I hope Crucial’s death isn’t a canary in a PC memory coal mine

I didn’t have “Micron kills its consumer business” on my 2025 bingo card.

The firm introduced the shuttering of its Crucial brand on Wednesday morning in unexpectedly simple, transparent language. The quick model: Micron is concentrating on their enterprise prospects, the place the demand has “surged” for reminiscence and storage—due to information facilities and their scaling up for AI.

(Translation: ‘We can make way more money through enterprise customers, so we will.’)

As famous on this identical publish, this choice ends 29 years of the Crucial model. I can’t say I’m utterly shocked. But I’m shocked by what this transfer partially implies. Namely, enterprise’s starvation for reminiscence and storage lasting for years and years.

Am I nervous for customers? Not simply but. But I’m questioning if the somber estimate of RAM shortages lasting past this decade finally ends up proving true.

I’m additionally questioning which different firms will again off client gross sales. And perhaps extra importantly, how such choices will have an effect on the event cycles and price of recent merchandise.

I don’t imply solely RAM kits and SSD drives, although I may see any firm producing reminiscence or storage modules abandoning direct-to-consumer efforts. No, I imply something that comprises them, too—like graphics playing cards. For instance, rumor has it that Nvidia could begin anticipating board companions to source their own memory. Individually, these smaller firms have much less energy to barter. That may then affect the pricing and portions they get, which in flip would lead to greater prices for customers…and certain slower releases and fewer choices, too.

Similarly, I may see prebuilt PCs turn into much less bleeding edge with their specs, both staying stagnant and even regressing.

Sounds dangerous, proper? So why am I not nervous? Let’s say customers are confronted with greater costs and sluggish innovation. Let’s assume too that on a regular basis people will push off tech upgrades for longer stretches. The market must adapt—and I’m curious what that may seem like.

To make up for lagging client {hardware} efficiency, does the shift to cloud computing speed up quicker? Or will software program improvements make up for older, much less performant client PCs and telephones? Companies need everybody on a subscription mannequin, however nobody can afford all that exist. 

I would like the second situation as our future, if we now have to endure a {hardware} apocalypse. How can we make that occur? Consumers can vote with their {dollars}, and we should as issues turn into bleaker. Local computing wants to stay a basic a part of client expertise. Chromebooks and GeForce Now are unbelievable choices, however the ideas they depend on—all the time on-line, absolutely depending on remotely administered servers—can not deal with everybody’s wants. Plus, with on-line safety devolving into an even bigger and larger dumpster fireplace, native computing is a protection in opposition to privateness and information leaks.

When PCs first grew to become mainstream, a primary mannequin price $1,500 to $2,500. Since then, client demand fueled the accessibility and openness of the PC—it’s a core cause for why I’m right here writing these phrases and why you’re studying them. I don’t wish to watch that die. So I’m selecting to imagine we customers can (and should) stave off such a regression.

In this episode of The Full Nerd 

In this episode of The Full Nerd, Adam Patrick Murray, Alaina Yee, and Will Smith dig into my annual record of one of the best DIY gaming PCs buildable with Black Friday deals, plus our predictions for CES 2026. As gloomy as we sound, it was a enjoyable dialogue—I get pleasure from sifting via all of the offers after which jigsaw-puzzling them into construct lists. Really cool to have crossed the 10-year mark with this custom!

As for CES, we now have determined not to play a ingesting recreation based mostly on how typically “AI” is talked about in keynotes and press releases. We’re too previous to climate the assured huge hangover.

Willis Lai / Foundry

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Don’t miss out on our NEW reveals too—you may catch episodes of Dual Boot Diaries and The Full Nerd: Extra Edition now!

And in case you want extra {hardware} discuss throughout the remainder of the week, come be a part of our Discord community—it’s filled with cool, laid-back nerds. 

This week’s packed nerd information

I got here again from our vacation weekend feeling as if I hadn’t heard a lot information. But loads nonetheless occurred behind the noise of AI and its have an effect on on {hardware}, even when it wasn’t notably cheery.

