially dumped billions into becoming a technological behemoth when it came to bike manufacturing. Their factories were so far advanced, and their engineers were so highly qualified, that many bike companies (including Specialized) were moving their manufacturing back to states because it had become too expensive to continue using the Taiwan factories.
Your comment is devoid of content, of substance. Just more parroting of obligations that do not exist.
You're not struggling to understand my comment. You're struggling to think altogether when your argument is "well because random political choice in 1979, we must today in 2026..." type reductive, functional illiteracy.
But ok; we must coddle the past to satiate some. Well, debt jubilees are things humans have done before. Wipe the ledger and start counting again. What is grandpa going to do? Rise from the grave?
As an obscure 19th century theorist once said, history does not walk on its head. That is, it is not ideas or sentiment that make the difference, but processes and the actually existing relations among people.
If you don't have the guts to pick a side, if you remain at the level of just disciplining sentiment, if you can't even say what you mean, then you are no better than a swindling preacher--you are part of the problem you are nominally fighting against.
You don't have to do anything, nobody cares about individuals when you have 8 billions. The masses, on average, want cheap simple fun, cheap stuff and so on. Market responds. Good luck trying to change that.
Sure, there is some market manipulation, ads are the best example (how can any adult with even a smidge of self-respect accept any ads in any form is beyond me, thats mind slavery 101) but since forever masses wanted bread and games more than literally anything.
All those companies making high quality expensive products that lasted decades? Barring tiny exceptions, they either went down with quality (less control, move to china etc) or went bankrupt.
Parent is right in 1 aspect - if we elevate whole world to similar income levels, the income of previously-rich countries will have much less purchasing power, can't escape simple numbers. But who cared in the past about slave kids in sweat shops, right, they didn't have the right skin color, passport or religion to worry about.
The dynamic is not a straightforward "race to the bottom" that simply runs out of victims, but rather a cyclical process that continually recreates working-class resistance and shifts capital into entirely new industries.
Maybe it seems like this strategy leads to a permanent decline in global labor power, but history shows a different pattern: "where capital goes, conflict goes". Relocating capital to exploit cheap labor does not permanently resolve crises of profitability; it merely reschedules them in time and space. By moving to new regions, multinational capital inevitably creates and strengthens entirely new industrial working classes in those areas.
Conversely (complementarily) when an industry becomes too crowded and profits are squeezed, capitalists do not just cut corners; they rely on what Beverly Silver terms the product fix—shifting capital entirely out of mature, highly competitive sectors into new, innovative, and more profitable industries.
Historically, the epicenter of capitalist accumulation (and subsequent labor unrest) shifted from textiles in the 19th century to automobiles in the 20th century. In the first decades of this century, capital shifted toward semiconductors, the "education industry," and producer services (like finance, telecommunications, and consulting).
Because a product fix involves withdrawing capital from an established industry, it usually brings about mass layoffs, deindustrialization, and the breaking of existing social compacts. In response, the workers who previously benefited from those compacts have, historically, risen up to protect their jobs, pensions, and established ways of life.
Unfortunately, they are often doomed by their diminishing economic leverage.
Crazy suggestion - maybe there is some space for a more efficient compute software / device combination ecosystem and companies. I don't really need or even want the AI features being pushed on my devices. I don't want to pay for ever more absurd camera specs on phones. I don't need 8k or even 4k displays on small devices. I don't need or want browser security container features to safely run and render obnoxious adds - I just want them suppressed. I don't need 4k streams or want to pay for the bandwidth.
We actually don't need all the ram. Everyone was fine in 2010. The devices were fine, the internet was productive.
We have all just seriously fucked up in the software and hardware space. We are super-sizing devices and software just as surely as the car industry has done in massive pickups and SUVs and the food industry has done with portion sizing.
Wait until Shrinkflation meets AIflation, where most services once mediated by humans are taken over by dumb, error-prone, allucinating AI, with no possibility of recourse.
My company has tens of thousands of people on a waitlist for our new product. We had planned to ship this year, but we simply can't get enough memory at any price. Even if we cut the installed memory to bare minimum functional requirements, the unit cost goes up by a few hundred dollars and functionality is drastically reduced.
So, we can't ship. This could kill our business. Thanks, Sam.
Shrinkflation is the diminution in product quality and/or volume to resist raising prices due to inflationary pressure. This has been happening in the USA since roughly 2001. Gadgets largely improved anyway though the market transitioned from metal and wood casings to brittle plastics, and there were other sacrifices made.
This, however, isn’t shrinkflation. This is supply chain, demand, and uncertainty.
It feels to me like the nadir of gadget material casing quality was around 2010. Back then _everything_ was cheap ticky tacky plastic. Now the midrange of everything seems to be metal and glass, or at least a high grade, solid-feeling grade of plastic. The low end range of goods is obviously allowed to be as cheap as it is my using much cheaper materials.
> Shrinkflation is the diminution in product quality and/or volume to resist raising prices due to inflationary pressure. This has been happening in the USA since roughly 2001.
This has been happening in the USA way before 2001:
> In 1967, the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act (FPLA) was enacted to ensure that consumers had enough information to make an informed choice between competing products. The Act requires each package of household "consumer commodities" included in the FPLA's coverage to have a label that includes the net quantity of contents in terms of weight, measure, or numerical count (measurement must be in both metric and inch/pound units).[10]
* https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/page-one-economics/2...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Packaging_and_Labeling_Ac...
