PC is the last major open platform. While other platforms like Android and becoming less open, PC in general is becoming more open than it's been in a long time as heavy MacOS/Android/iOS competition is creating a focus on open standards and all-time high strong Linux support gives people a place to land and tinker/hack to their heart's content.
I think we will see an abandonment of consumer grade PC components and individuals are either pushed towards closed hardware like Playstation, MacBooks, and Android devices or they are pushed towards server grade components. I already have home sever rack, and would recommend it for other people.
Motherboards used to be $100, $200 for the high end. Now they want $300+, ram is crazy, storage, video cards, etc. I'm not surprised sales for these components is hitting a wall.
My parents bought a mid-tier PC for $3,000 (in 1995 dollars). While things are getting more expensive now (and that sucks) we have had it really good for a long time.
I don't really agree with this. Motherboard prices haven't been moved at all by AI.
I would also say that most consumers, who are almost exclusively buying gaming-oriented boards, do not need anything high end. They can pretty much buy the cheapest board available.
I am shopping around for a mini ITX board and the difference between something at $180 and something at $400 is basically one to two faster USB ports, which are pretty much irrelevant on desktop computers, and a few minor conveniences that I imagine most people can do without.
The higher-end chipsets add no discernible advantage and there are no CPUs that are unsupported by the lower end chipsets (on the AMD side, at least).
The high end stuff is just available for people with a lot of money.
Shortages or not, there's little demand for cool new motherboards and CPUs from the enthusiast corner of the market because hardware platforms themselves are stagnating performance-wise.
13-14gen Intel Cores are still more than enough for your average home gamer, Zen 5 shows only marginal improvement over Zen 4 except for a very narrow range of workloads, getting wider than 128bit memory bus is prohibitively expensive while relatively cheap consumer boxes like Mac Mini run circles around dual-channel DDR5 setups, so on, so forth.
Sure, presenting this as a consequence of AI boom is convenient for a news outlet, but even before the craze both Intel and AMD were dragging their feet.
I'm not buying it. Both the premise and the new motherboard, that is.
Not just motherboards. Cases, PC accessories (fans, etc), consumer SSDs, and more. Cases are especially hard hit, apparently, as they're already quite a low margin business.
Personally, I see little reason to upgrade from my AM4 platform. It's never been easier to hold on to aging hardware with the advent of DLSS stretching older cards further, diminishing returns on the newer gen GPUs, and the 'realism' of video games plateauing.
I invested quite a bit in enterprises level homelab equipment 2020 to 2025 (about 10k). Happy I made it before the big bang. Eg. my SAS he8 drives will last at least till 2035. But what then? I want my children to be free, too.
Last year I said I should have upgraded my 1060 last year.
I bought it second hand 7 years ago and it is still the same price.
I don't do much gaming, and it runs Immich / etc light inference just fine. One thing I don't regret is getting 32GB of DDR4 when I built the system around the time of the GPU upgrade.
Agreed. I build a system every ten years and I've got 6 years to go. AM4 works great, and I've managed to hoard enough ram and drives to hopefully cover any concerns for the next 4 years. Things work, they are stable, and I feel super lucky for that.
AI is simultaneously the reason you can't buy a motherboard and the reason you don't need to build a PC anymore. The industry is eating itself from both ends.
This is really a two-for-one for the AI companies: they lock up the hardware market for their growth while also making sure no-one can buy hardware to host models locally.
10-12 Months ago I had commented here that people are not realising that AI is going to price us normal people out of computer hardware and we need China to actually reach on parity with node size. And sadly it looks like I was correct in my prediction.
At current prices, Chinese companies could even produce everything possible (~anything but current gen CPUs and GPUs) on slightly older nodes and make a stonking profit while lowering market prices.
After the recent run-up, where are prices on a per-performance basis? Back to 2019?
Computers were incredibly more expensive when I was growing up. People bought them anyway.
