I hope Crucial’s death isn’t a canary in a PC memory coal mine  | amznusa.com

I did not have “Micron kills its consumer business” on my 2025 bingo card.

The company announced the shuttering of its Crucial brand on Wednesday morning in unexpectedly simple, transparent language. The short version: Micron is concentrating on their business customers, where the demand has “surged” for memory and storage—thanks to data centers and their scaling up for AI.

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

As noted in this same post, this decision ends 29 years of the Crucial brand. I can’t say I’m completely shocked. But I am surprised by what this move partially implies. Namely, enterprise’s hunger for memory and storage lasting for years and years.

Am I nervous for consumers? Not just yet. But I am wondering if the somber estimate of RAM shortages lasting beyond this decade ends up proving true.

I’m also wondering which other companies will back off consumer sales. And maybe more importantly, how such decisions will affect the development cycles and cost of new products.

I don’t mean only RAM kits and SSD drives, though I could see any company producing memory or storage modules abandoning direct-to-consumer efforts. No, I mean anything that contains them, too—like graphics cards. For example, rumor has it that Nvidia may start expecting board partners to source their own memory. Individually, those smaller companies have less power to negotiate. That could then influence the pricing and quantities they get, which in turn would result in higher costs for consumers…and likely slower releases and fewer options, too.

Similarly, I could see prebuilt PCs become less bleeding edge with their specs, either staying stagnant or even regressing.

Sounds bad, right? So why am I not nervous? Let’s say consumers are faced with higher prices and sluggish innovation. Let’s assume too that everyday folk will push off tech upgrades for longer stretches. The market will have to adapt—and I am curious what that would look like.

Matt Smith/Foundry

To make up for lagging consumer hardware performance, does the shift to cloud computing accelerate faster? Or will software innovations make up for older, less performant consumer PCs and phones? Companies want everyone on a subscription model, but no one can afford all that exist. 

I want the second scenario as our future, if we have to endure a hardware apocalypse. How can we make that happen? Consumers can vote with their dollars, and we must as things become bleaker. Local computing needs to remain a fundamental part of consumer technology. Chromebooks and GeForce Now are fantastic options, but the concepts they rely on—always online, fully dependent on remotely administered servers—cannot handle everyone’s needs. Plus, with online security devolving into a bigger and bigger dumpster fire, local computing is a defense against privacy and data leaks.

When PCs first became mainstream, a basic model cost $1,500 to $2,500. Since then, consumer demand fueled the accessibility and openness of the PC—it’s a core reason for why I’m here writing these words and why you’re reading them. I don’t want to watch that die. So I’m choosing to believe we consumers can (and must) 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 list 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 fun discussion—I enjoy sifting through all the deals and then jigsaw-puzzling them into build lists. Really cool to have crossed the 10-year mark with this tradition!

As for CES, we have decided not to play a drinking game based on how often “AI” is mentioned in keynotes and press releases. We’re too old to weather the guaranteed massive hangover.

Willis Lai / Foundry

Missed our live show? Subscribe now to The Full Nerd Network YouTube channel, and activate notifications. We also answer viewer questions in real-time!

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

And if you need more hardware talk during the rest of the week, come join our Discord community—it’s full of cool, laid-back nerds. 

This week’s packed nerd news

I came back from our holiday weekend feeling as if I hadn’t heard much news. But plenty still happened behind the noise of AI and its affect on hardware, even if it wasn’t particularly cheery.

So on theme with Thanksgiving, I’m grateful to all the wonderfully crazy weirdos who do things like play Minecraft on a receipt printer—I find it great for morale as a hardware enthusiast. And a lover of doing dumb, harmless things for entertainment.

Mark Hachman / Foundry

• Long live emoticons: I’m in the minority of folks who still use emoticons, rather than emoji, for conversations. Reading up on emoticon history (as cataloged by former PCWorld contributor Benj Edwards) put a real smile on my face. It was simpler times then. Though humans were still very human.

• Am I old now? No, it’s the children who are wrong: I identified strongly with this rant from my colleague Mark Hachman, about the physical size of modern external SSDs. (I have too many things to track these days…)

• So…Year of Linux for real? According to the Zorin OS developers, the latest release of their distro hit an all-time high of 1 million downloads in just five weeks.

• Steve benchmarked a bunch of Linux games, btw: Our friend Steve Burke & team over at Gamers Nexus dove deep into Linux gaming performance. If you’ve been curious about how a switch off Windows would go, definitely check out this video.

• Microsoft’s new ugly holiday sweaters are kind of… cute? Except that Zune one. Burn it with fire. Also, it’s a no for me on the Copilot logo mixed in with ’90s nostalgia. And the Xbox one is okay only if you’re a huge brand fanatic. …Okay, yeah, let’s just skip all of these.

• An expensive slice of Pi: Sadly, RAM pricing affects our favorite budget single-board computer, too.

• Oh no: I don’t want Google Gemini on my phone. I also rely heavily on Google Assistant to set reminders for me. If this goes beyond just Android Auto, March 2026 may be the month where everyone finds out just how truly bad I am at keeping track of things on my own. 🙁

smilly (YouTube) / Tom’s Hardware

• Playing Minecraft on a receipt printer is a thing? Well, it was for a YouTuber who decided to give a go. Very entertaining concept. Almost as good as playing games with bananas or pomegranates.

• Friends laughed at my living room PC. But who’s laughing now? I mean, really no one, because Netflix killing casting support is just a crappy bit of news. But I do feel vindicated about the little buddy attached to my TV.

• My kind of ethical hacking: Organizers at Kawaiicon in New Zealand built a system to monitor CO2 levels in the air, as a proxy for viral infection risk. Pretty dang neat bit of hacking. (It’s a hacker conference though, so I guess the digital kind went wild and free, for science and fun.) (Yes, a hacker con, not an anime con.) (No, I did not expect that either.)

• On the topic of privacy: Proton just released an Excel alternative for its users. In combination with its Word alternative (Proton Docs), it’s now a possible viable alternative to Google’s free webapps. Time to roll up my sleeves and give it a spin, for the sake of reporting.

• Japan invents ‘human washing machine’: But fails to consider what will not get washed if a human sits in a recliner the whole time while being (gently) hosed down. (Ew.) I expected more from the land that gave us high-tech bidets.

• Uh oh. Cherry is having big financial problems: To stay afloat, parts of their business will be sold—and production of their well-known switches will shift from Germany to China and Slovakia. Feels like the Cherry we knew will not be the one that survives.

• RAM is so expensive, Samsung won’t even sell it to Samsung: My colleague Mike Crider has a way with headlines—and this one’s so good I had to include it here, even though everyone’s saturated with memory-related news. It is quite the sign of the times. 

I have a dilemma: As mentioned on the show, I have an insufficient quantity of holiday sweaters for our December episodes. Should go with a classy holiday sweater to round out my collection? Or should I lean even harder into the ugly holiday sweater theme? Decisions, decisions.

Catch you all next week!

~Alaina

This newsletter is dedicated to the memory of Gordon Mah Ung, founder and host of The Full Nerd, and executive editor of hardware at PCWorld.