> In fact, it was the humorist Art Buchwald who was among the first to sound the alarm. In a column entitled “Packaged Inflation” published in 1969, he lampooned the growing tendency to conceal price increases. Tongue in cheek, he praised American industry for “devising new methods to make the product smaller while making the package larger.”
[…]
> In late summer of 1974, for example, Woolworth’s offered a packet of pencils at its back-to-school sale for 99 cents – same price as the previous year. But as a sharp-eyed reporter at The New York Times observed, the packages only contained 24 pencils, six fewer than the previous year. The same strategy affected packets of construction paper (24 sheets, not 30).
* https://mikesmoneytalks.ca/shrinkflation-is-an-economic-mons...
And in recorded history for centuries:
* https://archive.ph/https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/...
Yup, one of Ea-nāṣir's other tablets complains about small blocks of copper in large crates that mislead about their size. The table is held in the Museum of Northern South Yorkshire, but you try and tell the young people of today that and they won't believe you.
> This, however, isn’t shrinkflation. This is supply chain, demand, and uncertainty.
It most certainly is shrinkflation. It's rising input costs decreasing the product quality.
That is an unusual definition of shrinkflation. I always understood it as quantity going down not quality.
I think at its root, the general idea of shrinkflation is that some desirable attribute of a product - quantity or quality - is slowly eroded while keeping the price the same. As a way to either increase margins, or preserve the price point. With there being some insinuation of malice, where the company is theoretically (...probably fully intentionally...) hoping consumers don't notice, at least for a while, that the deal keeps getting altered.
I think that’s right, with the ire coming from the perception of being cheated somehow. There’s a fair group of people who think anything other than changing the price or the product name is deceptive, and they’ll keep talking about it that way even if other people don’t see it as worse than a price increase.
The ire comes from the actual deception. Why do companies make products worse rather than bumping the price? It's not because they think that's what people prefer. It's because they hope that at least some buyers won't notice the change. People think it's deceptive because it is.
No, you’re combining two different concepts. Shrinkflation is the price remaining constant when the quantity decreases. Enshittification is when the quality of service decreases while prices remain constant or rise.
Less RAM in the same package (Deluxe Model X!) is exactly shrinkflation.
My definition of shrinkflation doesn't require its purpose to be "resisting price inflation". Rather, I would bet that more often than not it is just a cheap lever to boost margins.
It’s partially that the value of the dollar has been diluted a lot over the decades, and people are in denial about it. Earning 100k is no longer „a good salary“.
100k is still a good salary. However is used to be a great salary, and most people are not in touch with how inflation has changed the value.
100k is almost double the average. That makes it a great salary even today. We in tech so easily forget how hard life is for the vast majority of workers.
No, it means the average is too low.
Right, we're Americans; the median salary should be "I'm rich", just like all our kids should be above average.
Nobody is in denial about a well known behaviour that happens to every currency
People might not be in denial, but too many are clueless/uninformed about inflation and its effect.
You'd be surprised how economically iterate average people are. I had highschool colleagues who couldn't calculate VAT/sales tax out of a price on the whiteboard.
Sure, people have heard of the word inflation, they know this word exists, but they won't be able to explain how it works and its effects throughout the economy.
If you ask a random person on the street what inflation is (and what it is not) and how a 1950s dollar compares to today and what lifestyle the average single income household affords you then vs now, you’re going to get a wrong answer in both cases.
I mean: If you came up to me and asked about how the value of the dollar and average lifestyles compare between the 1950s and today, I wouldn't be able to answer that either. If you forced an answer on the spot, then I'd have to guess at it -- and that guess would probably be a wrong.
I simply don't know the specifics because that was 70 years ago and I wasn't around back then. I do feel confident that I could eventually produce a good answer (or perhaps even a great answer), but I'd have to do some homework in order to produce that answer.
But without that homework, it's just not something that I can relate to because my present perspective does not include it.
---
Meanwhile: If you asked random people on the streets of Anytown, USA about what they feel about price of a Big Mac or rent today compared to 5 years ago, it might be rational to expect to get some pretty direct and sometimes livid responses.
> It’s partially that the value of the dollar has been diluted a lot over the decades, and people are in denial about it. Earning 100k is no longer „a good salary“.
A "good salary" (or at least the median) used to be $5000:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Median_personal_income_af...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
As the 'dollar has lost value' people have demanded more dollars in their salary. (Whether the two have kept up with each other is a matter of debate/concern.)
OK, every time I see a comment about income on the internet, I have to assume that the person commenting has zero IQ if they mention nothing about COL.
The same happens when someone mentions something about the Average income as opposed to the median income. The average income is meaningless if the top 1% keep going up while the rest of the system stays the same. The average would look like people are earning more money when they're not.
Same thing with Market economics and the price of items. If I got a choice to sell a boner pill for $1 to a million people and $1 million to one person, those are equal value propositions. So whenever a corporation raises prices, they don't care how many customers they cut off as long as the remaining ones are whales. That's particularly sharp with all the AI costs being shoved into the pipe.
So, that is to say, you really shouldn't just produce a single number about anything and treat it as some benchmark across the world.
Technically even an income of 50k is really high for a person that just needs to pay property taxes and food (house is paid off for example). And if they live in Missouri, they are probably reaching "upper middle" especially if they already have savings.
