57
submitted 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) by HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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. And even then China is making incredible strides at developing their own GPUs from the ground up. Meanwhile, DRAM and SSDs are much simpler than a GPU 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. Though there could still be details I'm not aware of, the way I see is that all they have to do is offer something reasonably reliable and less expensive than the ridiculous prices "brand name" parts are going for nowadays (not to mention when the existing stock sells out and are no longer restocked) 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? Or is the paradigm of buying parts to build your own computer just cooked?

all 20 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] Sunsofold@lemmings.world 13 points 12 hours ago

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.

[-] winkerjadams@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 50 minutes ago

You could be like me and buy name brand (Samsung) and lose your data in month 12 of owning your drive anyway. Fuck Samsung

[-] winkerjadams@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 49 minutes ago* (last edited 49 minutes ago)

And then to warranty it you need to take the nvme completely out of your computer because they left a single character off the end of the serial number that's on the box.. Fuck Samsung with a rusty claw hammer

[-] Ziggurat@jlai.lu 7 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

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. (I even have a made in China Eastman guitar, for the price of the Taylor everybody has, I got a way better guitar, and that Taylor is damn great)

Sure, there is still tons of cheap, low quality stuff on Ali Baba,it's great for hobby crafting 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

[-] Tenderizer78@lemmy.ml 8 points 9 hours ago

It was never that Chinese stuff was bad, it's that American companies outsourced their bad things to China.

[-] m532@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 9 hours ago

As a AI user, quality = china.

[-] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 22 points 18 hours ago

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.

[-] eldavi@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 hour ago

i was a systems administrator back in the 1990's and i remember holding $40,000 worth of RAM in my right hand; somehow we've gone back to those days again.

[-] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 19 points 18 hours ago

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.

[-] Ilixtze@lemmy.ml 21 points 19 hours ago

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.

[-] GammaGames@beehaw.org 11 points 16 hours ago

put some pressure in the American tech firms

to lobby for banning the devices, probably

[-] Ilixtze@lemmy.ml 5 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

I don't even live in America, so the fact that the bans don't affect me color my opinion, of course. I currently have a Huion tablet and a Huawei phone among a wider bunch of Chinese devices and they have worked well for years and were very cheap. The phone, with a cheap plastic protector has fallen twice from roofs and it doesn't even have a crack on it; And the tablet has no scratches in 5 years compared to my dead Cintiq that was full of scratches in it's first year; In the end competition is good for the consumer. But we are finding out America was never about competition.

[-] MeThisGuy@feddit.nl 2 points 13 hours ago

and same as american devices they watch everything you do

this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2025
57 points (95.2% liked)

Asklemmy

51651 readers
461 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS