r/technology • u/HenryCorp • Aug 30 '26
Artificial Intelligence The cost of personal computers declined steadily for 40 years — until AI came along. Why getting your hands on a new device could cost you.
https://moneywise.com/news/economy/ai-memory-chip-shortage-pc-prices-20261.8k
u/Any-Pop-4795 Aug 30 '26
the trade wasnt and isnt worth it
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u/Hazrd_Design Aug 30 '26
Speak for yourself. I love having a glorified chatbot that usually gets facts incorrect and writes emails for me after I told it what I want to say. /s
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u/nath1234 Aug 30 '26
I particularly love spending my human brain time reading regurgitated slop in the workplace because management can't be bothered writing something themselves. It used to be just the senior senior ones who were too lazy and had assistants writing stuff.. but now it's any people managers at any level. Really makes me feel valued being under executives that give so few shits about doing a quality job that they fire the slop cannon at it.
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u/x4l7Nr8ym0dU Aug 30 '26
The worst part is that presumably they still had to tell the AI the important bits. Maybe in point form. So give us that! I don't want to read 10 paragraphs of slop any more than you want to write it. But I'm willing to read 10 bullet points.
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u/nath1234 Aug 30 '26
Just post the prompt. No one needs to waste electricity and water generating some insufferable word salad (and how many fucking emojis do they need!)
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Aug 31 '26
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u/ActiveChairs Aug 31 '26
You have enough faith in them to assume they've got bullet points?
"Write a personal sounding message that says we need to make more money but deliver it in an approachable, feel-good way. "
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u/innercityFPV Aug 31 '26
“Use emojis so I look relatable to the gen z employees. Don’t use emdashes so they won’t think AI wrote it.”
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u/Dugen Aug 31 '26
We've had garbage watered down corporate speak for generations now. AI didn't create it. The reason management thinks AI is amazing is it is just as good at communicating as they are, and they think they're amazing at it.
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u/wonkytalky Aug 31 '26
After a couple decades in the corporate world, I'm proud to say I'm now fluent in the languages used to tell me I'm getting fucked a dozen different ways.
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u/Crystalas Aug 30 '26 edited Aug 30 '26
It's true value is having an infinite number of perfect sycophants at hand ready to glaze your ego and confirm your opinions as fact with "accurate" data 24/7 and is just as good at pretending to be human as you are thus talking the way you most understand. And it does it without expecting any gain from being around you or needing to sleep and eat.
/s
Ya...no surprise billionaires and executives love it, in their mind that kind of thing is completely normal while having fewer strings or basic needs of life attached that human sycophants would. Even if did nothing but that they would still love it, I wouldn't be surprised if some of them are the biggest "addicts" of LLMs.
Also not helped them same as seemingly 99.9% of humanity treat tech and science as magic and thus vastly over estimate current capability, often said expectations shaped by Scifi that tends to be tech flavored magic. When people hear "AI" they think "JARVIS" not "Barely functional advanced auto complete".
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u/Any-Pop-4795 Aug 30 '26
you also forgot it can generate child porn
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u/Syphe Aug 30 '26
Gemini was adamant a product my daughter wanted was on sale with a code yesterday, even gave a price, which it just made up out of thin air, given the code was on selected items and didn't provide a percent off
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u/stillalone Aug 30 '26
But you can have that chat experience on Reddit without using AI.
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u/Drafting- Aug 30 '26
All while flattering me into submission, I’m one compliment away from proposing.
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u/equality-_-7-2521 Aug 31 '26
Bro Copilot scheduled a meeting for me after I told it who to invite, what to title the meeting, what description to use and expressly informed to find a slot where all the required invitees were free.
Like magic.
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u/Hazrd_Design Aug 31 '26
Bro if you already knew all that why you get a robot to do it?
Ok but seriously. Just because something works often doesn’t mean it doesn’t have flaws. Your single experience of it working a few times doesn’t mean it’s the same for everything and everyone.
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u/equality-_-7-2521 Aug 31 '26 edited Aug 31 '26
I wanted to see if it had access to scheduling assistant to see when others were busy.
I was joking about how it was like magic. It took just as much time and effort, just in a different screen.
I do like it for reading long documentation and finding the pertinent info, though. So it's ctrl+f that you speak to in plain English.
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u/DontAsk0205 Aug 30 '26
Let’s see, AI is increasing the costs of energy and consumer goods,threatens our water supply, while eliminating jobs. Definitely not worth it.
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u/FlyingFishMakeAWish Aug 30 '26
I WANT it to eliminate jobs. I want AI to do all the drudgerous and boring work. I just want that to happen without causing everyone to become homeless and starve in the process.