[dead]
This is unbridled greed, nothing more.
RAM prices experiencing a spike due to a demand shock is not shrinkflation. Its a single COGS line item not a broad increase across all line items.
Note: some single item shocks can lead to broad inflation (eg: oil) but that effect takes awhile to play out.
The RAM/SSD price spikes are not shrinkflation, but the article gives examples of shrinkflation happening due to it:
* Google's upcoming folding phone is going to have less RAM than the current model.
* Motorola has both increased the price on their Razr flip phone and downsized the minimum storage
* Sony reduced storage on the PS5 Slim
...
All of those could also be classified as "they learned consumers didn't need that much."
I see.
So when the tub of ice cream decreases in size from 64 ounces to 60, 56, 52, and finally 48 ounces while the price stays the same (or even goes up), then:
That's not necessarily shrinkflation; that might instead be a result of having learned that consumers didn't need so much ice cream.
There's nothing "finally" about 48 oz. Some brands are edging smaller. What I've noticed is 32oz. cartons gaining prominence in grocery stores, while the 48's seem to be slowly getting phased out.
We used to have quarts of ice cream available. It worked.
I just want to buy it in half-gallon sizes again. I don't care if it costs more :)
> I just want to buy ...
Find a locally owned ice cream parlor, and asked for a hand-packed half gallon.
It is true that their packages don't shrink. There's one in a nearby city that I'm very familiar with.
But at those kinds of quantities, their prices are 50% more than the higher-end store brand at the store that's near my house. The hand-packed treatment then literally doubles that price. We're now at 300% cost and we haven't factored travel expense yet.
Besides, if I kept their ice cream at home, then I think that would tend to lessen my enjoyment of sitting down and enjoying a proper sundae at their shop -- and that's not something I wish to ever diminish in any way. :)
> Find a locally owned ice cream parlor, and asked for a hand-packed half gallon.
I could be wrong, but I'd bet that my local ice cream parlours would decline that request - unless you can show that you're e.g. a restaurant and can commit to a certain order frequency, they're just going to tell you to buy as many 19oz "pints" as you need for $40/4. (A discount over $12/each.)
Man. The old-school ice cream place I grew up with is happy to sell bulk ice cream, in any quantity, in single-unit volumes ranging from a pint to up to 3 gallons. (The prices for this are on the website, and also on the wall behind the counter in the shop, though I'm sure that negotiation is possible for particularly large orders.)
They're even happy to package it with dry ice and ship it internationally. They've offered this service for as long as I've been aware of the world around me (several decades, so far).
They make the ice cream in-house just as they have always done, and they offer these services to anybody.
And while this ice cream place that I'm familiar with certainly does charge plenty, I've got to ask: What's wrong with your own ice cream place, my dude?
> I've got to ask: What's wrong with your own ice cream place, my dude?
So you got me curious enough to try to call up my three local ice cream places.
Spot 1: No phone number on either Google Maps or their website.
Spot 2: This was the spot I had in mind with my previous comment - indeed, they do not sell by any quantity larger than 473ml pints (I typo'd previous comment - 16oz, not 19oz pints.)
Spot 3: Happy to report that they will sell by the 3 gal bucket (or half bucket) for $150/$75, respectively.
re: Spot #2 and your "what's wrong with" question - this is a trendy place that opened about a decade ago, and I expect they're just not interested in taking lower margins or complicating their offerings - it's simply "take it or leave it" on their pints.
Hah. I was joking around, but that's a truly excellent reply. :)
The one I'm familiar with wants about $60 for a 3-gallon tub, which is positively cheap compared to $150.
I should make a point to stop in there again soon and get a chocolate soda or something.
Similar here, though they are too small-scale to make their own ice cream.
Upside, they stock very good quality ice cream. And their prices are about the lowest in town.
If this were true, they could have learned it at any time before now.
When the changes are done precisely during a time of huge increases in the prices of all kinds of memory devices, it is hard to believe that this is a random coincidence.
Or (for some of them) they could have previously been chasing the stupid spec numbers for advertising and realized they can save money if they just stop doing that.
See Apple as an example, who really doesn't care about telling you the newest phone has 12GB of ram. It's literally not even mentioned on the tech specs page.
I'm really appreciative of how much spin I learn on this site, should I ever want a career in PR or marketing
We can see this with the Lenovo Legion 2026 models. They literally perform worse than the 2025 models and cost more. Not only that, the build quality was cut for 2026.
I know Apple is escaping it due to their large contracts but I’m honestly not sure how at this point. They must have pre-purchased multiple years of memory or otherwise have a really insane contract.
But what’s puzzling about that is, why don’t other manufacturers have the same kind of deals? It’s not like Lenovo is a low volume supplier.
Obviously, the iPhone sells in volume unmatched by other devices. But still…I’d have to ask why other high-volume brands like Samsung have wildly expensive laptops.
It just seems like the other companies are asleep at the wheel and don’t have any passion for their strategy, to the point where a tiny company like Framework is overperforming just by caring a little bit. Sure, they can’t beat Apple on raw value but they at least they put together a laptop with a respectable trackpad and a CNC body. Where is volume leader Lenovo?
Apple doesn't only benefit from volume discounts on commodity parts, they also benefit from not having pay a margin on all the parts they designed in-house.
