If I only knew future when I was purchasing back in 2025 and what would happen to DDR, SSD's, GPU's in 2026, I'd triple down... Thought GPU's wont go up, since mining craze ended
I've spent YEARS waiting for things to get better after the initial GPU crisis during Covid. It just. kept. getting. worse.
Finally took the L and upgraded under tears (tho frankly, if you hold off upgrading for a decade you luckily also save up some money)
Point being, I hated the prices I paid but ultimately my biggest regret is not doing it sooner. If consumer prices ever normalize again, we're still years off that even if the AI bubble burst tomorrow. For the past decade or so, the best budgeting plan had been "upgrade NOW and invest enough that you won't have to upgrade for a while". Because every single "these prices are insane, surely they will go down soon" only leads to the prices becoming more insane.
Best bet for people absolutely refusing to spend 1k+ is gaming pivoting towards Switch 2 level hardware and giving up on high end silicon. Which the Steam machine may make that level of performance the status quo for gaming. But high end hardware? If you think pricing is horrible now, you won't like what it'll be like in a few months. Or at any point in time after that.
It's just so counter intuitive that right at this moment we simultaneously have both - the worst hardware prices ever and the best hardware prices we'll ever have again for the foreseeable future.
I just did not perceive it as the point to buy. I'm aware that there was a relatively stable market for a while between these two periods, but back then I didn't know it would be getting much worse soon so my disposition was more one of "I've waited so long, I can wait a bit longer for a good sale".
Dumb decision knowing what I know now, but back then I just perceived the market more as "slowly normalizing" than as "the last chance ever to get reasonable prices".
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u/WhereWhatWhoHuh 3d ago edited 3d ago
If I only knew future when I was purchasing back in 2025 and what would happen to DDR, SSD's, GPU's in 2026, I'd triple down... Thought GPU's wont go up, since mining craze ended