Redgate is a for-profit company. We look to make money by building and selling tools that help you. If we do a good job, we make money. If we don’t, you shouldn’t buy our tools.

I found this value to be very interesting:

The next page has this statement:

Focusing purely on the numbers is a sure way to kill Red Gate’s culture. We believe that if we focus on the game – building awesome products that people want to buy, and then persuading them to buy them – then success will follow.

Profits matter. Certainly all of us want to be paid (and get a bonus of some sort). With the changes in Redgate’s board this year, this is a piece of culture that I believe in and advocate to keep as an item of focus.

We watch profits, but we don’t optimize for profit, we aim to optimize in building better and better products that meet the need of our customers and prove their value from an ROI standpoint. Especially in this era of subscription software.

Our goal is what’s in the quote: build awesome products.

I have a copy of the Book of Redgate from 2010. This was a book we produced internally about the company after 10 years in existence. At that time, I’d been there for about 3 years, and it was interesting to learn a some things about the company. This series of posts looks back at the Book of Redgate 15 years later.

The post The Book of Redgate: Profits appeared first on SQLServerCentral.

It was a Sunday evening. Around 8:15 PM. The kind of evening where the whole house smells of cardamom and warmth, and you trick yourself into believing that time has stopped moving. Here is the story of AI, Disposable Apps, and the Sunday Evenings We Are Losing.

My wife had a novel open in her lap. I was on the sofa, half-asleep, letting the weight of a long work week melt into the cushions.

And our teenage daughter was sitting right next to us. Right there on the same sofa, in the same warm room, breathing the same cardamom air. We could have started talking about anything at all. About her day at school. About the book my wife was reading. About nothing in particular, the way families do when the evening is slow and there is nowhere else to be.

But we didn’t. And she didn’t either.

She was on her phone. Her thumbs moved so fast. Her face carried a deep frown. I watched her for a few seconds, this girl I used to carry on my shoulders, this girl who once cried if I left the room for two minutes. And I thought: when did she stop looking at me?

Then she looked up.

Not at her phone. At me. Directly at me. And her eyes were not angry. They were confused. They were tired. They were the eyes of a sixteen-year-old girl who is growing up in a world that does not make sense to her.

She looked up and said:

“Dad, why does every app feel temporary? I download something, I use it once, and I delete it. Nothing feels like it belongs to me anymore. Nothing stays.”

I opened my mouth. But nothing came out.

Because she was not asking about apps. Not really. She was asking about her life. She was asking why the world she is growing up in feels like sand running through her fingers. She was asking why nothing holds still long enough for her to love it.

And I did not have an answer. Because I feel it too.

She wasn’t asking about apps. She was asking why nothing stays.

The Age of the Paper Cup

Let me describe the world we are building.

You want to organize a small dinner with old friends. You do not download an app. You do not sign up for anything. You just tell an AI: “Make me a quick tool where five people can vote on pizza toppings and split the bill.” Five seconds later, the tool exists. You share a link. Everyone votes. You eat. You laugh. You hug your friends goodbye. And then, quietly, the tool vanishes from the server. Gone. Like it was never there. No one saves it. No one remembers its name. No one even notices it disappeared.

It is brilliant. It is efficient. It is the future.

And it is a paper cup. You drink from it once. You crush it in your hand. You throw it away without a second thought.

Now, you might be thinking: what is wrong with that? Paper cups are useful. Disposable apps are convenient. Why should I care?

Here is why.

Because every paper cup you throw away teaches your hands something. It teaches them that things are not worth holding onto. That if something is imperfect, if the design is a little off, if it does not match your mood in this exact second, you can just get a new one. No cost. No effort. No guilt. No grief.

Every paper cup teaches your hands that nothing is worth holding onto.

And that lesson does not stay inside your phone. It follows you home. It sits down at your dinner table. It crawls into your marriage, your friendships, your relationship with your children. It rewrites the way you love.

And you do not even notice. Not until it is too late.

The Muscle We Forgot to Exercise

I want to tell you something personal. Something I am not proud of.

Last month, I was sitting at my desk debugging a complex SQL Server query. It was a hard problem. The kind that does not give you the answer in five minutes. The kind that requires you to sit with the discomfort, stare at the screen, and think slowly.

And I caught myself reaching for my phone. Not because I needed to check anything. But because my brain could not tolerate the discomfort of not knowing the answer immediately. My own mind was trying to escape the difficulty. It wanted the fast thing. The easy thing. The paper cup.