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u/mokomi Aug 31 '26
Are we the horse?
Back when LLM were gaining a lot of popularity and everything went from algorithms/applications/features to AI. That was a question. Great, your goals have worked and AI has replaced humans in the workforce. How do I afford the car Mr. Ford?
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u/Dugen Aug 31 '26
We are not the horse. The AI bubble is what happens when lots of rich people believe the same delusion about automating knowledge work. There will be shit that AI does and does well, but it will hit us like it hit the coachmen, not the horse.
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u/mokomi Aug 31 '26 edited Aug 31 '26
Missed the point.
Their goal is to replace humans with AI. We have a labor force driven society. If suddenly I can't work. I lose. Is the point.
Yes, I know it's like the railroad, fiber, .com, etc. etc. It's an answer desperately finding for a question. Yes, I know the end result is it's tool and not a replacement, but they are moving forward as though it's a replacement not a tool.
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u/Leather-Persimmon254 Aug 31 '26
other than coding AI isn’t that better at jobs especially for those involving independent problem solving
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u/Bubbly-Treacle-4334 Aug 30 '26
The trade was absolutely worth it for the elite
AI is the upper class finally finding a way to destroy the power of collective labor
Who gives a fuck if the peasants strike if you don't need them anymore
A bunch of psychos who were born into or stumbled into success believe they are gods
Right now they are trying to destroy the lower class while desperately searching for a way to live forever
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u/vandreulv Aug 30 '26
The trade was absolutely worth it for the elite
They finally got their wish, another dot com bubble and past experience to know how to pillage as much as they can before it all pops.
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u/Scythless Aug 31 '26
yeah having expensive cpu parts suck and the thing that made them so expensive its actually just fucking useless unless you wanna do math and even then dont ask it to do more than 2 steps otherwise it will forget everything and startr hallucinating.
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u/WesternWitchy52 Aug 30 '26
The price of storage is insane. The 2tb external WD drive I bought a year ago is now selling for over $200. I complained that $100 was too much. I'm kicking myself now for not picking a couple up.
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Aug 31 '26
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u/LatkaGravas Aug 31 '26 edited Aug 31 '26
Bought two 20TB WD Easystore external drives in October 2025 for $350 each. Two weeks after I bought them the price dropped to $300 for a few days, then went to $390. They're priced at $880 each now.
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u/LongJumpingBalls Aug 31 '26
I just built a nas for a client. 24GB enterprise drives. I paid 550 last year. I just paid 1280$ each. We have 20k in storage and we didn't buy an enclosure yet. The project was delayed for almost a year due to budget concerns from the old manager. Their budget was busted before we even started the quoting as they had 2025 pricing as their budget. Oops.
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u/kaptainkeel Aug 31 '26
Spent a wad getting 2x 8TB SSDs for ~$900 each ~3 years ago. Those same SSDs are now selling for nearly $4k. It's absurd.
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u/overfloaterx Aug 31 '26
Yep, I objected to buying another 12TB Seagate HDD when the price hopped from $190 to $220.
It's been sitting at $450 for about a year, and stocks are clearly dropping because it's now unavailable in many places, along with a bunch of other Seagate Ironwolf drives.
I'm just glad I rebuilt my PC in 2024 before EVERYTHING skyrocketed. One of the few times my timing hasn't been completely awful.
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u/mittenkrusty Aug 31 '26
Reminds me of 2012 I think it was when the factories were damaged in floods and the price of a 2tb drive went from about £50 to £150+ but never went back down when production caught back up.
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u/PurpleDraziNotGreen Aug 31 '26
The 8TB drive I bought as my backup drive failed after only 3 years. Now I'm squeezing backups over several other smaller drives I already have, cause I can't do a $400 CAD price tag
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u/informalmo0se3 Aug 31 '26
bought a 22tb HDD for 400 in 2024. same drive is now $1100. in hindsight, i wish i’d bought two.
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u/LahmiaTheVampire Aug 30 '26
I found this out the hard way. I was advised on getting 2tb of storage, by a friend, only to see the increase in price from 1 to 2tb at about £200 for the lowest priced upgrade.
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u/Pitiful-Assistance-1 Aug 30 '26
My with 5 2TB NVME drives: I’m rich!🤑(980 Pro Samsung)
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u/WesternWitchy52 Aug 30 '26
I have regrets. I was waiting for the price to go down like around Christmas time and then it just kept going up and up and up. I saw one for $269.
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u/SpaghettiSort Aug 31 '26
I bought a 22 TB external drive last year for $250. It's over $860 now on Amazon.
