yeah... I am lucky that I don't have to worry about SSDs even :D

HDDs market is just taking advantage of the SSD market (because SoC's are all flowing into the AI market). Memory and anything that involves memory chips will be (are) a monopoly in the near future...

Samsung
Hynix
Micron
Kioxia

And then because TSMC operates most of the world's foundry edge tech orders... they have their own share...

And they are probably agreeing on prices or exploiting pricing... either.

Next year is going to get worse. Hopefully this gets stopped by some sort of miracle... but so far, looking very hard.

Still looking at ARM to see if they get to dismount some of the monopoly here by adoption, but hard to tell as they are themselves trying to survive or risking being swallowed by the biggest giants... like NVIDIA! Intel might try something very weird next year, too, as they are starting to compete by price, supported by US tax patriotism alongside NVIDIA support, too.

The market on this is all fked up. Making my IRLW life slightly harder...