Kostas Farkonas
1 min readJun 21, 2022

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It's a power game between hardware component manufacturers and OEMs, actually. What you describe might happen at some point in the *consumer* space, to us end users that is, but not to OEMs: they are in a position to negotiate better prices the larger their orders of a particular component are.

If, for instance, Dell routinely orders e.g. a million SSDs per quarter and does a bit of planning to order e.g. 5 million SSDs during the previous quarter that Microsoft plans to make SSDs mandatory for system disks, it will be able to get a lower price per SSD from its manufacturing partner.

Higher orders, from a manufacturer's perspective, are preferable even if there's a discount involved because at volume they bring in more revenue. SSD manufacturers will be hopefully preparing for the spike in orders they'll be getting around this point next year from OEMs. If they aren't, then they'll most certainly face problems with their OEM partners. They are in this together after all.

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Kostas Farkonas
Kostas Farkonas

Written by Kostas Farkonas

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