this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
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The memory manufacturers don’t do contracts like that. There was no way to lock any price. Check out the Gamer Nexus steam machine benchmark video, it has a segment where they interview Pierre-Loup from Valve. He says they had to call a guy and either they buy at the price the guy says or they never hear back from him again.
That was after the memory apocalypse happened though. Before that memory was abundant
So the trick is to stay ahead of the curve and order stuff before an entire market segment is decimated.
Yeah, Apple did it. Although it's close to expiring or already has.
Apple's hardware sales are probably a few orders of magnitude higher than Valve's. Do you suppose that would give them some options a small time hardware vendor wouldn't get?
look, i am not asking them to predict the future 8 months ago, ok. they had steam machine in development for years, it would be natural to arrange it for production before they announced it, right? and to setup production, it would be natural to secure some parts. had they done that, they would have avoided being caught in the ram apocalypse.
they didn't need to predict the ram price would skyrocket, they just had to do what a reasonable hardware manufacturer would naturally do.
That's just not how it works