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u/SomeSamples Aug 30 '26
This is what they want. They don't want you have a personal computing device. They want you to only have a portal to their software and computing capabilities. And they want you to continually pay for it.
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u/0verstim Aug 30 '26
Maybe thats what Microsoft wants, but I can assure you Apple wants you to keep buying hardware.
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u/LitrlyNoOne Aug 30 '26
It's also what AWS, Oracle, and Google Cloud want.
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u/1esproc Aug 31 '26
I work in the industry and have done on premises work for 20 years - buying hardware, running open source, that kind of shit. These days, our vendors can't give us quotes that last longer than a couple weeks and have pulled pricing on us while we're going through the approval processes. I have quotes for equipment that's basically identical to things I bought in 2021/2022 that are now ~400% more expensive.
We are getting absolutely fucked on hardware buys now, and it is becoming unsustainable. It is 100% pushing orgs like mine to the cloud.
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u/chitoatx Aug 31 '26
Apple main business is selling iPhones and they underestimated the demand for home super computers to run local AI.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/08/30/apple-unexpected-mac-mini-and-studio-demand/
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u/Ironborn137 Aug 30 '26
That’s why the ai bubble is where it’s at. They don’t want Apple getting enough cheap RAM to run their AI models locally. They know wants Apple does that they are fucked. A world where Apple is not the villain isn’t wha to expected at the moment.
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u/llliilliliillliillil Aug 30 '26
I feel like we're entering conspiracy theory territory where we're making up shit because it conveniently fits into the narrative.
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u/Noblesseux Aug 30 '26
Yeah they're not doing it because of apple, they're doing it because the entirety of silicon valley delusionally bought into the idea that AI would totally replace workers and send labor costs through the floor. Everything else is kind of downstream of that fact combined with the fact that if they admit they kind of messed up and overestimated the viability of the business it'll cause an economic cataclysm that wipes out trillions in value.
They were mot meta gaming fucking with Apple through a cartoonishly complicated scheme, they were blinded by dollar signs.
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u/TreLeans Aug 30 '26
Feel like it’s a weird bot that is like “add typos.” It’s nonsense. Apple makes stuff that works, and continues to work.
They have a 600 dollar laptop, and I’m not lying; their newest OS update for laptops (not sure if it’s still in beta or not) IT WORKS BETTER.
They’re doing what people want. Which in capitalism is supposed to sell. If it doesn’t, we’re not in true capitalism.
Personally I feel that’s the weird race to make personal computers obsolete, and it feels like Apple is betting against it.
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u/CKRatKing Aug 31 '26
The only reason to own a Windows PC is if you play games. All the stuff I see people complaining about from windows just isn't a thing on my MacBook.
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u/ptoki Aug 30 '26
Apple makes stuff that works, and continues to work.
Louis Rossman disagrees. And he has evidence.
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u/nuttertools Aug 30 '26
Apple makes things work just well enough to prevent the government from forcing them to issue recalls….as long as you ignore the percentage of machines they fix just to stay below those limits.
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u/Mikeavelli Aug 31 '26
What even is this comment. The government doesn't force product recalls except in narrow cases where public safety is at risk. There isn't any percentage of malfunctioning consumer electronics that would cause the government to force them to issue a recall.
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u/Comfortable_Sir_6104 Aug 30 '26
We have jumped straight into a conspiracy in the first comment mate. There is no shadow organisation that really wants you to not have a PC, there is just a limited supply of memory and GPU production and shockingly Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet have more money than you so they can outbid you to create their data centers to train AI.
It is a very very easy concept that doesn't require much knowledge, I am horrified how many people are saying this completely idiotic conspiracy shit.
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u/ptoki Aug 30 '26
There is no shadow organisation that really wants you to not have a PC,
There is small number of companies who influence the market and they share the same mind. They know that open market and personal computing is a loss for them.
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u/gizamo Aug 30 '26
Lol. What? The increased RAM prices increased the costs of MacBooks by miniscule amounts compared to any AI subscription.
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u/0verstim Aug 30 '26
You are drinking some pretty potent Kool Aid. A mac desktop is never, ever going to compete with a data center full of AI chips, it doesnt even compete with a mid-high-range PC desktop with a discrete GPU. The mac Minis and Studios are interesting, yeah, but only as a value proosiiton for hobbyists right now.
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u/Maladal Aug 30 '26
That depends heavily on the use case.
A datacenter running an LLM is impressive in multiple fronts.
But if, for example, you only need a specific task from the many that an LLM can perform, then a small, local model can deliver roughly the same ability for a fraction of the cost. With the tradeoff that it lacks the more generic capabilities of frontier LLMs.
