Ring cameras sold out; collapse of civilization expected?

by philg

We wanted to get a Ring camera for our apartment in Florida. The crime rate in this neighborhood is low, but we have our golden retriever to protect! How worried about crime are Americans? The Ring indoor cam is back-ordered 7-9 weeks:

No problem then. Just pay extra for the indoor/outdoor version:

Unless the apocalypse is nigh, why are security cameras sold out?

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15 thoughts on “Ring cameras sold out; collapse of civilization expected?”

  1. Surely it is because they’re end of life-ing visible spectrum cameras, and introducing a line of cameras with thermal sensors to detect Covid zombies, and the soon to be required 2D barcode mark of the vaccinated.

    Personally, I doubt it’s a chip shortage:

    https://www.wral.com/chip-shortage-caused-by-the-pandemic-means-less-electronics-to-go-around/19865287/

    Or increased demand by folks looking to sell their accidentally captured clips of crime to news organzations.

  2. > Unless the apocalypse is nigh, why are security cameras sold out?

    For the same constellation of reasons that gun sales are still high and ammo. is scarce, even among people who had never before seriously countenanced owning a firearm.

    • This just in from the Wall Street Journal:

      https://www.wsj.com/articles/women-are-nearly-half-of-new-gun-buyers-study-finds-11631792761

      “SAN DIEGO—Close to half of all new U.S. gun buyers since the beginning of 2019 have been women, a shift for a market long dominated by men, according to a new study….For decades, other surveys have found that around 10% to 20% of American gun owners were women.”

      Unless I’m mistaken, in the first photograph embedded in the article text, the woman at “A Girl & A Gun” is getting ready to fire a Ruger SR9 full-size version (although it’s tough to tell precisely from the photo) and she is being instructed how to acquire an accurate sight picture.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruger_SR-Series

    • On closer inspection with Photoshop, I am 99% certain that’s an SR9 and I understand why she likes it: As the Wikipedia piece notes, that pistol is only 1.18 inches thick through the grip (despite having a “double-stack” two-column magazine) and the deep “beavertail” on the back of the frame combined with the smooth contours at the top of the grip provides a deep and very comfortable fit in the hand, excellent reach to the controls and trigger for people with medium to smaller hands, and easy controllability of the firearm during “muzzle flip” when it fires. The sights return to level very quickly and the pistol is extremely controllable even with enhanced pressure rounds – I’ve shot one. It also has an ambidextrous safety and magazine release, so if you’re left holding the pistol with just a single hand you can still unlatch and drop the magazine or turn the safety off. The full-size version is a little large, but the SR9c “compact” version is a bit smaller and was very highly regarded when it was in production.

  3. Probably the same thing that caused the toilet paper crisis of 2020: panic hoarding. As pointed out in https://spectrum.ieee.org/chip-shortage:

    “One potential hiccup on the road to ending the shortage is that some of the skyrocketing demand appears to be from customers that are double-ordering to bulk up on inventory, says Jim Feldhan, president of Semico Research. “I don’t know of any product that needs twice the amount of analog” as the year before, he says. But manufacturers “don’t want a 12-cent part to hold up a 4K television,” so they’re stocking up.”

    • I work in the semi industry (for a Taiwan based fabless semiconductor company that is not TSMC). I agree with the above comment – we are seeing elevated orders across all sectors of our business.
      At the same time as the rise in orders has occurred the available capacity at TSMC, UMC and other fabs has become completely full. In addition to this, semiconductor packaging, which takes place mostly in Malaysia these days, is also totally capacity constrained. I have wafers sitting in warehouses in Malaysia where the estimated packaging date is 90 days from now – usually 15 days would be typical.
      One thing that is clear is that manufacturers were extremely “lean” in their semiconductor inventory. The question going forward is will manufacturers learn to carry any kind of real buffer of inventory in their own warehouses or will they continue to be forced by accountants to have practically zero inventory and rely on their “supply chain” to ride out manufacturing shutdowns/problems? Seems to me that too many assumptions have been made over the last couple of decades about how reliable and easy it is to obtain semiconductors and other electronic components.

  4. Isn’t the golden retriever supposed to do the thing the ring does? (Alert you to visitors to the door)

  7. On Friday, Sept. 17, for example, there were 147 total ships in port at Los Angeles and Long Beach, according to figures provided by the Marine Exchange of Southern California. That broke the former record of 146 — set on Wednesday. It was at least the third time this week, that record was broken. Of those 147 in port on Friday, 86 were at anchor or in drift areas awaiting berth assignments to unload. And 95 were container ships — also a record.

    https://www.dailybreeze.com/2021/09/17/truckers-longshore-workers-to-clock-more-hours-as-la-long-beach-ports-try-to-reduce-cargo-backlog/

    • Yes, you’re talking about my backyard. I can see all the ships from my patio. My understanding is that there is a trucker shortage so the containers aren’t being moved fast enough for new ships to unload. There are shortages of everything it seems.

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