It's not like designing your own part is free, but Qualcomm charges a very healthy margin on top of their manufacturing costs.
Apple also invests in designing the tooling and processes used on their manufacturing lines.
For instance, they cut way back on how much CNC time was required to produce the Neo.
This has always been my question of why don’t companies just directly emulate Apple.
If lenovo is buying a billion chips a year, why can’t they lock in like Apple?
All big vendors will place orders some distance into the future. Lenovo does it, too.
You can't lock in prices forever, though. The more volume and stability you have, the more a vendor will be willing to enter long-term agreements with you. Lenovo has less volume than Apple and is not in as great of a financial position, so they don't have as much leverage.
The bigger factor is that Apple already had more margin in their products. The price premium for RAM upgrades on Apple laptops is large, as everyone knows. They could absorb more RAM price increases without being forced to raise retail prices.
I really don't understand why more companies don't emulate Apple in terms of line simplicity. Look at Dell for a great example of a sprawling product mix. I can't imagine having that many product varieties helps with profitability.
In the consumer space, I recently bought a Sonicare toothbrush, and the number of models and combinations is staggering. 1000x plaque removal, 750% plaque removal, it's ridiculous.
PC makers can't count on brand loyalty. If you want a PC and your favorite brand is missing something that a competitor has, it's easy to switch. If you want a Mac and Apple is missing something, it's harder to switch. Enterprise sales are a bit stickier, but not that much stickier.
So Dell, Lenovo, et Al end up trying to address every niche except the focused product catalog niche.
Like Dell Vostro, their "small business" line. Versus Latitude, their "business" line. What on earth is uniquely needed by a "small business" versus a... regular business? Why not introduce a third "large business" line? Maybe a "sole proprietor" line too?
It can only be explained as a psychology play. The dizzying array of options is designed to, I suppose, make you feel like Dell surely has the exact right laptop for you, even if that is bullshit.
It doesn't entirely make sense to me from a psyche standpoint either -- I have no idea why purchasers would possibly feel anything other than anxiety and analysis paralysis. But whatever!
> Like Dell Vostro, their "small business" line. Versus Latitude, their "business" line. What on earth is uniquely needed by a "small business" versus a... regular business? Why not introduce a third "large business" line? Maybe a "sole proprietor" line too?
My vague recollection is that Latitude were nice business laptops; coming with all the enterprise goodies, replaceable parts, service manual, next-day onsite support available and also the enterprise usual costs, lack of sexy displays, and slow model turnover.
Vostro was a lot closer to the Inspirons (sold for personal use); I think just badge engineering a couple selected Inspirons to have a bit longer of a product cycle and better parts availability.
Re: analysis paralysis, that's a real issue. I try to find some feature that really narrows the field and then it becomes easier to decide. If I required a wired ethernet port, memory slot(s), and a specific cpu family, it narrows the field a lot; then I can figure out from what's left. For laptops, off-lease entrerprise refurbs are pretty price competitive with new models targetted for personal use; then it's really a matter of what's available, and how they differ ... and then looking at the units with specific damage/defects to see if the compensating price drop makes sense; personally, I'd take several dead pixels for $100 off, cause I don't do pixel peeping work anyway.
It's the old General Motors product philosophy of "A Car for Every Purse and Purpose". That market segmentation and badge engineering approach worked great for decades and allowed them to earn huge profits. But eventually customers figured out that there was no actual difference between a Buick versus a Pontiac, and more focused competitors ate their lunch.
Many moons ago, we used to buy Dell Dimension desktops at work. They were fine. They were very quiet, robustly-built, and were expandable to fit individual users' requirements as things changed. They were usually easy to work on when that was necessary.
Dell also had the Precision line, which was very posh. These cost a lot more.
The Vostro line eventually showed up. They were noisier, and lighter/flimsier, less-expandable, and harder to work on. But they did cost less to buy.
---
I would never buy a Vostro computer for myself. I think that buying cheapness as a primary feature is dumb. Given a choice between good/better/best, I tend to pick "better." I like being able to get what I think is a better design, even though it generally costs somewhat more. I don't want the cheapest car tires, the cheapest hand tools, or the cheapest PC.
But the company chose to operate as cheap-at-every-expense. The Vostro line was a perfect fit for their buying proclivities, so that's what they started buying. (I didn't like that, but those decisions were above of my paygrade.)
---
Was Dell wrong for offering several different classes of computer back then?
Are they wrong for doing so today?
Why? Why not?
(Remember: In the insatiable quest for the bottom dollar, the company kept buying Dell computers. We could have began giving those dollars to one of their competitors instead, but we did not do so. This suggests that the model is not bullshit at all: After all, they are in the business of selling computers, and we kept buying them.)
What I and others have always questioned is how far beyond that Dell goes. It's not good/better/best; it's Vostro/Alienware/Precision/Inspiron/Latitude/XPS/etc... which all have their own array of models and internal good/better/best subdivisions.
There are a lot of variables at play there. Pricing, branding, perhaps even your CIO's solid golfing relationship with the Dell sales rep... or their not-so-nice relationship with the HP sales rep.Which variables helped? Which hurt? Was the dizzying model lineup a pro, con, or neither? The only thing we can conclude from the facts you presented is that the proliferation of Dell's models was not a dealbreaker for your particular company.
