Micron to stop selling RAM and SSDs to consumers (via Crucial branch)

[YeOldeStonecat]

WOW....didn't expect this to come. Microsoft just announced they will stop selling RAM and SSDs to consumers ..they are ending their Crucial branch.
They will continue to produce their Micron branded RAM to OEM vendors and the enterprise server market, and....focus on data centers. Same with their SSDs.

WOW...just...WOW. They've been our preferred vendor for RAM for...about 30 years. I set up a reseller account with them way back when. And when they started making solid state drives....they became our preferred vendor for those too...we'd always keep stock of their SSDs.

We loved that they're a US company too, "Made in USA". Always love supporting that.

 

[mmerry]

Think I may just use Samsung SSD and Kingston RAM. Always directed people to Crucial before.

 

[Metanis]

Just reading the comments over at ArsTechnica on this story. Must be fun to be an executive at Micron and deciding to put all your eggs into the AI basket. Sounds like the MBA's were busy with Excel.

 

[timeshifter]

Sounds like the MBA's were busy with Excel.

I've been a big Crucial fan for RAM and SSDs too. But, I suspect it's a classic Pareto Principal situation. 20% of their revenue / profit from the brand and 80% of their headaches from a support and customer service and distribution standpoint.

 

[Sky-Knight]

@YeOldeStonecat I didn't expect this and yet I'm not surprised. What you're seeing here is Micron telling the world, we don't see a future viable enough for expansion, but we make enough money selling to datacenters that we don't need the retail marketplace. They'll be back, in about 18 months or so... when the AI bubble finally blows.

Don't forget peeps, Micron chips in SSDs and on memory modules are still going to flow, you just won't be able to buy their named products... and again I expect all this to change again in 18-24 months.

@timeshifter you have it nailed sir, same reason Broadcom crapped all over the tiny VMWare customers.

 

[Metanis]

Very irate commenter here...

He's correct that US Taxpayers have been supporting Micron very substantially and this might be considered a slap in their faces.

Warning NSFW!

 

[britechguy]

The U.S. taxpayers have been supporting virtually any industry you can name very substantially at one point or another. Most of us remember the various auto industry bailouts (which were great investments, as it turns out) as well as the "too big to fail" banking/investment house rescues.

That's never had much of any bearing on what any of these industries decide to do when they are not under direct oversight of government because of what it's doing for them at that very moment.

I also hate to say it, but the phrase "corrupt industry" has proven to be redundant more times than I can count in my life. And the current political climate in the USA is actively encouraging more of that, not less.

 

[Sky-Knight]

Yeah... "corrupt industry" drop the qualifier... this is simply "industry" that's how it works, that's how it has always worked. And if our Senate doesn't perform its duties to rein these forces in, then it's up to us voters to correct that. Which is going to be hard, because voting red or blue means more corporatocracy.

 

[britechguy]

And if our Senate doesn't perform its duties to rein these forces in, then it's up to us voters to correct that. Which is going to be hard, because voting red or blue means more corporatocracy.

Indeed, sadly. No one ever said it better than this, and things were much more distinct, and identifiably so, between the choices when it was written:
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
~ John Kenneth Galbraith, Letter to John F. Kennedy, 2 March 1962

I have never understood how anyone could believe in what can be broadly classed as libertarian political philosophy. We have already tried true, full, laissez faire governance and seen the absolutely disastrous results. The Robber Baron era and early in the 20th century when nothing at all was regulated was not good for "most of the citizenry." Contrary to popular mythology, there is no Department of Bureauracy that creates rules and regulations out of thin air for no reason at all. Getting things written into law, or into rules and regulations, even when that was at its simplest, involved months (at least) to years to accomplish with the opportunity for public input at many steps along the way. I don't want to go back to the bad old days before necessary oversight of all sorts of things was established. All one needs to do is look at today's news about the hepatitus B vaccine to see an example of backsliding that is going to damage heaven only knows how many people.

 

[brandonkick]

I've been a big Crucial fan for RAM and SSDs too. But, I suspect it's a classic Pareto Principal situation. 20% of their revenue / profit from the brand and 80% of their headaches from a support and customer service and distribution standpoint.

It's the money. It's always the money.


Big AI paid a kings ransom to lock down the ram wafer supply.

I've been looking to rebuild my 1st generation AMD ryzen based personal workstation for a few months. The build list originally had 64GB of DDR5-6000 ram (2x32GB) priced at I think $190? Then ram prices started to go NUTS.

I grabbed a corsair vengenance kit off of ebay for $180 about three weeks ago. Now that same kit retails for $400. During a rakuten / paypal combo promo I bought most of the parts for my rebuild including a 5070TI GPU which effectively came in just under $600 and the 64GB ram kit I wanted for an effective price of about $320. Which at the time, was (and still is) retailing for closer to $700. The same kit that 5 or 6 weeks ago was 1/3 that price.