So on theme with Thanksgiving, I’m grateful to all of the splendidly loopy weirdos who do issues like play Minecraft on a receipt printer—I discover it nice for morale as a {hardware} fanatic. And a lover of doing dumb, innocent issues for leisure.

Mark Hachman / Foundry

• Long live emoticons: I’m within the minority of parents who nonetheless use emoticons, slightly than emoji, for conversations. Reading up on emoticon historical past (as cataloged by former PCWorld contributor Benj Edwards) put an actual smile on my face. It was easier instances then. Though people have been nonetheless very human.

• Am I old now? No, it’s the children who are wrong: I recognized strongly with this rant from my colleague Mark Hachman, in regards to the bodily dimension of recent exterior SSDs. (I’ve too many issues to trace today…)

• So…Year of Linux for real? According to the Zorin OS builders, the most recent launch of their distro hit an all-time excessive of 1 million downloads in simply 5 weeks.

• Steve benchmarked a bunch of Linux games, btw: Our good friend Steve Burke & crew over at Gamers Nexus dove deep into Linux gaming efficiency. If you’ve been interested by how a swap off Windows would go, positively try this video.

• Microsoft’s new ugly holiday sweaters are kind of… cute? Except that Zune one. Burn it with fireplace. Also, it’s a no for me on the Copilot brand combined in with ’90s nostalgia. And the Xbox one is okay provided that you’re an enormous model fanatic. …Okay, yeah, let’s simply skip all of those.

• An expensive slice of Pi: Sadly, RAM pricing impacts our favourite price range single-board pc, too.

• Oh no: I don’t need Google Gemini on my telephone. I additionally rely closely on Google Assistant to set reminders for me. If this goes past simply Android Auto, March 2026 often is the month the place everybody finds out simply how actually dangerous I’m at protecting monitor of issues by myself. 🙁

smilly (YouTube) / Tom’s Hardware

• Playing Minecraft on a receipt printer is a thing? Well, it was for a YouTuber who determined to offer a go. Very entertaining idea. Almost nearly as good as enjoying video games with bananas or pomegranates.

• Friends laughed at my living room PC. But who’s laughing now? I imply, actually nobody, as a result of Netflix killing casting assist is only a crappy bit of reports. But I do really feel vindicated in regards to the little buddy hooked up to my TV.

• My kind of ethical hacking: Organizers at Kawaiicon in New Zealand constructed a system to observe CO2 ranges within the air, as a proxy for viral an infection threat. Pretty dang neat little bit of hacking. (It’s a hacker convention although, so I suppose the digital form went wild and free, for science and enjoyable.) (Yes, a hacker con, not an anime con.) (No, I didn’t count on that both.)

• On the topic of privacy: Proton simply launched an Excel different for its customers. In mixture with its Word different (Proton Docs), it’s now a potential viable different to Google’s free webapps. Time to roll up my sleeves and provides it a spin, for the sake of reporting.

• Japan invents ‘human washing machine’: But fails to think about what’s going to not get washed if a human sits in a recliner the entire time whereas being (gently) hosed down. (Ew.) I anticipated extra from the land that gave us high-tech bidets.

• Uh oh. Cherry is having big financial problems: To keep afloat, components of their enterprise shall be bought—and manufacturing of their well-known switches will shift from Germany to China and Slovakia. Feels just like the Cherry we knew is not going to be the one which survives.

• RAM is so expensive, Samsung won’t even sell it to Samsung: My colleague Mike Crider has a manner with headlines—and this one’s so good I needed to embrace it right here, though everybody’s saturated with memory-related information. It is sort of the signal of the instances. 

I’ve a dilemma: As talked about on the present, I’ve an inadequate amount of vacation sweaters for our December episodes. Should go along with a cultured vacation sweater to spherical out my assortment? Or ought to I lean even tougher into the ugly vacation sweater theme? Decisions, choices.

Catch you all subsequent week!

~Alaina

This e-newsletter is devoted to the reminiscence of Gordon Mah Ung, founder and host of The Full Nerd, and govt editor of {hardware} at PCWorld.