Dell has a lot of other things going for them. Namely, their name. They have been around for ages and their products are... fine. Nobody ever got fired for buying Dell. PCs are commodities; by definition one PC can't really outshine or outprice another too much on any technical level because they're all using the same core components. So name really matters. I think that is the overwhelming reason why people buy them, not "I love that they sell 100 different laptop models at any given time."
> There are a lot of variables at play there. Pricing, branding, perhaps even your CIO's solid golfing relationship with the Dell sales rep... or their not-so-nice relationship with the HP sales rep.
No, there's really not. I've already explained the main variable here: Price.
The other driving variable, which I left to implication, was inertia.
We didn't have a CIO. Nobody from Dell or HP was taking anyone from this company out for golf outings, dinners, strip clubs, or nose beers. We merely bought and used computers, with perhaps 50 desktop systems at peak that slowly rotated over time as needs ebbed and flowed.
We could have switched to HP or Acer even some box-builder with a non-English name instead, and maybe we would have done so if Dell hadn't introduced cheaper products. Who knows. That version of reality never happened.
It sure seems like the introduction of the lower-cost Vostro line strengthened our inertia. I don't know if that was good or bad for us, but it was almost certainly better for Dell this way than in some alternate reality where it went in some other direction.
---
Anyway, I looked at Dell's laptop lineup after I read your previous comment. It's a damned mess. But I'm not sure that this mess qualifies as 70 or 100 (or whatever) base models: It's plainly evident that there's a lot of overlap within this list. :)
Apple has a unique market position due to their OS. A buyer shopping for a Mac can't visit multiple vendors and compare models.
Dell and Sonicare do not have that luxury. They are competing with other PC vendors and other toothbrush vendors.
The strategy is to produce so many models that you appear to serve every price point and need without requiring the user to shop around. You can find something in their lineup that fits your budget or requirements if you look long enough and you don't feel like you need to go looking around at competing vendors as much.
Having may models isn't a high cost because they share so many parts. I bet if you opened multiple Sonicare toothbrushes they'd share many main components like batteries or motors. Dell has a few laptop and desktop lines but they're different combinations of parts within a shared chassis.
Dell's claim to fame when they started was they could manage the complexity of a large product mix to get you want you really need. It is a lot of work, but their ability to manage that complexity it what makes them profitable.
> If lenovo is buying a billion chips a year, why can’t they lock in like Apple?
Lenovo controls less of the stack than Apple: CPUs (Intel/AMD), BIOS, operating system, etc. While ostensibly Apple and Lenovo are both selling personal computers, Lenovo is in a (sub-)segment of the market that is commoditized with Dell, HP, etc.
If you need to run Windows and associated (Windows-only) apps, what's special between Lenovo/Dell EMC/HP/etc? How much of a difference is there between Coke and Pepsi?
A lot of vendors hitched their wagon to the Wintel duopoly, and now they're all riding (or being ridden) herd.
They can lock in. However that is risky too - if prices go down they are locked into the higher prices.
More importantly, if you have a locked in price you can sell your products for more profit - or you can sell the things that you have locked in and not have to make the rest of the widget at all. Sometimes someone will give you a good deal to buy out your locked in contract.
Because people continuously underestimate just how good Apple engineering and supply chain management is. And since iPhone and portables is such a juggernaut for them, it goes downstream into every other product line that uses the same architecture. That’s why it was so critical for them to pull off the ARM MacBook transition - the only other alternative for them essentially would have been to exit the market or run mostly at a loss.
Do they have anything like the same volume? Lenovo’s annual revenue is about half of Apple’s annual profit.
They don’t have the same profit margins but they are the #1 volume PC manufacturer in the world. They also own the Motorola smartphone business.
Apple is #4 in PC volume but they certainly make up for it with their smartphone volume.
And of course, they have a lot of service revenue to pad the balance sheet.
I'm not even looking at Lenovo's profits. I'm comparing their revenue to Apple's profit just to emphasize the difference in scale.
By the numbers, Apple is a smartphone business that has a casual side hobby of also being the #4 PC maker. Their PC sales are ~3x less than Lenovo's, but their smartphone sales are 10x their PC sales. There's plenty of commonality so the massive smartphone business surely helps with supply on the computer side of things as well.
Because Apple has the capital to take a loss on hardware indefinitely due to the App Store being their primary source of revenue?
But if you read their actual financial reports they have never indicated in any way that their hardware is a loss leader. They disclose this information publicly since they are publicly traded. Yes, the services revenue is higher than Macs and iPads combined and is at a higher profit margin, but hardware also makes a lot of money.
Apple’s only structural advantage should be their custom silicon, but I don’t think that’s a cost advantage as much as it’s a performance and battery life advantage. Apple is still buying huge dies from TSMC and designing them custom themselves which is not cheap. Lenovo shares the cost of designing an Intel, AMD, or Qualcomm chip with dozens of OEMs. Same deal with software: I wouldn’t be surprised if macOS costs more per unit for Apple than Windows costs for Lenovo considering all the employees Apple hires directly to develop it.
Apple in theory should be paying a pretty similar amount of money to make the rest of their systems. They don’t make camera sensors, displays, keyboards, DRAM chips, or anything else themselves.
>But if you read their actual financial reports they have never indicated in any way that their hardware is a loss leader.