Is a computer that lasts 5-8 really productive years (and is still serviceable for another 5-7) and costs $1500 really a deal-breaker just because it was $1000 and on sale for $850 a year ago? Even if it doubled again, it still doesn’t price normal people out, IMO.
I think your idea of what "normal people" can afford is a bit off. Normal people aren't buying $1500 computers. And they definitely aren't buying $3000 computers.
An 4K Apple ][ cost the equivalent of around $7K when released. A C64 cost the equivalent of around $2K when released. Both were fairly popular and vastly less useful than a computer today.
If the cheapest useful computer ends up costing $3K, it will still be purchased and will still be worth it at around $1/day of useful life.
The C64 sold "between 12.5 and 17 million units" in its lifetime [0], vs. worldwide PC shipments of "71.5 million units in the fourth quarter of 2025." (emphasis mine) [1] It's truly an apples (hehe) to oranges comparison, and in my opinion it only reinforces the point that "normal people" will no longer be able to purchase computers, just like the C64 was not a mainstream product.
Hobbyist equipment is still relatively cheap. You can get previous-gen hardware for formerly current-gen prices, you can run lots of “hobbyist” software on low RAM and no GPU.
Who cares if Qualcomm owns Arduino. It has never been cheaper to get into embedded computing. You can buy Arduino-compatible STM32 Nucleo boards straight from STMicroelectronics for $15-20, and that's first party. If you're willing to buy third party clones there are boards on AliExpress for $10 or less.
Because they own nothing but make believe stocks and life works great for them.
The mega-rich are 100% decoupled from physical reality. May as well treat them more like tribal shaman, priests, preachers, and rabbis.
Just parroting memes the likewise idiot politicians believe are the magic chants that keep gravity itself pulling together the Earth.
"Omg he said the thing! Cut his taxes! Give him welfare!"
Our generation of leaders were raised in a pre-science and information as world. They rely entirely in cult of personality as their meat suit never sees itself engage in the labor it relies on to live. It's well aware intuitively how fucked it is. Must continue to stand in the pulpit!
Nah. The first two thirds of the 20th century was the science and information world. Man gained mastery of the skies, the depths of the sea, the void of space, the atom. We were taming diseases and found a way to end hunger. We started building thinking machines. We were playing with the fire of the gods. Science was working miracles on the daily.
It still is, but nobody gives a shit anymore, we are in the financialization and rent-seeker world now.
Bold claim given all the hate out there for covering up Christian leaders diddling kids, slaughter of Palestinian kids for not being Israeli Jews, and the beheadings and assassinations coming out of Muslim-landia over trite offenses.
I think you conflate informed consent with "brainwashed as children into fealty via allegory of the end times, and threats of violence if they don't comply."
I think treating them as the fae, vampire or demons is sort of insulting. Those creatures are at least bound by supernatural laws and can be negotiated with in some way.
But in a way I do agree with you, I doubt it is as organized as you imply. Yes, companies and governments do not way anyone on a General Computing Device at all. They want to see exactly what content you are viewing and responding to.
Microsoft and Apple have been slowly adding various forms of spyware and locking down what applications you can use. And Cell Phones ? Those are the Holy Grail of what Microsoft and Apple want to move your Laptop/PC to.
Right now Linux and BSD are the only games in town for non-spyware systems. But the new Age Verification Laws seems to be a first attempt to lock-down even Linux :( Since the Linux Foundation is owned by large corporations, I feel that will succeed. For the BSDs ? Right now seems they are flying under the radar.
Why do you doubt this when the rich also have Signal? They meet and talk out of view? The insider trading coming out of Washington?
Why when emails from discovery in labor disputes between google and apple in the 2010s revealed they engage in exactly the sort of manipulation you disbelieve?
I'm thinking about how I jumped on getting a new PC a little over a year ago anticipating tariffs would balloon prices. Turns out I made the right choice but for the wrong reasons (not like the tariffs are helping either, but just wasn't as big of a factor).
High end resins and epoxies are in a critical supply shortage right now. I suspect that there are going to be some serious resource driven PCB shortages in the very near future.