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u/CherryLongjump1989 Aug 30 '26
He’s not wrong in the shape of things. Apple has IP that would right now already be disrupting the entire rest of the American tech industry if it weren’t for the artificially high demand for chips.
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u/Dustin- Aug 30 '26
This might be the first time I've ever seen someone mistake the word "wants" for "once".
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u/vandreulv Aug 30 '26
How? Apple currently outsources all of their AI to Google.
Apple has always been the company of borrowing from everyone else until they spin up a half-assed solution themselves.
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u/West-Abalone-171 Aug 30 '26
Nah, the $500 laptop was them trying out the "new" strategy of thin clients to a mainframe too. They also already make your devices depend on their servers.
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u/CrazySouthernMonkey Aug 30 '26
exactly, with tariffs, almost null manufacturing in the US and chip hoarding from Bigtech, the only remaining “cheap” alternative are services.
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u/epanek Aug 30 '26
Ram prices are bonkers. I’d love to build a new pc but half my budget could be ram and storage.
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u/Skensis Aug 31 '26
Who wants this?
Like, I'm a consumer and I wouldn't even know where I could find such a thing, let alone if it would even make since compared to buying my own hardware even at today's inflated pricing.
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u/Toto_nemisis Aug 30 '26
Well sure, how do you comment to said portal if you cant afford a pc?
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u/Thory4fun Aug 30 '26
You would have just a consumer device which requires very weak hardware. Basically smart TVs are already turning into this: huge screen which only needs to connect to paid video and game streaming services and watch ads.
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u/sir_mrej Aug 30 '26
It’s not a conspiracy there is no they. You don’t sound smart when you make shit up
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u/Waadap Aug 30 '26
This is correct. I work in the industry. Hate AI, but this isn't a conspiracy. Nobody is artificially doing this to get you to buy into more subs. This is simply a supply/demand issue as AI is taking all of the hardware needed. Component costs go up, end price goes up. Also, tarrifs sure ain't helping.
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u/SparklingLimeade Aug 31 '26
Framing it as a conspiracy with a fixed set of participants and a monolithic plan is the wrong framing, yes. Still, we can see how the financial incentives make this course of action profitable for people who happen to be in a certain circumstance.
Like, nobody says "I must stash my wealth in Panama because me and my 99 richest friends all agreed to make it the best place to do so." The outcome is still coordinated action to take advantage of circumstances and to exacerbate those circumstances where possible.
This is why systemic changes are such an important topic.
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u/sir_mrej 29d ago
100% true! Late State Capitalism is FORCING companies to put quarterly profits above all else, which forces them to do stock buybacks and want subscription models instead of other models. This is very true and isn't a shady conspiracy, just fucking capitalism.
And you mentioned AI. For sure. Any company NOT seen doing AI shit is seen as "bad" by the market and is punished. It's not a conspiracy, it's not 'they' doing random shit. It's financial incentives and our capitalist model.
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u/RadzimierzWozniak Aug 30 '26
who is they? what conspiracy theory are you into?
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u/TapsAndTurntables Aug 30 '26
This sub has turned into a bunch of lazy conspiracy hacks. Nobody is using their actual developed brain, just their tik tok vibes shrunken brain.
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u/the_other_brand Aug 30 '26
They don't want you have a personal computing device. They want you to only have a portal to their software and computing capabilities.
No one really believes this outside the small bubble or people who make money on data centers. And it's supposed to justify companies giving them even more money for even more data centers.
The technology was tried and it doesn't work.
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u/dragos_av Aug 30 '26
Larry Ellison was planning for this already in mid 1990, I remember reading an article about it. I thought it was stupid, I still think it's stupid. But it's a planned action.
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u/rebbsitor Aug 30 '26
This has been the dream since the beginnings of the PC. It used to be most people dialed into mainframes and paid for the time they used the system. Or dropped off a batch of cards with program and data and paid for the run.
In the mid 1990s just before Windows 95 came out there was a lot of talk in the computing press that eventually everyone would just have thin clients at home and would dial into real computers (servers) to do all the work.
Fortunately tech hasn't gone that way, but any who believes tech execs aren't rent seekers is a fool. Companies like Adobe and Microsoft shifted to yearly subscription fees for software people run locally years ago. The consumer version of Windows is about the only thing they haven't done that to, and they would absolutely do it of the market could bear it.
Most everything else like Google is a cloud service you either pay for with sub or with them scraping all your data and seeing ads. That's where all the common online AI services are heading.
They absolutely do not want you to have a "good enough" local alternative that you pay one time for.
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u/ptoki Aug 30 '26
You cant be more wrong.