Right, I'm just saying they could afford it if it came down to that. They also have enormous margins on their higher-end systems, so they've got plenty of room to lose some profitability before it comes down to that.
The App Store is in no way Apple’s primary source of revenue.
Apple also makes healthy margins on its hardware products.
Apple is also slightly decreasing their margins to maintain price. They can easily do this as their margins are 10x to 20x most of the industry.
Is that showing up in their financial disclosures?
Apple prioritizes price stability over price competitiveness. They will happily charge formerly eye-watering prices for extra RAM and their customers will less happily pay them. On the other hand, Apple rarely change their prices after release except in cases of extreme currency devaluation. They simply raise the price when the new model comes out.
They do this for their own reasons but it's helping them in this crisis. They can simply accept lower margins in the short term, in the knowledge that in the long term these price fluctuations even out.
From the perspective of the producers Apple are a consistent purchaser with deep pockets. AI companies may be willing to pay more for RAM in the short term, but Apple is a safer customer. The current AI bubble may or may not burst, but people will keep buying iPhones regardless. The producers do not want to freeze Apple out because Apple is their hedge against the bubble bursting.
Lenovo may not be a low volume purchaser but they are not at Apple's scale nor are Lenovo's customers willing to pay the premium that Apple's customers are.
I don’t think we’ve seen the lower margins in Apple’s financial reports.
Also, their computers have been getting more storage/RAM competitive as time has gone on. Literally just by time passing and prices staying the same.
Lenovo is beyond Apple’s scale when it comes to PC sales. They are #1 in volume. Apple is #4. Apple sells more iPhones but Lenovo does also own Motorola which is not nothing. We can also look at Samsung: a wildly high volume company who has their own production lines of major components like RAM and displays but they still sell their 2026 laptops at eye watering price increases.
Apple literally buys displays from Samsung.
Lenovo is beyond Apple’s scale, sure, but Apple has relatively few product lines. I imagine that makes it so the few parts they end up doing they have massive volume on.
The article is wrong with their Apple example. The cheapest Mac mini with the smallest amount of RAM is no longer available, but the next larger config is available at the same unchanged price point.
"is available" assuming you can find one in stock.
So I randomly ended up buying a lot of computer gear last year because I killed a perfectly fine 4 year old PC and couldn't decide what I wanted to replace it. I thought at the time "this is an expensive mistake" but you look at the prices I paid for parts a year ago and it's mind-blowing eg:
- 4TB Samsung Pro 990 SSD for $150 (now $940)
- 64GB DDR kit for a laptop $180 (now $700)
- 64GB DDR5 CL30 kit for a desktop $200 (now $950)
- 9800X3D/5070Ti PC $1800
- 2TB Samsung Pro 990 $95 I think? I honestly don't even remember why I bought this
It's really depressing now. Normally at this point in the NViida product cycle we'd be expected a 50x0 Super series. I think it's all but confirmed we won't see those until next year. I think the 50x0 series will last a lot longer than the 40x0 series.
So it's going to be interesting to see what happens when this hits phone makers who also need RAM. There certainly won't be a RAM increase this year and there'll likely be a price bump. Apple may be able to absorb this to some degree because of anyone I expect them to have long term contracts.
Still, Apple has temporarily delisted the base 16GB Mac Mini and removed the 512GB Mac Studio so they aren't unaffected.
But I think this SSD/RAM price hike has basically killed the Steam Machine, which is sad. Valve obviously didn't lock in long-term contracts before announcing it. Woops. The Steam Deck is also a hard find as a result.
We've seen an almost unprecedented price hike on the PS5, which is an almost 6 year old console at this point. I wouldn't exxpect a PS6 before 2028 at the earliest.
We've had RAM price spikes before, usually because of supply crunches (eg years ago I seem to remember a fire taking out one of the major suppliers).
I honestly don't expect any of this to get better until we have an increasingly likely global recession and the AI bubble pops. OpenAI and Anthropic may not be able to cash out in time to avoid all this.
tech peaked at the PS Vita and I am not joking
As much as I love my Vita having access to Chinese handhelds with decent screens that can emulate almost everything under the sun (including PC, Switch and some Vita!) is pretty damn awesome!
The MacBook Neo proves that gadget "shrinkflation" is largely a choice. I own an Neo and I continue to marvel at how capable, nice, and yet inexpensive it was.
If a brand decides to release a budget version of their expensive product with a value-for-money proposition ... that is not shrinkflation IMO. (whether that value-for-money proposition is mere marketing hype or well received and is closer to reality ... is secondary)
If seemingly the "same" product -- in this example say 'MacBook Pro' base model for current year -- delivers less goodness, less value compared to its price year-on-year. If the price appears to stay more or less the same but the product is made weaker in service of higher margins for the seller. THAT would typically qualify as shrinkflation ... in my understanding.
This is more objectively measurable in comsumer goods where you can see the packaging being tinkered with over time so consumer thinks they are getting the same SKU but this year's packaging has less of the product tghan last year's, at similar price point so it doesnt register as price inflation.
You have to keep in mind, the less capable you are with computers, the more computer you need. You might get by just fine on 8 GB, but Grandma, with her three anti-malware suites, two active malware infections, corporate spyware, and fake version of Google Chrome which reports all browsing usage to the Neilsen corporation, is going to slow to a crawl, at best, even on 16gb. Normal people computers are different than yours or mine.
