The US government is discouraging, but not yet forbidding, buying from certain Chinese manufacturers. But following other hardware manufacturers and making those deals is a risky move for Apple and a potentially riskier move for IT buyers.
For work we need to give the user manual of the machines we sell in a USB drive. Because it’s a 3mb PDF and nobody reads user manuals anyway we buy the shittiest and smallest capacity USB drives available on Alibaba in bulk (64-128 mb or even smaller).
They are so cheap that the plastic shell isn’t even glued, it can be pried open with my nails. Because there’s a 15% failure rate (either the computer reports it as empty, or the hash after writing doesn’t match), I opened the faulty ones to check them. They’re made with recycled nands from ewaste. Some chips are clearly resoldered from something else (glue residue from tore down stickers), others come from rejected production lines as the brand has been removed with a laser (for example, someone engraved XXXXXXXX over the SanDisk logo), others have numbers wrote with a marker.
Since november prices went up 70% “eh the nand prices went up because datacenter demand them”.
Sure, ai datacenters are using 20 years old 64mb nand chips recycled from ewaste…
The Chinese companies are also gouging prices
For work we need to give the user manual of the machines we sell in a USB drive. Because it’s a 3mb PDF and nobody reads user manuals anyway we buy the shittiest and smallest capacity USB drives available on Alibaba in bulk (64-128 mb or even smaller).
They are so cheap that the plastic shell isn’t even glued, it can be pried open with my nails. Because there’s a 15% failure rate (either the computer reports it as empty, or the hash after writing doesn’t match), I opened the faulty ones to check them. They’re made with recycled nands from ewaste. Some chips are clearly resoldered from something else (glue residue from tore down stickers), others come from rejected production lines as the brand has been removed with a laser (for example, someone engraved XXXXXXXX over the SanDisk logo), others have numbers wrote with a marker.
Since november prices went up 70% “eh the nand prices went up because datacenter demand them”.
Sure, ai datacenters are using 20 years old 64mb nand chips recycled from ewaste…