I'm sure the AI shortages are hurting, but also I'm still using my same motherboard from 2020 and I see no reason why I should have to upgrade in the next 2-3 years (whenever I buy my RTX 7070Ti, it might be time, but maybe not even then).
I was looking into self-hosting deekseek v4 pro since frankly cache reads are an absolute scam and they're 90% of the cost, but then I looked at the ROI and it will never pay off fast enough because the hardware will become obsolete faster even if you were running 10 token generation streams 24/7.
The napkin math resulted that renting is around 27 times cheaper than owning (not including power). I think we're really screwed when it comes to having owned access to AI unless intel comes out swinging with a c series card that has 128gb vram so we can run them in a 4x128gb configuration, but seems unlikely since nvidia has a large share in them.
This was calculated expecting around 30tok/s, of course you can get 2-5tok/s much much cheaper, but it's unusable for my workflow.
Ironically the few people not scamming you for cache reads are Deepseek.
Everyone else charges a ridiculous amount but Deepseeks API is $0.003625 / M tok.
I'm surprised no one talks about this because of how significant it is. GPT 5.5 for example costs a ridiculous $0.50 / M tok cached. It's literally almost 140 times cheaper which matters a lot for tool calls.
I would say that since more and more of the world wants/needs sovereignty in this space, more and more options would come up in the next 5 years. They will probably not be the cutting edge we have now but personal computing will not die. It will just get a (healthy) reset.
I assume manufacturers were making enough motherboards in 2025 to fulfill demand, so what happens when the demand is the same but the production is 25% less? Crazy.
I know it's going to be extremely painful, but the sooner this ridiculous unsustainable AI bubble pops the better off we'll be. The more it inflates the more collateral damage it will cause, and we're probably already looking at 2008 levels of financial chaos.
There are probably multiple goals of AI investment. It's entirely possible that they are deliberately killing the affordability of how personal electronics like home computers are made and will instead replace them with terminals that stream everything to the cloud. You can make a lot more money off consumers if you can turn their entire computing experience into a utility.
PCs and higher-end IoT devices (like RPi) are no longer affordable. The web is saturated with slop and bot traffic. We are rapidly losing several of our major technological ecosystems that have driven economic growth in the past few decades. It's not at all clear what economic benefits we will be getting in return.
Smaller manufacturers will fold, and larger ones will leave the consumer market (like Micron/Crucial did), before the market has a chance to bounce back. If and when it does recover, it will be a market of much fewer choices.
A somewhat comparable historical example is the destruction of the Swiss watch industry in the 70s with the advent of quartz and digital watches.
A Rolex Daytona today is known as a very fancy and even hard-to-get watch. In the 70s they were practically giving them away with other watch purchases because electronic watches were taking their lunch.
The bigger takeaway, I think, is the destruction and folding eventually lead to the Swatch group. People forget Rolex, Omega, et. al. were tool watches that were expensive but fairly attainable. Even into the 90s you could walk into a Rolex store and walk out with the watch you wanted. Nowadays you basically have to buy a watch to prove you're good enough to get the one you want.
I forsee a similar thing happening with computing hardware. There will be a small high-end side industry for non-datacenter customers.
The digital watch user will be renting time for a thin client via a datacenter provider. The wealthy or high status user will be able to purchase the expensive boutique home computing hardware they want.
even if volume and hype decreases from the general pop there doesn't seem to be much of a cap on model requirements -- so at least one sector will be pushed into purchases one way or another.
Maybe with AI we can finally kill user-owned computing, and make almost everyone renters.
It's really wrong that the common people have access to things like PCs. It leaves a lot of money on the table the corporations can extract, and makes control much harder. PCs should cost at least as much as a car, so only the right people can afford them.
Those who earn their living from their labor, and those whose income is derived simply by owning things they (often) didn't create themselves and charge for access.
Also the root of most of society in the first place. We would probably not be able to sustain our current standard of living without this horrible system.
If any of these people don't work or don't work enough, they undeserving immoral moochers and should be miserable and in pain.