That scared me.

I remembered the early days of computing in India. The heavy CRT monitors. The screaming sound of dial-up internet. The way a single webpage could take a full minute to load, and you just sat there, hands folded, watching a progress bar crawl across the screen like a tired animal. And you were fine with it. You did not rage. You did not swipe. You waited. You breathed. You let the slowness wash over you.

That waiting was not a waste of time. It was a workout. Every slow query, every stubborn bug, every hour of confused reading was training something inside us. I call it the patience muscle. And like any muscle, it grew stronger every time we used it.

But we stopped using it. And now it is dying.

We called it slowness. It was strength, and we let it go soft.

With AI disposable apps, there is no friction. If a button is in the wrong place, you do not learn to work with it. You command the AI to rebuild the whole thing. Instantly. You have become a tiny god of your own digital kingdom, demanding that reality reshape itself around your every preference, your every mood, your every passing whim.

And here is the part that should frighten every parent, every spouse, every human being who loves someone:

Your brain does not know the difference between how you treat your technology and how you treat your people.

When you spend ten hours a day commanding machines to obey you without resistance, your brain quietly recalibrates. Friction becomes intolerable. Waiting becomes unbearable. Imperfection becomes unforgivable. And then you close your laptop and sit down across from your wife, your husband, your child. Real, messy, beautiful, imperfect human beings who cannot be rewritten with a prompt. And you find yourself getting irritated. Not because they did anything wrong. But because they are not as fast, as smooth, as instantly perfect as the digital world you just left.

Think about the last time you felt impatient with someone you love. Not over something big. Over something small. A story that went on too long. A question that could have been Googled. A pause in conversation that felt uncomfortable.

Now ask yourself: was that impatience always there? Or did you learn it?

The Beautiful, Quiet Loneliness

But the loss of patience is not even the part that keeps me awake. The part that keeps me awake is the loneliness.

In the older world of technology, we shared a common landscape. We all used the same clunky operating systems. We all wrestled with the same confusing software. We all cursed at the same blue screens. And because we shared these small frustrations, we shared something much larger: a sense of belonging. You could walk up to a coworker and say, “Did you see that crash?” and they would nod and groan and laugh. And in that tiny, forgettable moment, neither of you was alone.

Disposable apps are destroying that shared world. Quietly. Invisibly. Without anyone voting for it.

When every piece of software is custom-generated by an AI that knows exactly how you think, exactly what you like, exactly what makes you comfortable, you are no longer part of a shared digital community. You are living inside a private universe. A universe of one.

A universe of one. Perfectly comfortable. Perfectly alone.

Look at that image carefully. That is a girl inside a bubble. Everything inside is beautiful. Every app is tuned to her. Every notification is personalized. Every screen knows her name.

And right outside the bubble, three feet away, sit two people who love her more than any algorithm ever could. Two people who would give anything to hear her laugh. Two people whose tea is going cold because they are waiting for her to look up.

She does not look up. The bubble is too perfect. The bubble is too comfortable. The bubble asks nothing of her.

This is the loneliness I am afraid of. Not the dramatic kind you see in movies. Not the kind where someone is stranded on an island. The quiet kind. The kind where you are surrounded by people who love you, and you do not even notice them. The kind where your whole family is in one room, and everyone is in a different universe.

Real people are not customizable. Your spouse will have bad days when they are short-tempered and unreasonable. Your children will say hurtful things they do not mean. Your friends will cancel plans and forget to call back. None of these people can be debugged. None of them will update their personality based on your feedback. Loving them requires you to sit with imperfection, with frustration, with the slow and sometimes painful process of understanding another human heart.

No one you truly love can be rewritten with a prompt.

And if we spend our days inside bubbles that demand nothing of us, we will slowly lose the ability to do the one thing that makes life worth living: to love someone who is difficult to love, and to stay.

The Question That Will Not Leave Me

My daughter is sixteen. In two years, she will leave for college. Maybe in a different city. Maybe across the country. She will build her own life, with her own routines, her own Sunday evenings, her own cups of tea with people I may never meet.

The Sunday evenings we have left. The ones with the three of us on this sofa, in this room, with the smell of cardamom in the air. Those evenings are numbered. I can count them. And the number is so much smaller than I thought it would be.

So when I watch her disappear into her phone, into a world that is custom-built to hold her attention forever, I feel something I do not have a word for. It is not anger. It is not frustration. It is something older and heavier than both of those things.

