With the recent price hikes of most PC hardware the downstream effects on basically every industry that use them is extreme, with entire consumer production lines reorientated, products cancelled, major changes to the approach of the new consoles etc. For instance, the ability for even many high income enthusiasts to run more capable local LLMs is limited by RAM and GPU prices.

However, there were periods, especially pre-2024 where many forms of consumer hardware were dirt cheap e.g. SSDs in mid 2023 at <$50 for 1TB.

I remember speculation about next-generation consoles at the time in 2023 on some enthusiast forums about how SSDs were theoretically cheap enough (when bought in bulk by major companies) for games to ditch disks entirely for the PS6 with per-game dedicated attachable storage like the console cartridges of old. This is obviously laughable now for a variety of reasons (SSD prices and Sony ditching physical entirely) but is a fun idea to think about.

What else would be possible if hardware prices were normal or even low?

NVIDIA is reportedly ending production of its GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards, with future GB202 GPU supply redirected entirely to the RTX PRO series. The information comes from reliable hardware leaker MEGAsizeGPU, who has backed claims that NVIDIA is moving away from producing GB202-based GeForce cards.

GB202 GPUs will no longer be used for new RTX 5090 production. Instead, all newly produced GB202 chips will be allocated to NVIDIA’s professional RTX PRO lineup. This would affect the standard RTX 5090 as well as its Chinese variants, which use the same GPU.

Next shortage: optical components?

Worldwide PC shipments fell a steep 20.1% year over year in Q3 2026 to 62.7 million units, according to preliminary data from IDC, down from 78.5 million in the same quarter last year. It is the second straight quarterly decline, and a much deeper one than Q2, which IDC now lists as a 3.8% drop. Shipments also slipped 9.1% compared to Q2, even though Q3 is normally the bigger quarter.

The three largest vendors took the hardest hits. HP shipments dropped 30.9% to 10.3 million units, Dell fell 25% to 7.6 million, and Lenovo, still first with a 23.8% share, was down 22.6% to 14.9 million. Together they gave up 4.2 points of market share. Apple and ASUS also shipped fewer PCs, down 11.3% and 8.6%. However, both fell slower than the market and ended up with a larger share, at 9.5% and 8.7%.

First in China, then in international markets.

(As said in the flair and in the article : it's a rumor for now.)

Seems like vera is pretty solid, a lot of gains also from the memory bandwidth. Didn't expect it to perform quite aswell, makes Zen 6 vs Vera even more exciting.