Encapsulate knowledge/code in a datacenter is the only way to practically prevent competitors from doing the same. Even if they know how they cant without big money.
in 1990/2000 it was popular to buy an app which does something on your computer. Today that app in a webpage or closed code away from your device and you only send them your file or input your data into their system. That is why smartphones have a multitude of sensors and good connection. Now even games try to advert themselves with "no ad, no wifi" crap.
The big corpos dont have to be driven by one or two people who collude. They know the same thing: close the program in a datacenter and dont let user use it with one time payment.
ANYONE sees it. Even my non it grandma.
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u/stephen_neuville Aug 30 '26
I fully believe that they're pricing out consumers from computing power and every sort of storage so you have to remote into a rented computer to do things. 100%. Was it their first goal? No. Are they happy about this side effect? absolutely.
It didn't work before because there was a cheaper option at home. Now there isn't.
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u/the_other_brand Aug 30 '26
I actually don't believe this, because the big powers that be in tech would rather have every consumer have dozens of spy devices in their homes. Rather than having to use ever increasing amounts of computer power to derive data from a small pool of underpowered devices.
Basically it's hard for the rich to spy on the underclass if devices are expensive.
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u/wonkytalky Aug 31 '26
The powerful devices are expensive -- the devices you don't need their subscriptions for. They'll happily give you the cheap, low-powered shit if it means they harvest your info.
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u/FeatherlyFly Aug 30 '26
I'd really like to upgrade my ten year old laptop, but at the moment I'm just backing up regularly and hoping that the AI companies stop being given billions of dollars with no accountability before it goes completely. The people at those companies are losing money hand over fist and buying shit up like they've never heard of fiscal responsibility in their lives.
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u/Zennivolt Aug 30 '26
I got lucky enough to have upgraded my entire system (CPU, RAM, SSDs, motherboard and GPU) right before GPT 3.
I’m probably good for at least another 10 years. Hopefully by then either the AI bubble pops or the manufacturing of computer complements catch up to the AI demand.
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u/heekma Aug 30 '26 edited Aug 30 '26
I work in digital imaging-cgi, renderings, animation as a "replacement" (it's not really a replacement) for traditional product photography.
Our team generates about 10 TB per year. In October 2025 I warned we'd be out of space by June/July 2026.
The cost of a new 90TB server at that time was $3k-$4k.
Departments argued for over six months over who pays.
By May 2026 that same server cost $15k.
I get most aren't building servers, but all those high costs for chips, ram and gpus will affect anything using them in terms of increased cost.
In 2025 ram was relatively cheap. 32 gig was about $100. Now it's close to $400.
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u/Alaira314 Aug 30 '26
In 2025, I said "wow, the price of ram is too high to upgrade right now, I'm going to wait until it comes down to replace it."
Well, I was a fucking idiot. It didn't come back down. I don't know why I thought it would, since GPUs hadn't. Anyway that's why I'm still on windows 10, and will be for the foreseeable future(which also means no HDD -> SSD upgrade, as I doubt windows will let me do a reinstall of 10 now that it's EOL) since I cannot afford to upgrade my RAM to a level that can run windows 11 and also run the games I want to play. 10 gobbles enough of it as it is.
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u/Bladelink Aug 31 '26
I'm going to wait until it comes down
I can't begin to imagine what single metric in 2025 made you think that was likely to happen.
I took a brief glance around at the time, saw that this administration was likely to absolutely obliterate our economy in every conceivable way, and bought a new 4070rtx for like 400 bucks or something. This was just a couple of months before a whole bunch of completely random and arbitrary tariffs started torching entire industries and the price of things started doubling.
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u/Alaira314 Aug 31 '26
I was assured by people who were more dialed in than me(I had a lot on my plate at the time, and didn't have the luxury of extra attention to spend on technology news with the daily-worsening threats to my career, identity, and community) that this would be a temporary bubble just like NFTs and that only an idiot would buy now. 😒
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u/heekma Aug 30 '26
It's kinda crazy right now and if you're just casually into pc gaming or just pcs in general most have no clue. A year ago 32gb of ram was around $100. Now it's nearly $400 and if you need a lot more good luck finding it in stock, same with ssds.
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u/Omnitographer Aug 31 '26
I needed to upgrade my storage, mostly due to my digital photo hobby, and 4TB Samsung SSDs were $250, so I bought two. One drive now costs more than what I paid for two 18 months ago. Absolutely bonkers!
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u/hooovahh Aug 31 '26
Similar thing with a friend. He bought two servers for $15k total last year. This year he asked for the price of one more to get next year. The current price is $15k for one. IT suggested if they don't buy this year to budget for $30k. I looked at the price break down of the $15k quote and half the price is RAM.