How does grandma install all of that on macOS?
Yes, we are vastly superior with our enormous brains.
I bough a unifi access point on the ubiquiti store today, and on checkout they slapped me with a €5 "memory surcharge" on checkout.
Shrinkflation is when a product for the same price gives you less while pretending to be the same amount, e.g. get 450g of pasta per pack instead of 500, same price, sold in the same boxes.
This is the same product at 5x the price. It sucks but it's not shrinkflation
Anecdote: The ‘zfs send’ capable accounts at rsync.net have always had a 5TB minimum size because they require a full blown virtual machine with resource guarantees and IP address, etc.
We just changed that minimum to 10TB last week and it was specifically the RAM prices that forced us to re-calculate that value proposition.
And then Google is moving at full speed to lock-up the whole Android experience (bootloaders, OS, app store, etc.) so that even tech-savvy consumers are forced to get new, crappier devices when the old ones start slowing down. Enshittification at its highest level
I really hope we will have some innovation with LLM that would remove such demand for RAM. Any ideas what is more likely?
ASIC LLM?
inference inside SSD?
bigger 1-bit trained models?
better MoE so we don't have to load all experts?
Bubble popping, useless AI hardware sold off to creditors and scrapped to RAM sticks in SSDs for actual real world use case ? And eventually maybe later in a few years some actually useful and profitable real use cases for the current LLM generation are found.
Alternatively "AI" gets such a bad name regular people will go and burn it all down as long as it has "AI" even just in the name.
We squeezed everything we could squeeze over the last decades, getting better products / quality of life (in the west at least). Now that there is almost no one left to abuse (ie people on the other side of the planet willing to work for pennies) we'll have to get by with shittier products, more working hours, later retirement, worse public services, etc.
Many product segments peaked and the only way left to extract more money from us is to either lower the quality so that it's cheaper to make/break faster or subscriptions/ads.
Almost every global graph tells the opposite story. There are far fewer people in poverty. There are much better average outcomes on basically every metric you can imagine. Almost all directly attributed to global commerce
Despite decades of expanding global commerce and industrialization in the developing world, the data shows that extreme income inequality between nations has remained stubbornly entrenched, and between-country inequalities still account for an overwhelming ~80% of total world income inequality.
By the end of the twentieth century, these decades of development and industrialization had primarily succeeded in consolidating world inequalities in income and resource use, while accelerating environmental degradation to unprecedented levels.
When corporations relocate manufacturing to the imperial periphery, they successfully export the social contradictions of mass production (like class conflict and labor unrest), but they do not relocate the wealth that historically allowed high-wage countries to afford social safety nets and high living standards.
Then why are global living standards rising rapidly?
I also don’t think inequality is intrinsically bad. Depending on type and timeframe it may even be good. Especially if the inequality is increasing while everyone is also doing better than they previously were. (note that internal US inequality is actually shrinking)
A 10% increase on a larger base will produce more inequality than a 20% increase on a smaller base. However, I don’t think the smaller base person would prefer neither of them get an increase.
> internal US inequality is actually shrinking
Since the 1980s, the United States has experienced a profound shift in wealth concentration toward the top of the economic ladder. The bottom half of American households controls just 2.5% of the nation's wealth.
That's 50% of the nation leveraging 2.5% of the purse-strings. That's not what I call "representation."
How can you tell such blatant falsehoods?
Edit: just because it's ridiculous the way some people pretend it's complicated or nuanced:
I am not saying that there isn’t inequality. I am also not saying that infinite inequality is good.
I am saying it would be better to be poor now than poor in 1980 even though the inequality is higher now.
I am saying that inequality by itself is not an especially meaningful measure.
I am saying that recently, 2019 through 2024, low wage income has risen in the US faster than high wage income.
https://www.epi.org/publication/strong-wage-growth-for-low-w...
> they successfully export the social contradictions of mass production
Because the West used to have tons of manufacturing and unusually large amounts of social unrest? Shitholes are gonna shithole. No one is stopping them from being the next South Korea or Singapore (if they really wanted it, lol) except themselves.
> Shitholes are gonna shithole.
Wow, brilliant insight.
Yes, the US used to have tons of manufacturing and unusually large amounts of social unrest. Is that your only question?
Why do we have to get by as you say? On whose command?
Why do we always act like there's an immutable social obligation to march right along believing the prior generations had freedom to start marching in that direction, but we are forever locked in to such a direction.
You know all the people that made those choices are dying and future generations have zero obligation to carry on linearly from where they left off?
Women would not have the right to vote. We'd all be speaking Latin.
Two things that would remain true if society of the living was tightly coupled to exactly how the past worked.
The original comment has conflated every ill into "have to", combined with political fatalism. Not unreasonable given the way things have turned out, but yes it's not inevitable either. It's just the direction of travel that the majority chose.
Certain "have to" are imposed by the physical world. The world will have to use less oil in 2026 than in 2025, because production has been so heavily impacted by the war. What happens beyond that .. well, only a fairly small number of people get to make that decision. Next US presidential election is in 2028.
This is a valid point but I’m struggling to understand what it has to do with the gp comment.
The reality is the West has been leaning on cheap labour for decades. That can’t continue as the rest of the world is catching up.
This is a good thing even though it will be painful for people used to consuming cheap goods from Asia and other parts of the world.
