Amazon Hikes Hardware Prices By 60%, Blaming Memory Shortage (techcrunch.com)
- Reference: 0185136844
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/08/24/228251/amazon-hikes-hardware-prices-by-60-blaming-memory-shortage
- Source link: https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/24/amazon-hikes-hardware-prices-by-60-percent-blaming-memory-shortage/
> The [2]price explosion impacted Fire TVs, Echos, Kindles, and Eeros. One egregious example that's [3]been cited is that of the Echo Dot, one of Amazon's cheapest smart speakers, the price of which jumped 60% overnight, from $49.99 to $79.99. Price-tracking sites like [4]CamelCamelCamel show the stark uptick, which has previously hovered much lower. [...] The company also said that it would continue to offer occasional promotions to customers over the course of the next year.
Amazon said in a statement: "The consumer electronics industry is facing significant increases in memory and storage component costs. After absorbing these increases for as long as we could, we recently adjusted pricing across our product lines."
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/24/amazon-hikes-hardware-prices-by-60-percent-blaming-memory-shortage/
[2] https://fortune.com/2026/08/21/exclusive-amazon-quietly-hiked-prices-echo-fire-tv-kindle-eero-significant-increases-memory-costs/
[3] https://www.theverge.com/tech/983598/amazon-price-increase-echo-kindle-fire-tv
[4] https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B09B8V1LZ3?context=search
I'm Not Anti-AI (Score:5, Interesting)
I use AI daily to write code ... a lot. And I love the technology.
However ... the narrative that "AI makes things better" is increasingly looking like an (industry-motivated) myth to me.
Pros: I can write code faster and easier (and generate diagrams and poorly-written English text). That *is* nice.
Cons: AI is adding adding trillions of gallons of greenhouse gases to a planet that is already starting to die (plus all the other costs of data centers). We're making all other electronics more expensive, slowing the pace of all other tech development. We're losing our ability to read and write (both code and English), our ability to assess academic achievement, and our ability to monetize the web (in a sustainable way).
Honestly, despite being very pro AI, I do question whether its benefits actually outweigh its costs.
Re: (Score:3)
Humanity deserves to go extinct. the planet will carry on. New life will evolve. Maybe they'll do a better job than we did. Maybe they'll go to the stars.
Re: (Score:3)
Not likely. In about 20 million years all complex plant dies from lack of CO2. It would have been more like 2 million if we hadn't pumped a lot of stored CO2 back into the atmosphere.
Not a lot of time for anything else to evolve into a technological society before any kind of complex life dies.
Re: (Score:2)
Nope.
"the atmospheric concentration of CO2 will fall below 150ppm (parts per million) in 100 million years, which will eliminate plants that use solely C3 photosynthesis. Further studies have shown that this threshold will probably not be the end of the biosphere however. C4 pathway photosynthesis can persist to CO2 values as low as 10ppm. Those levels should persist for another 1 to 1.5 billion years."
[1]https://atoc.colorado.edu/~van... [colorado.edu]
[1] https://atoc.colorado.edu/~vanderwb/5810/flora.html
Re: (Score:2)
I am curious how this all plays out; it is cash flow negative, capitalization negative, and at least on the surface unlikely to have a major change. But, scarcity is a business model so maybe that is the real answer. It seems much more likely than the step-change necessary for more advanced systems.
And nobody cared? (Score:2)
I supposed Kindle readers will be upset, but Alexa is garbage.
Trade Ins? (Score:4, Insightful)
So the question becomes, where is the new trade-in industry hungry to rip the chips out of all of my older unused devices to pay me top dollar?
Re: (Score:1)
Those chips are soldered onto the board, son. Might as well be trading in toxic waste, which is the truth if the device has a rechargeable lithium battery.
Saving my upgrades... (Score:4, Interesting)
All Win10-Win11 upgrades are dumping a massive amount of DDR4 higher end hardware on my doorstep these days... Bet your rear end I'm hanging onto it like its money. Got an ITS system swap out, perfect condition, the other day with 128gb of DDR4 Sodimms in it... Felt like nerd Xmas ;-D
Re: (Score:2)
*ITX
And who is to blame for the memory shortage? (Score:4, Informative)
I'm pretty sure that Amazon is one of those institutions that's all-in on AI so they can join in the attempts to take over every business in the country.
Maybe they should just say "We're upping our prices because of our own greed and lust for power, just not in the usual way."
Re: (Score:2)
"We're trying out an all-new, never before seen type of evil. If this thing works out, we put you out of work, fuck up culture and then burn down the planet. If not, we just fuck up culture and burn down the planet."
Re: (Score:2)
Whether it's profit or not depends on whether people buy anyway. I've decided "no upgrade this year".
The free market (Score:2)
Bad news. the so-called free market does not care, if your devices are too expensive then demand will fall.
There will be a reckoning with the bungling of the memory component supply chain. Too many industries have staked their business on a handful of manufacturers and went for spot pricing and low inventory overhead over hedging through contracts and second source warehousing on the components they need to build devices.
Because consumer electronics margins have been so bad, we're seeing multiple parallel f
Re: (Score:2)
Chinese equivalents will fill the space using Chinese memory and storage.
Re: (Score:2)
Great for China, but the North American economy is weighed down by escalating tariffs. We're on track to look a bit like Brazil in the 1980's with different root causes to our economic woes.
TLDR: don't care (Score:2)
I wasn't a consumer of those devices, nor do I expect to become a consumer of those devices.
That said, I do take some umbrage at the increases in costs for devices I DO care about, but Amazon isn't the producer of any of those.
Deceptive Business Practices (Score:2)
Consumer affairs need to heavily fine misleading and deceptive statements, triple that if the cause claimed is specific but untrue in descending order of cause. If Amazon said, import duties, transport, distribution costs, decreased discounting, interest costs, return costs, compliance costs, then yeah, fine. Or even bulk deal and old stocks have run out. Or claim it was a loss leader. They know their own buy cost. And they dont want to tell consumer affairs when the PR department make over the top generali
Nobody wanted this (Score:2)
Yet another way the general public is being forced into subsidizing AI data centers. All of the memory capacity has been bought up for 2027 too so it's not getting better anytime soon.
Irritating but not really surprising (Score:3)
The subject says it all ....
Re: Irritating but not really surprising (Score:2)
They always run deals to discount their tech by 35-50%. So now we pay full price.