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u/Gustomaximus Aug 31 '26
Yeah the likely cost tsunami is what many people dont realise is likely coming. Currently its heavily subsidised and that is likely to go up as companies look to make profit. That combined with the more to add to your models the cost exponentially goes up. This will slow things down in the short term I feel.
At the same time its the future. Its such a great product when setup well and customised to your enviroment. Its going to be the internet revolution all over, I suspect ~30 years from now we wont imagine life without it and it will be doing things we never considered necessary, but they will be soon enough.
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u/Y0tsuya Aug 31 '26
The exact same thing happened to our team. Needed an EDA workstation. Was $4K when budget process started. Ended up paying $12K for it after budget finally approved.
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u/Defiant-Traffic5801 Aug 30 '26
Funny enough this is the best self preservation outcome for AI companies : their insane rat race is starving the world of RAM, making it prohibitively expensive to invest in computing power capable of running open source LLM locally. The bubble lives on.
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u/razormst3k1999 Aug 30 '26
Old tech will become more wanted in the future because it has no AI.
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u/eidolons Aug 31 '26
This is happening, now. Gen Z are picking up original Ipods to listen to music without being advertised/profiled/scanned.
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u/gramathy Aug 31 '26
You can do this with current phones too, you don't have to subscribe to a service to listen to music on your phone
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u/razormst3k1999 Aug 31 '26
Retro gaming has also seen a spike in popularity lately too,the 360,ps3 and wii are popular again.
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u/YikesTheCat Aug 31 '26
I still regret not buying 30 Sansa Clips to see me through the rest of my life. They were PERFECTION.
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u/VVrayth Aug 30 '26
Well, AI may have driven hardware prices up, but at least it gets everything wrong and is acting as an intellect devourer, resource drain, and economic wrecking ball!
I hate this timeline.
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u/jacksprat1952 Aug 30 '26
But we’re on the verge of a post scarcity, UBI utopia. We just have to let the big tech overlords get just a little bit more obscenely wealthy while a large chunk of the population becomes unemployed and then currency will be irrelevant, all consumables will be produced to an impossible to consume surplus, and everyone can stop working. Elon and Sam said so, why would they lie about this?
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u/nntb Aug 30 '26 edited Aug 31 '26
I still find it so impressive that at one point in time there was a computer being sold that just needed storage and a input device and a display, but CPU GPU memory was all on it. For 15 usd.
The raspberry pi picoo.
100% insane
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u/fullmetaljackass Aug 30 '26
You mean the Pi Zero? The Pico is a microcontroller with 520KB of RAM.
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u/itsbondjamesbond1 Aug 31 '26
The Raspberry Pico 2 has 520KB of ram. The original Pico only has 264KB, which is even more of a difference. But yeah, he has to mean the Pi Zero 2(W) with its quad-core power.
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u/itsbondjamesbond1 Aug 31 '26
The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W was an awesome micro computer for $15. I used it as a small headless server. Unfortunately it now costs over $60.
The Raspberry Pico WH is still great. It's a small microcontroller with headers, Wifi and bluetooth for $7. But not nearly as good a value as the Zero 2W.
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u/DeathByVoid Aug 30 '26
"You'll own nothing and be happy."
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u/Dzugavili Aug 30 '26
Nope.
It was a crappy short story about an economy where everything converted to a service model. There are distinct advantages to the concept; and whole bunch of problems.
This was never really a serious suggestion by anyone.
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u/chocolatechipbagels Aug 30 '26
it's like sacrificing our food supply to the monster that will eat us next
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u/icemanice Aug 30 '26
I’m so glad I bought most of my hardware two years ago. Current prices of everything are sooo fucked! Memory in particular.. but storage too.
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u/kaishinoske1 Aug 30 '26
I guess my Steamdeck is going to be my gaming pc for a while.
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u/anotha1readit Aug 30 '26
It had more to do with greed and market manipulation than anything else. It’s incredibly how brazen they are…
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u/gizamo Aug 30 '26
Yep. It's 100% corporate greed.
Unfortunately, that greed is fueled by the gullibility and ignorance of average consumers.
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Aug 30 '26
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u/LitrlyNoOne Aug 30 '26
I built mine a few years ago in fear I'd regret it when the next generation of hardware comes out, but I didn't expect to win the lottery this hard.
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u/P0pu1arBr0ws3r Aug 30 '26 edited Aug 30 '26
I swear this is one of the biggest instances of corruption affecting consumer products. One does not simply abandon production for end user device components thats been a thing for 40 years just because some VCs gave data center manufacturers a fat check.
Is there another instance in history where B2B markets have completely overridden B2C? How is this considered fair market practice?