It is grief for a moment that has not ended yet.

She is right there. Three feet away. I can hear her breathing. And I am losing her to a paper cup.

But here is the thing that makes my chest tight when I really think about it: she is not the only one disappearing. I am too. Every time I check my email during dinner. Every time I scroll through my phone while she is talking. Every time I choose the screen over the human being sitting next to me. I am teaching her, with my own hands, that people are interruptible. That presence is optional. That love can wait.

What if she learns that lesson? What if she carries it into her marriage, her friendships, her own family one day? What if the reason she cannot put her phone down is because I never put mine down first?

Maybe she cannot look up because she learned it from a father who never did.

That is the question that will not leave me.

A Point to Ponder

I am not writing this to lecture anyone. I have no right to. I am as guilty as anyone. Maybe more.

But I am writing this because I believe we are standing at a crossroads that most of us do not even see. On one side is a world of perfect convenience, where every tool is disposable, every experience is customized, and every moment of friction is eliminated before you even feel it. On the other side is something messier. Slower. Harder. And infinitely more beautiful.

Here are a few things I have started doing. Not because I have figured anything out. But because I am afraid of what will happen if I don’t:

• I write with a real pen. When I make a mistake, I cannot undo it. I cross it out and keep going. The smudge stays on the page. And somehow, that imperfection makes the words feel more honest than anything I have ever typed.
• I let myself be bored. When the chai is brewing, I stand in the kitchen and listen to the water. I do not reach for my phone. I just stand there. Doing nothing. Being no one. And those ninety seconds of silence are more nourishing than anything on my screen.
• I stay in the hard conversations. When a talk with my wife or my daughter gets tense, when every instinct tells me to glance at my phone and escape, I stay. I sit with the discomfort. I let the silence stretch. I remind myself that love is not about being comfortable. Love is about being present when it is hard.
• I build things with my hands. A recipe I know by heart. A plant that needs watering every morning. Three clumsy chords on an old guitar. Things that resist my impatience. Things that teach me, again and again, that the most beautiful things in life are the ones that refuse to be rushed.

Technology will keep getting faster. Apps will become more disposable. AI will keep getting better at giving us exactly what we want, in exactly the moment we want it, with zero friction and zero resistance.

But I do not want to become disposable. And I do not want my daughter to grow up believing that the people in her life can be swiped away as easily as the apps on her phone.

So here is what I am going to do tonight. And I am asking you, from the bottom of my heart, to consider doing the same.

Close this screen. Put the phone face-down on the table. Walk into the room where the people you love are sitting. Look at them. Not at a screen. At them. Their faces. Their eyes. The way they hold their cup of tea. The way they breathe when they do not know you are watching.

And start a conversation. A real one. A slow one. An imperfect, stumbling, beautiful conversation about nothing in particular. The kind of conversation that has no purpose and no destination. The kind that cannot be optimized or prompted or generated by any machine.

Because some things in this world are not disposable. Your marriage is not a paper cup. Your friendships are not a one-time-use app. The evenings with your family, the ones you think will go on forever, are not infinite. They are running out. Right now. While you are reading this.

And if someone you love is in the next room right now, I am begging you: put this down. Go sit with them. This blog post will be here when you come back.

They might not.

Well, that’s it for today! Let’s keep building connections that last.

Reference: Pinal Dave (https://blog.sqlauthority.com/), X

First appeared on AI, Disposable Apps, and the Sunday Evenings We Are Losing

Struggling to come up with a story idea? Discover 20 fun and creative ways to find plot ideas worth turning into your next novel.

Do you struggle to find ideas for plots?

For some of us, the problem with writing a book is finding a great idea for a plot. Use these fun suggestions to help you find a story idea that makes you want to write a novel or a short story.

20 Fun Ways To Find Plot Ideas For Your Story

1. Turn Your Favourite Song Into A Book

1. List your five favourite songs.
2. Download the lyrics. Use a site like A-ZLyrics to find the lyrics.
3. Which one would make a great story?

Use it as a starting point for a novel – or as the basis for a novel. Change names and places to avoid being sued for copyright infringement.

2. What If?

Look at reality and turn it on its head. A ‘What If?’ scenario envisions a reality with a critical difference to our own.

1. Find a news site. Look at the headlines. Write a list of five ‘What if?’ scenarios based on the headlines.
2. Look at pop stars, politicians, neighbours, and colleagues. What is the worst thing that could happen to them?
3. Look at trends. Choose three that interest you. Write a ‘What If?’ scenario for each one. Could you turn one of them into a novel?

