PINE64 Halts Linux Device Production Amid DRAM and EMMC Shortages (nerds.xyz)
- Reference: 0185057844
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/08/19/2134209/pine64-halts-linux-device-production-amid-dram-and-emmc-shortages
- Source link: https://nerds.xyz/2026/08/pine64-linux-device-production/
> [2]PINE64 has some very bad news for Linux hardware fans. PINE64 says it has [3]no plans to produce additional Linux devices in the near future because of the ongoing DRAM and eMMC shortage. Future production will depend on component pricing after mid 2027, while existing PineNote and PineTab2 inventory could run out in roughly three months. The company says PineTime, PineVoice, and Pinecil production will continue as usual, but the outlook for its Linux hardware is much less certain.
"That's it for this post, all in all it's a bit bleak for the Linux devices, but in the meantime PineStore still have a great lineup of MCU powered devices which will continue to expand with more exciting devices," the company [4]said .
[1] https://slashdot.org/~BrianFagioli
[2] https://pine64.org/
[3] https://nerds.xyz/2026/08/pine64-linux-device-production/
[4] https://t.me/PINE64_News
Isn't capitalism supposed to fix this? (Score:2)
We have a massive shortage why is nobody stepping up to make more supply? And it's not a short-term shortage everyone knew this was coming and we have known for a couple of years and we knew that was going to get worse and the absolute best case scenario is that it starts to get better sometime around 2029 or 2030.
If capitalism can't even solve something this fucking simple what is even the point?
Of course the actual problem is capitalism is doing exactly what it does when it's not regulated. Nobody
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Because building more manufacturing capacity is a large expenditure and nobody wants to get stuck holding the cards if the AI boom turns into a bust.
The communists aren't building any faster, either.
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> rsilvergun is simply trolling America and the western civilization again like he does all day long in order to push his Chinese masters agenda!
He (or she) certainly does seem to post a lot.
Mind you, one of the strengths of a democratic society is the freedom to look at your own way of doing things, criticise where appropriate, and make improvements. If there is a good point in what comrade rsilvergun says, it is that pure (sometimes called "unfettered") capitalism has its drawbacks. America at its best has tempered this pure capitalism with a sprinkling of social welfare, anti-monopoly law, or government assistance to business.
As Valgrus Thunderax
There's no such thing as pure capitalism (Score:2)
What you're thinking of is called anarcho capitalism and it quickly becomes fascism.
That's what it means to fire the ref.
Try taking the referee and all the rules out of the NFL and let me know how much fun it is watching football. The same goes for basketball in the nba. The rules in sports games are remarkably complex at the professional level for just that purpose. There are for example half a dozen rules in basketball that exist because people got too tall and the game got boring The watch becaus
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which really just highlights what a stupid game basketball is
Bullshit (Score:2)
We have known AI was eating all the RAM for about 2 years now. We also know it's going to continue to eat all the RAM for at least another 3 years.
It does not take 5 years for someone who already works in the semiconductor industry to enter the market. China is already making viable and useful ram but it's going to of course stay in China. If nothing else the big three producers are Taiwanese and South Korean and they're going to block any attempt to let Chinese companies get a foothold in the rest of t
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There was speculation but not actual eating until about one year ago. And it takes a shit lot longer than one year to build anything the size and complexity of a fab.
High demand on Flash memory hit two years back, but not DRAM.
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> Because building more manufacturing capacity is a large expenditure and nobody wants to get stuck holding the cards if the AI boom turns into a bust.
Not so much a bust, but a lot of consolidation as the players who can't turn a profit start burning through all their venture capital money. AI probably won't go away, but I doubt the current hardware buying frenzy is sustainable long term.
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Nope that's not it either. Companies have found out that if they collude and control the entire supply of something, they can make more money by not meeting demand, indefinitely. The free market basically no longer exists and definitely no longer discovers prices by matching supply and demand. Covid fundamentally broke it all. Even without collusion in markets with high barriers to entry, reducing supply, or at least not meeting demand maximizes shareholder profits.
Don't mistake heavy criticism of our p
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*When* the AI boom goes bust. Cannot possibly still be "if" at this point.
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It'll be solved once the bubble bursts.
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You're not listening. I just said the bubble isn't going to burst. Best case scenario we are looking at 2029 before there's any relief and it could easily go beyond that. Most likely we are looking at 2030 before supply gets any better.
This isn't a bubble. This is a fundamental shift in human technology. I think the problem is we're having a hard time wrapping our heads around that because new technology has always kind of been available for us and made for us. AI is not for you and it is not for me. It
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We just need to invent star-trek style replicators and then we'll be all set. You know: tea, earl grey, hot. It shouldn't be too hard since Claude is already smarter than Data.
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They're not going to let up until the bubble bursts. There is no end to expansion in their eyes.
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You're acting like this is the first ever RAM shortage. It's not. These things are cyclical, and things will get back to normal eventually. The AI tech bubble will eventually burst (but AI will stick around), everybody and their grandmother will stop trying to build data centers in everyone's back yards, and RAM and storage supply will return to normal.
Oh, and Nvidia will pretend to give a shit about gamers again for a few months until the next tech fad that requires GPU acceleration pops up.
If anything, we
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There's a stronger connection than you say: some of that mining hardware ended up being snapped up for training small LLMs. Most of it has become too old for support unless you want to compile llama.cpp yourself, but it's still out there and it's still cheap.
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My current gaming GPU is an ex-miner fire sale item. They got sold on multiple consumer secondhand markets after proof-of-stake transition.
Buying new gaming GPUs then was already horribly expensive so getting one secondhand was a big relief. I can see the games console price attraction.