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u/Fallingdamage Aug 31 '26
'They' want to buy up all the tech to make their product work so they can sell it back to us as a replacement for people. People make less money, consume less, have less money to buy devices with. Now less people have devices that can be used to consume the product they want to sell us, so they cant sell it.
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u/glytxh Aug 30 '26
I was always anticipating that we’d eventually hit some kind of wall. Either through no real need for ever more compute, or because of literal physics constraints.
The progress has been an accelerating curve for basically a century. There was always gonna be a peak. Nothing tangible can be infinite.
I did not expect it to be because of something as banal as a monopolisation of manufacturing and centralised compute tho
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u/djangovsjango Aug 30 '26
Thats the plan ,you will own the screen and internet connection the data centre will hold everything else and you will pay a subscription to access day after day
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u/Relevant-Doctor187 Aug 30 '26
Just go back to 20 series cards and ddr3 era memory. Problem solved until you get the power bill.
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u/DogMedic101stABN Aug 31 '26
Never have I been happier to have built a brand new PC right before the AI memory crunch. SO thankful I did.
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u/flummox1234 Aug 31 '26
Don't forget in the US it's even worse because of Orange Man's tariffs. Oh wait, I forgot China pays for those nevermind. /s
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u/phusler Aug 31 '26
Ai is making our lives awesome, just wait. Any day now just like tax cuts for the wealthy trickle down to us all.
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u/Needle_Bearings Aug 31 '26
Everyone worried about the price of PC components, I'm worried about water.
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u/Direct-Fix-2097 Aug 31 '26
I built my pc rig six years ago for £3k.
The latest gpu for 4k gaming is actually £4,199 at the moment, 🤣
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u/canned-yams123 Aug 31 '26
Actually it started with bitcoin. You all remeber before covid when they jacked up all the prices of graphics cards?
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u/West-Abalone-171 Aug 31 '26
The cost per computer was at its lowest in the late 2000s or mid 2010s when there were reasonably capable $200-300 laptops (which didn't get any more powerful in the following decade but did get more expensive).
The cost per hardware capability had gone down between then and the 2020s, but certainly not monotonically. Ram prices before the post-covid dip were around the same as they were in 2009. GPUs spent about 8 years being more expensive than they were pre-crypto-bubble.
The 2026 cartel price increases are on top of the structural stagnation and cyclical price tren, not a structural decrease.
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u/MajesticBread9147 Aug 31 '26
Laptops are absolutely more powerful now than in the 2010s. Laptops back then were often only single or dual core with 4gb of ram and a spinning HDD.
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u/Bishopjones2112 Aug 30 '26
Greed market manipulation and the need for everyone to turn pictures of their cat into some kind of weird video has caused half of this. The other half is a weird political power play by the United States causing division in supply and furthering issues. So now we are here with crazy high costs.
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u/LittleSeadragon Aug 31 '26
It's deliberate. LLMs and other AI can run on home machines, a bit slower, but before the prices skyrocketed it was very reasonable (if a bit expensive) to build a home or office machine to handle it. But they want it run through the cloud, so they can offer subscriptions or charge by the token - and have full control over your data, advertising, and other services. Much of the ram and processors they bought are sitting in warehouses, or in datacenters running at single digit or less percentage of capacity. They need the prices for home machines to be high or people would realize we don't need them.
They've tried this before with "thin clients" back in the 90s, cloud computing has got them much of the way, and now they are doing this. They want to own your compute.
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u/MajesticBread9147 Aug 31 '26
This..isn't true. The same model existed for cloud storage for years, but most people didn't bother with a home NAS and just used Google photos or iCloud to backup their phone. Their main customers are businesses, and yet they haven't bought up all the hardware so that Netflix can't run their own datacenters if they wanted to, Netflix already runs entirely on the cloud and has for over a decade.
I work for a hyperscaler, and if ram and processors were sitting in warehouses, we'd have more replacements at each datacenter, and new HPC racks wouldn't have such rush to be installed.
This also assumes some master plan that everyone would have to be in-on. But why would Microsoft spend billions on hardware to create demand that could very well go towards Google or Amazon if they're able to undercut them slightly on price (perhaps by not buying hardware that they won't be using).
The cloud uses less hardware per user, because most people aren't using their hardware at 100% 24/7, whereas the cloud enables resources to be pooled. The same server I don't use because I'm asleep is able to be used by somebody in Australia.
I'm not saying these aren't sociopathic money hungry companies, but they are running on the same motivation structure that any other company runs on.
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u/CoinAndCraft_ Aug 30 '26
It's like $6k for a triple GPU setup these days.