3. Outrageous Titles

Keep a list of the most out there titles you can think of. When you have 10, choose one that would make an interesting story.

Examples of weird titles that became books:

1. Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas by Tom Robbins
2. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
3. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
4. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams

Use this: Book Title Generator to get some ideas.

4. The List

Write a list about your childhood with our acrostic ‘I remember ABC’ poem method. (You can make it rhyme – or not.) After you’ve completed it, see if you can come up with a synopsis for a story. Create a character who is the opposite sex to you and who lives in another city. Name them, and let them drive the story.

Example:

I remember:

Asking for my mother
Being an outsider
Catching fish with my father
Ditching my little sister

etc.

5. Issues

They don’t change. Examples include: abortion, environment, corruption, crime, government incompetence, and the death sentence.

You need to find a character who would live for this issue and one who would die for it. Set them against each other and write the book.

6. Opening lines

Write random, weird, odd opening lines. Keep them. Look at them when you’re serious about writing a book. Or use this opening line generator.

Examples:

1. People trust me with their husbands; they shouldn’t.
2. Dear reader, I wish I could tell you that it ends well for you.
3. I always wanted to be just like my stepmother.

Choose one.

1. Which plot would it suit?
2. Which genre would it suit?
3. Name the protagonist and the antagonist.
4. Write the ending.

7. Steal plots

Plagiarism is the key to originality. Somebody famous once said: ‘Good artists copy; great artists steal.’ We’re not sure who it was, but the statement is true.

There is nothing new under the sun. Great artists and writers look at those who have gone before, take their ideas, rework them, and stamp their own style and authority on it. If they are good enough, their versions seem new.

8. Flip a genre

1. Take a Western and set it in outer space.
2. Take literary fiction and make your heroine a detective.
3. Take a romance and set it in Narnia.

Read: 6 Things To Consider Before You Cross Your Genres

9. Research

If you’re interested in something, research it. The findings will suggest stories. Philippa Gregory finds new stories in all the ones she is busy writing. Her research leads to more leads.

Use trusted sources like print and digital encyclopedias, such as Encyclopaedia Britannica and InfoPlease.com. Use newspaper archives.

10. Use Obsessions

What are people obsessed about? It could be serious or trivial.

They could be obsessed about:

1. Getting even.
2. Their jobs.
3. Money.
4. Leaving town.
5. Climate change.
6. Appearances.
7. Their looks.
8. Animals.
9. The odd noise from the house next door.

It’s always a good idea to create a plot around an obsessed character. It’s easier to motivate them and they are not distracted from their story goals. A good example of this is The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway.

11. Use Myths

A myth is a traditional story about supernatural beings, ancestors, or heroes. We use myths to explain nature, or to show where a society’s customs, religions, and ideals come from. Myths exist in every culture on Earth.

Click here to find 20 Myths To Use As Writing Prompts

You can rewrite a new myth or write a new one and turn it into a novel or short story.

12. What I Really Want To Do

What do you want to do? What would you do if you had no obligations or restrictions? Write down a list of five things. Could you turn one of them into a plot?

13. Occupations

Keep a list of unusual job titles of use this Random Job Generator. Make a list of the five occupations that fascinate you most. Could you create a story around a character with this job?

Examples:

1. Mortician
2. Croupier
3. Lap dancer
4. Motel owner
5. Leaflet distributor
6. Magician

This would work well for a short story.

14. The Test Of Time

1. Buy a newspaper every day for one week.
2. Cut out one article a day.
3. Look at them a month later.
4. Are there follow ups to the stories?
5. Which have stood the test of time?
6. Are any of them interesting enough to build a story around?

15. Play A Role-Playing Game (RPG)

The Expanse was a result of an online RPG written one post at a time between a group of about five people. They can be in-person or online.

Examples of role playing games are: Dungeons & Dragons, White Wolf, Numenera

Who knows, you may come up with a science-fiction or fantasy bestseller?

16. Write A Prologue

We don’t think you should use necessarily use prologues in your final novel, but this could be the inspiration for a book. Prologues are easier and shorter to write than a book.

Write an inciting moment strong enough to cause a story, as an action-packed prologue.

17. Buy A Pile Of Comic Books

Comic books contain the largest amount of recycled plots in the world. Buy them on Comixology

18. Use The Top TikTok or Instagram Hashtags/Trends

Go to Instagram or TikTok. Write a premise for a story based on the top trending hashtags. (A premise in fiction is a brief statement that has been revealed in a story, for example: People don’t learn from voting for the same party.)