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> This isn't a bubble. This is a fundamental shift in human technology. I think the problem is we're having a hard time wrapping our heads around that because new technology has always kind of been available for us and made for us. AI is not for you and it is not for me. It is for the capital owners who are sick and tired of having employees and customers. They want to replace everyone in the chain from the employee through to the customer with a machine that does whatever the fuck they want it to do.
It certainly is a bubble. Just because Altman et el want their (magic) genies that can grant any wish (yes he actually said that) doesn't mean they are actually going to get them. Reality is distinct from what people want.
The value AI does bring is insufficient to justify current expenditures and certainly not expenditures of a few American "AI" firms when there is more value in training private models on corporate datasets for specific purposes.
The one weird trick stemming from the 2017 attention paper h
Re:Isn't capitalism supposed to fix this? (Score:4, Insightful)
> We have a massive shortage why is nobody stepping up to make more supply?
Look up some stuff instead of just commie ranting.
Apple is testing supply from an up-and-coming DRAM supplier in China. Hynix is working on converting old fabs into a smaller process to create more fast RAM. TSMC is building a fab in Arizona. Samsung is opening a fab in Texas next year.
> the big three can anytime they want drastically increase production within 6 months to a year
Tell me you've never been to a fab without telling me you've never been to a fab.
If they could double their capacity Altman would buy *that* too. At least presume that the greedy capitalists are greedy.
> Capitalism needs a referee and US dumbasses fired the ref.
How, precisely, did they accomplish this coup in China?
Also, why not move to China, Cuba, or North Korea? They have varying degrees of central planning that should take care of your needs. Nobody wants you to be unhappy.
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Apple will get cock blocked by Trump and tariffs after some bribes. Even if the Democrats get back in charge they will probably keep those tariffs because they're nervous about China.
Even if a miracle happens and apple out bribes The Big Three memory producers which is possible they have a fuck ton of money apple is just going to make sure they have supply. That's not necessarily going to help you or me. They will take advantage of the elevated RAM prices to raise the base price of their hardware to mat
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Maybe you should stop panicking lie a wee baby and think from the other end: things are working as well as they can, and the problem is a lot bigger than just snapping your fingers and hoping a genie shows up.
Fabs are expensive and big, and can't be built overnight. Even stupid ordinary homes take months to build, and fans are thousands of times bigger with thousands of times the utility requirements.
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Literally the only reason we're in this mess is because governments have been keeping interest rates artificially low for thirty years to enrich their cronies. No company would be borrowing trillions of dollars if interest rates were 10-15%.
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> If capitalism can't even solve something this fucking simple what is even the point?
"The point" is that it's the best system we have, despite its problems.
The alternatives have, historically, led to mass starvation and bloody revolutions in relatively short order. This will predictably happen again if they are attempted, because they violate human nature too strongly.
Be that as it may, technological advancement has always been the game-changer. If anything stands any kind of chance at enabling humans to t
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The best system that's been done is called SOCIALISM. It combines the best and most useful aspects of communism with the best and most useful aspects of capitalism. Straight capitalism, like what the right and far right in the US want (and are largely starting to get under their God-Emperor Trump, unfortunately) ultimately leads to fascism and assholitry. See "anarcho-capitalism". The end result will be some system akin to slavery, even if it has a different name, just like has happened in the past. See "sh
I probably shouldn't be saying this but... (Score:1)
...just FYI the resell value on discontinued Pine64 products on the open market tends to exceed the purchase price.
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This is the only time in my life that the value of computers and parts is rising rather than falling.
Queue the idiots taking about using AI at work (Score:1)
The rest of us suffer while the fucktards in big tech force AI down our throats.WE NO LONGER HAVE PERMISSION FOR PHYSICAL THINGS.
How about you fucktards start paying some reparations rather than taking smugly how you replaced your real dog with a chat gpt one. This is not a fucking joke.
Pine64 is a joke (Score:2)
I've known pine64 was a joke for a while, but they really just shut down production? You should be able to keep products in stock if you raise the prices. If they choose not to, they aren't doing business, they are protesting component costs. In reality, pine64 has not been driven by market forces for some time, they reliably have stock outs and dont properly use pricing to manage stock or moderate demand. They also refuse to make a better pinephone despite there being market demand for it. I'm not sure
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If all the slashdot posters who complained any spying cell phones and closed source put their money where their mouth is and bought a Pine phone we wouldn't be having this discussion. Really how many phones have they sold?
PINE64 products are not that great (Score:2)
I had a Pinebook PRO and it was... meh. Way too slow and underpowered for modern web browsing. Also shipped with Manjaro, but I'm a Debian fan. I installed Armbian instead; PINE64 doesn't offer much in the way of hardware documentation and so I spent a fair bit of time getting Armbian to work. I had to munge the device tree files based on the ones in Manjaro. I ended up selling the laptop.
In retrospect, I probably should have hung on to it. I could probably sell it for more now!
Oh no! (Score:3)
Where will I get a SBC that fails after three months now?
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China.
Re:Oh no! (Score:4, Informative)
I bought a MiniPC from China instead, a GMKtec M5 Plus with 5825U, 32GB DDR4 and a 1TB NVMe SSD — for $295 right before everything went to shit. That one is out of production, but an equivalent machine is now $600. I've had it for over a year now with literally no problems.
The memory is 3.2 GHz, and despite being so cheap it doesn't even report a manufacturer, there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with it. It's got wifi 6 (MT7922) and dual 2.5 GbE (RTL8125) and the only thing that requires even a vaguely recent kernel is the wifi. It came with Windows, and I even shrank that just in case I'm ever desperate for a real Windows machine to flash some firmware or something, but ofc I've never needed or wanted to.
Too bad the combination of AI bullshit and tariff fuckery has doubled the price, I'd buy another similar machine.