>> That can’t continue as the rest of the world is catching up.
This has already been happening quietly in several industries.
I remember many years ago when I was working in a bike shop (early aughts) and the Specialized engineer was talking about how Taiwan used to be the brunt of the jokes in the bike world for decades. He went on a rather long rant about how over that same time, they had essentially dumped billions into becoming a technological behemoth when it came to bike manufacturing. Their factories were so far advanced, and their engineers were so highly qualified, that many bike companies (including Specialized) were moving their manufacturing back to states because it had become too expensive to continue using the Taiwan factories.
Your comment is devoid of content, of substance. Just more parroting of obligations that do not exist.
You're not struggling to understand my comment. You're struggling to think altogether when your argument is "well because random political choice in 1979, we must today in 2026..." type reductive, functional illiteracy.
But ok; we must coddle the past to satiate some. Well, debt jubilees are things humans have done before. Wipe the ledger and start counting again. What is grandpa going to do? Rise from the grave?
> What is grandpa going to do? Rise from the grave?
If he did, he'd jump right back in
> Just more parroting of obligations that do not exist.
What obligations did I mention?
You seem to want to say something whether it has any relation to the parent comments or not.
There's the obligation to validate your expectations.
When in reality we're all off the hook caring you even exist.
As an obscure 19th century theorist once said, history does not walk on its head. That is, it is not ideas or sentiment that make the difference, but processes and the actually existing relations among people.
If you don't have the guts to pick a side, if you remain at the level of just disciplining sentiment, if you can't even say what you mean, then you are no better than a swindling preacher--you are part of the problem you are nominally fighting against.
Or is this just dead internet?
You don't have to do anything, nobody cares about individuals when you have 8 billions. The masses, on average, want cheap simple fun, cheap stuff and so on. Market responds. Good luck trying to change that.
Sure, there is some market manipulation, ads are the best example (how can any adult with even a smidge of self-respect accept any ads in any form is beyond me, thats mind slavery 101) but since forever masses wanted bread and games more than literally anything.
All those companies making high quality expensive products that lasted decades? Barring tiny exceptions, they either went down with quality (less control, move to china etc) or went bankrupt.
Parent is right in 1 aspect - if we elevate whole world to similar income levels, the income of previously-rich countries will have much less purchasing power, can't escape simple numbers. But who cared in the past about slave kids in sweat shops, right, they didn't have the right skin color, passport or religion to worry about.
"Good luck going to the moon!"
"It's impossible." They said.
"Simple" numbers generated by Machiavellian computation given the economy.
So it turns out that difficult computation and going to the moon are possible.
Problem you asserted as in the way is solved.
Bullshit jobs (and unnecessary in-office), material waste (food, clothes, etc.), culture warring...we have much more to squeeze.
The dynamic is not a straightforward "race to the bottom" that simply runs out of victims, but rather a cyclical process that continually recreates working-class resistance and shifts capital into entirely new industries.
Maybe it seems like this strategy leads to a permanent decline in global labor power, but history shows a different pattern: "where capital goes, conflict goes". Relocating capital to exploit cheap labor does not permanently resolve crises of profitability; it merely reschedules them in time and space. By moving to new regions, multinational capital inevitably creates and strengthens entirely new industrial working classes in those areas.
Conversely (complementarily) when an industry becomes too crowded and profits are squeezed, capitalists do not just cut corners; they rely on what Beverly Silver terms the product fix—shifting capital entirely out of mature, highly competitive sectors into new, innovative, and more profitable industries.
Historically, the epicenter of capitalist accumulation (and subsequent labor unrest) shifted from textiles in the 19th century to automobiles in the 20th century. In the first decades of this century, capital shifted toward semiconductors, the "education industry," and producer services (like finance, telecommunications, and consulting).
Because a product fix involves withdrawing capital from an established industry, it usually brings about mass layoffs, deindustrialization, and the breaking of existing social compacts. In response, the workers who previously benefited from those compacts have, historically, risen up to protect their jobs, pensions, and established ways of life.
Unfortunately, they are often doomed by their diminishing economic leverage.
Crazy suggestion - maybe there is some space for a more efficient compute software / device combination ecosystem and companies. I don't really need or even want the AI features being pushed on my devices. I don't want to pay for ever more absurd camera specs on phones. I don't need 8k or even 4k displays on small devices. I don't need or want browser security container features to safely run and render obnoxious adds - I just want them suppressed. I don't need 4k streams or want to pay for the bandwidth.
We actually don't need all the ram. Everyone was fine in 2010. The devices were fine, the internet was productive.
We have all just seriously fucked up in the software and hardware space. We are super-sizing devices and software just as surely as the car industry has done in massive pickups and SUVs and the food industry has done with portion sizing.
Wait until Shrinkflation meets AIflation, where most services once mediated by humans are taken over by dumb, error-prone, allucinating AI, with no possibility of recourse.
> , allucinating AI
Oh, the irony
Maybe speling mistakes will become more common, as a signal of non-AI content.
For a while, at least.
My company has tens of thousands of people on a waitlist for our new product. We had planned to ship this year, but we simply can't get enough memory at any price. Even if we cut the installed memory to bare minimum functional requirements, the unit cost goes up by a few hundred dollars and functionality is drastically reduced.
So, we can't ship. This could kill our business. Thanks, Sam.