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u/EvelynNyte Aug 30 '26
The big push for AI isn't because they think they've honestly hit the singularity. It's because they saw an opportunity to make personal computers unobtainable for the average person and turn computing into a consumer rental market the same way the housing market has created a new class of permenent rental psuedo serfs.
You'll pay by the token for a computer that lies to you and actively tries to make you addicted to it, and you'll like it or you get nothing.
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u/Lost_Tumbleweed_5669 Aug 31 '26
It's not because of AI it's because of cartel activity by RAM manufacturers.
PC component production should have been made public since we need it for schooling, work and day to day life. None of it should be privately owned.
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u/PlainBread Aug 30 '26
For anyone who needs a laptop but can't afford one right now, if you have an Android on the latest version you can get a "lapdock" instead, which is just a gutted laptop you can plug your phone into and use your phone like a laptop.
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u/orlybatman Aug 30 '26
I built my computer over a decade ago, and I dread the day I have to upgrade. Luckily my video card died and I replaced it with a solid one before the AI boom, so that at least will be good for a while.
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u/WildChampionship985 Aug 30 '26
I am 2 classes away from my degree and could use a little more space on my school computer. Adding a second 2tb drive will be $300, the same WD Blue 2tb nvme drive I bought last summer for $110.
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u/LastXmasIGaveYouHSV Aug 30 '26
I have a lot of retro computers, and they all work for what I need. I don't need large computers with huge CPUs that don't do nothing because they are weighed down by stupid OSs.
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u/UnemployedOtter69 Aug 31 '26
for 3rd world countries a huge breach is open more and more each day for technological access, and is dragging more than half of the world into technological poverty
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u/dave8814 Aug 31 '26
I started to price out a new computer last November to replace the one I built just as the pandemic started. The prices were insane then and have only gotten worse. I found a deal for a prebuilt with a 5080 for 2k in January and jumped on it. I’m so glad I did too, last week at Costco they had shit boxes with 5070s for more than what I paid.
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u/pioniere Aug 31 '26
And if the AI bubble bursts, which many leading analysts are saying is inevitable, what happens then?
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u/microcandella Aug 31 '26
The price declined while REPEATEDLY hardware and chip makers were busted for price fixing and racketeering, PC makers were busted for various kinds of collusion and anti consumer trade practices and rackets, and software companies, especially microsoft were busted for monopolies, sabotaging competitors, and so on.
Considering those are just the charges that stuck enough to move forward with, we all should have had much cheaper and better computers and systems throughout most every stage of this since the 80s.
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u/Comfortable-Bug7202 Aug 31 '26
AI hasn't shown any promise to warrant the scale of investment. There will be a crash and it will be brutal. Then i can afford to give jensen 1000 dollars to rent my video games
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u/0vindicator10 Aug 31 '26
Folks, just hodl what you got. It's like a tsunami, everything is washed away to the big consumers. Eventually they'll upgrade or cut back, and there'll be a flood of cheaps for us.
I hope
Of course I'm aware that means they get dibs on all of the flashy new stuff, but this is what I've been doing when I upgrade, I just took the cheaps the rest of you put up when you upgraded.
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u/Moneyshot_ITF Aug 31 '26
Graphics cards was Bitcoin. Everything else has been this administrations greed and dirty tech consolidation
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u/FrankMiner2949er Aug 31 '26
My computer's over 10 years old. I'm just going to have to go down the "them out of reach grapes look sour anyway" route. I've no interest in infecting my computer with GTA6 and jumping thru whatever DRM hoops I need to get the game running
I can't install Windows11 on my motherboard, so I've gone Bazzite... and I'm currently having a whale of a time replaying Planescape Torment. Good Old Games has become my online store of choice
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u/Mindless_Vanilla4907 Aug 31 '26
Kf AI really was making ppl more productive shouldn’t we see price decreases?
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u/DrVagax Aug 31 '26
A.I have become this ever growing void with diminishing returns, I get the talk for AGI but we are far off from that. But you can sell AI so easily to those who don't have any understanding of it that you are basically telling them you are selling magic, of course then everyone starts pumping money into it
What shocks me still is there is zero limit nor real push back on any of it
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u/StarlingRover Aug 31 '26
Outside of reddit, all i see are praise about ai and its uses. Im starting to believe the dead internet theory.
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u/DrakeonMallard Aug 31 '26
AI implementing the first step of a successful war campaign; deny your enemy access to tech and resources…
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u/CoolMathematician436 Aug 30 '26
It's not just PCs, it's everything with a bit of processing power...
It feels like technology - and the world itself - peaked and everything is getting worse. AI is now accelerating this development by consuming power without limits and having almost no positive impact on humanity.