2025 A dismal Black Friday experience?

[Easto]

The way that prices on Memory and SSD have exploded I really don't see this being that great of a year for any "deals". It seems like SSD prices are up by at least 50% and in some cases memory prices have almost doubled. With no end in sight I think I'm going to be buying both items as soon as I see any substantial pullback and hold onto them for when I need them.

[Philip]

From what I've read, AI datacenter infrastructure has put upward pressure on memory and HDDs/SSD prices, LLMs (Large Language Models) require a lot of hardware.

Still, I think some companies will try to entice some buzz/hype/coverage in their retail sales, so there are always a few decent deals around Black Friday/Cyber Monday.

[Easto]

Using the Samsung Gen4 2tb 990 Pro as my focus point it appears at $169 right now which is $20 less than 4 days ago. Everything I'm reading seems to confirm that the big players in AI are buying this stuff up by the handful. Actually, I can't confirm that's the actual problem. I think the manufacturers are just catering to the big players and shifting what they make to fill that void while the rest of us scramble for a good deal.

I'm seeing a few deals but the prices are not getting anywhere near where I'd like to see them.

[Philip]

I am done shopping for SSDs for a while, I got all I need for the time being.
I just need to find an office PC or two for a business I do IT work for at times, most of their stuff is Dell PCs so I may go that route again.

[Easto]

I came across an add for a USB-C memory card reader. Some website was saying that it was a Black Friday deal on Amazon. Since I had bought that item back in July I looked up what I paid for it and it was the same as they were offering it now for the BF deal. Just because something is marked special doesn't mean it is.

[Easto]

It's still 2 days before the "official" Black Friday sales begin, but most of the deals I'm seeing so far seem to be for accessories and/or a "combo deal". I'm not seeing any great deals so far on CPU or Memory.

[Easto]

I spent a couple hours yesterday comparing so called "Black Friday" offering against what I had paid for certain things about 1 year ago and even though they would say there was discount, they were all at the very minimum 25% higher than last year. It's definitely not the time to be buying a CPU, memory or SSD, those prices are through the roof.

[Philip]

I haven't done any real comparison to last year, but whoa, 25% is a lot!
I didn't do much shopping, seems to me Black Friday deals are generally watered down to "deals" you can find for most of November and major holidays.

[Easto]

So now I wait a couple of days for "cyber Monday" and see if that brings up anything of interest.

[Philip]

Bought a couple of Dell desktop office PCs for $850 ea, with Intel Core Ultra 7 265 CPU, 32Gb RAM, 2TB SSD, seems like a good deal.