19. Make A Post On Facebook Or Instagram Asking For Plot Ideas

Ask your friends to make a short list of five plot ideas they would like to read or write about.

20. Use Your Senses

1. Look around you. Look up. Look down. Zoom in. Notice colours.
2. Listen. Sounds and music creates memories and feelings.
3. Touch things. Get a sense of texture and temperature.
4. Smell everything. Smell is the most powerful sense to take you back to a place or time.
5. Taste things. Take your time chewing. Become aware of textures.

You will find plenty of material for your novels when you do this. You may even find an idea that is so startling, you can use it as a plot.

An Idea Is Only The Beginning

Remember that ideas are only the beginning. After that you need to develop a plot and identify your four main characters. We suggest you read: The Top 10 Tips for Plotting and Finishing a Book to get you started.

Top Tip: If you want to learn how to write a book, sign up for our online course.

© Amanda Patterson

If you liked this article, you may enjoy:

1. All About Pacing: 4 Key Questions Every Writer Should Ask
2. Past Tense Or Present Tense: Which Works Best For Your Story?
3. A Guide To The 17 Most Popular Fiction Genres
4. How To Write A Spy Novel
5. How To Outline A Short Story – For Beginners
6. 6 Sub-Plots Every Writer Should Know
7. How To Write Great Dialogue In Fiction
8. What Is An Unreliable Narrator? 9 Types Every Writer Should Know
9. How Writers Use The 4 Main Characters As Literary Devices
10. Mastering Point Of View In Writing

Top Tip: Sign up for our free daily writing links.

The post 20 Fun Ways To Find Plot Ideas For Your Story appeared first on Writers Write.

Recent developments in the world of copyright have been making many writers rethink their attitudes toward copyright registration and reversion of publishing rights.

Because many artificial intelligence companies used pirated books to train their large language models, there are now a growing number of copyright infringement class action lawsuits against them. While it is still undetermined whether these companies’ use of the copyrighted material was fair use or not, it has become clear that the use of copyrighted material from pirate libraries is a no-no, especially when the method involves torrenting, which means the companies participated in redistributing the materials.

The first of these lawsuits, Anthropic v. Bartz, just held the final Fairness Hearing on a class action settlement and, although there were some minor factors which delayed Judge Martinez-Olguin’s approval, it looks as if the class action settlement will be approved and 1.5 billion dollars will eventually be paid out to claimants who met the definition of the class.

Needless to say, this will be an unprecedented class action settlement involving copyright. As currently calculated, claimants for each copyrighted work that was pirated by Anthropic will share $3,100. If the work was self-published or the work’s rights had reverted to the author, they will receive the entire amount. It’s safe to say this is the first time the average writer will benefit from their copyright registration in any substantial way.

But not every writer benefited, for a number of reasons; the primary reason was that the book had to have had its copyright registered with the US Copyright Office. The definition of the class for the Anthropic class action was:

• have been downloaded by Anthropic from LibGen or PiLiMi;
• have an International Standard Book Number (ISBN) or Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN);
• have been registered with the United States Copyright Office within five years of the work’s first publication; and
• have been registered before being downloaded by Anthropic, or within three months of the work’s first publication.

Of the estimated seven million works that were pirated by Anthropic, less than 500,000 works were part of the class. As of the May 14 settlement hearing, the number of works claimed was 447,576. That’s about 7% of the pirated works.

The requirement that a work have an ISBN or ASIN is essentially unfair because it only recognizes individual books, but at least it doesn’t discriminate against self-published works. There is nothing in US Copyright Law that distinguishes between “books” and other literary works that may have a registered copyright. The requirement is only to make identifying works and verifying author and publisher easier for the settlement administrators. As I say, though, most books do have one or the other, even if the ASIN is connected to long out of print book being sold used. Presumably some book authors have managed to avoid Amazon entirely, but they must be a small number.

Another similar class action lawsuit, Elsevier Inc. v. Meta Platforms, Inc. was filed on May 5 by a bunch of publishers and Scott Turow as the only named author. It restricts the class even further. The proposed class definition is:

All legal or beneficial owners of registered copyrights, in whole or in part, for any book possessing an International Standard Book Number (ISBN) or journal article possessing a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) or International Standard Serial Number (ISSN), that Meta, without such owner’s authorization, (1) reproduced by downloading during torrenting and/or copying of web scrapes; or (2) distributed during torrenting; or (3) reproduced in connection with the development and/or training of a Llama Model. For purposes of this definition, copyrighted works are limited to those registered with the United States Copyright Office (a) within five years of the work’s publication and before being reproduced or distributed by Meta, or (b) within three months of publication.

