Post #67454

2025-12-15 23:05 UTC

I personally never really considered “Chinese knockoff” a negative term because those products still fill a niche that is beneficial to the consumer, usually very low cost entry level offerings the “brand name” companies don’t bother making. Now that the “brand names” have straight up said they don’t intend on making entire categories of consumer products anymore, this could be a great opportunity for Chinese companies. There’s a stereotype of Chinese brands being “low quality” which obviously isn’t always true to begin with, but even if we assume it is, given the choice between a maybe lower quality product you still get to own and none at all, I think the decision is pretty clear, at least for me. With shortages of things like GPUs, third party Chinese manufacturers can’t easily jump in to fill the gap because those chips are complex and proprietary both in the silicon design and the interfaces/APIs they need to work with, so the barrier to entry is quite high. Even if they straight up reverse engineered and “stole” Nividia’s designs (which I personally don’t even consider unethical), they’ll have a hard time legally selling them in Western markets because Nividia will sue them. But DRAM and SSDs are much simpler and there are already Chinese offerings of both on places like Aliexpress and even Amazon (not just using brand name chips on their own board, though that’s still more common, I’m certain there are also in-house Chinese DRAM and flash chips from small firms), I don’t see a reason they can’t just ramp up production and cash in on the shortage in the West. But there could still be details I’m not aware of. All they have to do is offer something reasonably reliable and leas expensive than the ridiculous prices “brand name” parts are going for and I can’t imagine them not getting customers looking to build custom PCs for cheap. Again, I personally don’t give a shit if they “stole” designs from the brand names or not, because I consider stealing intellectual property from billion dollar corporations to be morally neutral. So, people more knowledgeable on how electronics manufacturing and supply chains work, do you think we’ll see Chinese brands becoming more prominent in the Western consumer computer parts market now that the likes of Samsung, SKHynix, and Micron straight up don’t even want to sell to consumers anymore?

Replies (12)

@Ilixtze__dup_18226@lemmy.ml 2025-12-15 23:33

I’ve been looking forward for full chinese ARM computers for a while, especially now with all the work being done to run games and x86 applications in them. I’d buy a cheap, energy efficient Chinese computer to put some linux in it in a heart beat! And i think that would put some pressure in the American tech firms that have been growing a little too comfortable and anti consumer for the last decade.

Open ##67557
@FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 2025-12-16 00:18

Somebody is going to jump into this. But I would keep my eyes open beyond just the Chinese market. Vietnam and Thailand are interesting places to watch. V because of the relative sweetheart deal with the trumpist of tariffs. And T because they already do a lot of SSD manufacturing. And China, more than any other country, will be at the mercy of a particular person’s bowel movements on Pennsylvania Ave.

Open ##67702
@Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 2025-12-16 00:18

The answer is no on the immediate timeframe because current market prices already include Chinese manufacturing capacity. It will take years to build the factories that can bring prices down.

Open ##67703
@flamiera@kbin.melroy.org 2025-12-16 00:32

I'm sorry, I don't want anymore chinesium-quality junk of an idea they consider electronics, much less RAM and SSDs. Bad enough they sell deceiving GPUs and CPUs.

Open ##67729
@Sunsofold__dup_8138@lemmings.world 2025-12-16 06:17

The big problem with cheap Chinese knockoff crap isn’t that it’s crap, but that it’s that it’s highly variable. With some things, who cares? Getting a spatula for half price that will, even at the worst quality, do basically the same job and last years, won’t be a problem. Getting a badly made computer component that fries some other component, or a storage drive that craps out after 6 months and takes your data with it, is a different matter. You won’t have any recourse. Same with cheap batteries that either ruin the experience by needing constant charging or by being actually unsafe. QA is expensive, but it’s worth it when the object is also innately expensive.

Open ##68359
@Ziggurat@jlai.lu 2025-12-16 08:39

There’s a stereotype of Chinese brands being “low quality” which obviously isn’t always true to begin with, This was still debatable 10-15 years ago, but today? Huawei or Redmi do phone which compete in the same league as Samsung, BYD is leading the electric car market. Sure, there is still tons of cheap, low quality stuff on Ali Baba, but China has moved toward high quality products. To answer your question, I expect to see a Chinese company entering the global Ram, FPGA and GPU market. Especially considering the US embargo forbidding Nvidia and Intel to export their high end products in China. Looks like a quick way to push China to grow their domestic production

Open ##68624
@m532@lemmygrad.ml 2025-12-16 09:05

As a AI user, quality = china.

Open ##68682
@umbrella@lemmy.ml 2025-12-16 23:57

more broadly than ram, from what i’ve been reading, they are already gearing up to do just that. semiconductors are one of the few industries they are behind in and it wouldn’t even be wise to depend on their rivals for their computing. whether or not they will be able to pull it off before the couple of years it would take for western manufacturers to meet demand, or the ai bubble to burst is anyone’s guess, but i don’t think so. a bit of speculation but i don’t think they would hate to be the gatekeepers of rented cloud computing either so who knows, maybe we do need china to come sooner rather than later and flood the market with cheap chips.

Open ##71560
@yogthos@lemmy.ml 2025-12-17 00:45

The real question is how long before they end up being banned in the west like we already see happening with Chinese phones and EVs.

Open ##71733
@BobQuasit@beehaw.org 2025-12-17 01:08

I hope China sanctions the USA to keep their RAM and SSDs and technology in general away from the US.

Open ##71815
@dRLY@lemmy.ml 2025-12-17 02:38

There’s a stereotype of Chinese brands being “low quality” That used to be how things marked “made in Japan” were stereotyped. Basically all the major industrialized nations carried that stereotype until they were able to develop. So China will eventually get to the point of the stereotype flipping at the rate they have been moving. They will still have plenty of truly cheap crap due to being so large in volume of factories and being super willing to make really really niche things. Always fun (and cool) to see the wild motherboards/PCs out of e-waste old parts. The only thing I hope to see is a push to stop outright ripoff stuff like the “2TB USB drives” that are really 32GB (or lower) with firmware that deletes data that is larger than the flash storage. I am fine with knock-off stuff as long as it is able to do the core thing. A knockoff bag that is able to still hold the same amount of things is fine and allows folks that want the look to be close enough. Even if the flash storage on a knockoff USB drive is super slow, it should be the real capacity.

Open ##72048
@GenosseFlosse@feddit.org 2025-12-17 06:03

Why should any Chinese build RAM end up in the hands of consumers, instead of Chinese data centers or AI server farms?

Open ##72581