The main difference from the Anthropic class is the limitation to only books that have ISBNs. ASINs don’t count, cutting out a large majority of self and indie published works, even if they do have registered copyrights. You can understand, I suppose, why the plaintiff publishers want the class restricted to the books that they published, but it’s even more grossly unfair to ebooks that were published without ISBNs because ISBNs are only important for physical book distribution. It’s hard to justify limiting a class action this way when, for all practical purposes, the fairer Anthropic settlement’s class definition worked (fingers crossed).

So will there now be a rush by indie authors to purchase ISBNs? It makes sense if, for example, you claimed a book without an ISBN in the Anthropic settlement, since there’s a good chance it will turn up again in the Turow class. Like with copyright registration and rights reversion, the effort and outlay start to look worthwhile. Large copyright class actions and settlements change everything.

Postscript. The fundamental problem is that there is no comprehensive registry for published works.

The post Has the Anthropic Settlement Changed Everything? appeared first on Writer Beware.

We’ve got a holiday weekend here in the US. It’s a good chance for me to take a breather after a couple of large events, and before doing a couple more in Europe.

[blog] AI and the New Business Moat: Defending Your Competitive Advantage. Is your company “moving the moat” given what AI is capable of doing itself? Double down on unique data? Deepen your expertise? Jason offers good ideas.

[blog] Scaling Software Architecture Without Overengineering. Great points here from Derek about what it really means to have boundaries, and why physical boundaries (e.g. putting microservices on different hosts) may not reduce your coupling or improve your scale.

[blog] The future of agentic development: Redefining the data practitioner lifecycle with Data Agent Kit. We showed this during my session at Google I/O, and it really is an impressive set of skills, tools, and plugins for doing legit work with data. Plug it into your favorite tool to create, query, and troubleshoot data solutions.

[blog] Agentic Design Patterns. Guillaume does a recap of a recent Devoxx talk, and includes his highly-visual and understandable slide deck about categories of agent patterns.

[blog] Introducing the pkg.go.dev API. Most other language ecosystems have discovery APIs for packages. Now Go

[article] How well do public benchmarks predict AI coding agent performance in production. I saw a lot of chatter on this topic over the past few days regarding Gemini 3.5 Flash. Benchmarks are useful, but eval based on your own scenarios.

[blog] Google Cloud Next 2026: The Agent Era and the Full AI Stack. James does a roundup of the highlights from the event, but with his analyst hat on to explain what matters.

[blog] Code was the smallest part of the job. I like “smallest” more than “easiest.” Coding isn’t “easy”; ask anyone who’s wrestled for hours with syntax or getting an outcome JUST right. But building good software systems is the big job.

[blog] What’s new in Flutter 3.44. You might have to block off your afternoon to read all this! But it’s impossible to even skim this and not be impressed by the breadth and momentum of Flutter.

[article] CIOs need a people strategy to scale AI. Nothing new, but still a good reminder about the hard work of change management.

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The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics

David Oks provides the clearest explanation I've seen yet of why consumer products that use memory are likely to get significantly more expensive over the next few years.

The short version is that memory manufacturers - of which there are just three remaining large companies - have a fixed capacity in terms of how many wafers they can process at any one time. This fixed wafer capacity is then split between DDR - used in desktops and servers, LPDDR - used in mobile phones and low-energy devices, and HBM - used with GPUs.

Until recently, HBM got just 2% of that wafer allocation. The enormous growth in AI data centers has pushed that up to an expected 20% by the end of 2026, and "a single gigabyte of HBM consumes more than three times the wafer capacity that a gigabyte of DDR or LPDDR does".

Memory companies have learned from the extinction of their rivals that you should always under-provision rather than over-provision your fabricator capacity. The profit margins and demand for HBM (high-bandwidth memory) will constrain the production of consumer-device RAM for several years.

This is already being felt in the sub-$100 smartphone market, which is particularly important to markets like Africa and South Asia.

(The original title of the piece was "AI is killing the cheap smartphone" but I'm using the Hacker News rephrased title, which I think does more justice to the content.)

Via Hacker News

Tags: memory, ai, ai-ethics