> and those whose income is derived simply by owning things they (often) didn't create themselves and charge for access.
It totally fine if these people never lift a finger in their lives. In fact, they deserve it. NEVER question that. N-E-V-E-R! It's great! Capitalism is great! Capitalism is fair!
It will be the same two classes there are now and always have been. Those who need to sell their labor and those they sell it to. Class struggle is the only way out. Find some solidarity, you aren't exempt.
if you are on land, you are (or someone is) still paying rent to the government. rent can be raised and you will be evicted if you don't pay.
if you are living mobile, you probably need gas or batteries for warmth or cooling. if your climate is currently comfortable, temperatures can be raised.
or maybe you are a nomad hunting and gathering your own food? the wilderness can be pillaged and sold and "secured" until there's nothing left to eat.
I kinda felt like this was coming so mid last year I built a local rig with the top of the line parts I could afford at the time lol (rtx5090/ryzen9 etc) now I just need to build out my inference setup (sadly m3 ultras r insanely expensive now) - I have a feeling they will try to lock down usage of open source LLMs too. I don’t get how token moat can exist if local inference rigs can be built out and serve open source models locally for nothing (besides power cost).
I'm sure this makes the billionaire class happy but there are some legit economics involved. We all want frontier class models running on our home PC but that takes 100x or 1000x the computer we've been running. The market isn't going to instantly adapt and make that kind of machine for the same price we've been paying for 1% of it, so that we can leave it sitting idle 99% of the day.
AI bros and crypto bros. One and the same thing. Same optimism. Same arguments. Same blind faith. Same zero knowledge of how economy, society or even the technology they are evangelizing works under the hood and what are its shortcomings that are impossible to overcome because physics won't allow.
PCs are also made by corporations, together with PC parts. The reason computing became so cheap during the last 50 years was competition between said corporations. Competition that is also pushing the AI token price down and also encouraging - corporations - to come up with models that can run on user hardware.
So what are you ranting against?!
> Own nothing and be happy.
Ah, here it is. Only governments can confiscate our property and force us into that. Governments and politicians that keep telling us how evil corporations are…
In the digital age corporations can and do confiscate things we thought we owned. Amazon removing paid-for kindle books, devices getting bricked, paying a recurring fee to use some features in your car.
The “own nothing and be happy” quote is from a blog post made by the World Economic Forum. I find meta-governmental organisations even more troublesome, and you can’t vote them out.
It isn’t only conspiracy theorists who should be disturbed by whatever politico-corporate freemasonry that goes on in Davos.
You sound like a useless-eater manager. Just the kind of roles we'll be happy to have in our future Utopia. The people will be happy to be led by such visionaries such as yourself.
We were both being satirical. Seems like people couldn't seem to attribute me the same generosity and benefit of the doubt as the OP. Funny and yet the starkness of the hostility onto my post and not his is real.
Shortage of ram and ssds, and soon, cpus. Motherboards aren’t selling because theres no point buying a motherboard if you can’t by the ram or ssd it needs.
It’s brutal. I’ve just built a workstation with DDR4 and two-gen old cpu. I paid more for the ddr4 than it originally cost, four years ago. The same amount of ram for the latest motherboard would have been 10x ($10,000). So used DDR4 has gone through the roof, which impacts hobbyists who used to rely on “hand-me-downs”.
15 months ago I saw writing on the wall on several fronts. I suggested my community commit to their buys/builds ASAP and be forward-looking, before things changed.
My high-end HEDT would now be +$2300 to build mostly due to memory and SSD pricing. 96GB of memory going from $430 -> $1800 is wild. One community member literally wouldn’t be able to buy their Mac Mini configuration anymore, plus the self-upgrade SSD would be price hiked.
Where I blanche most is my storage server running TrueNAS. Built it 3.5 years ago, future-proofing in mind. Strong SSD cache layer, plus two spare HDDs as spares. It wasn’t cheap then, but I think between disks, storage, ECC memory, etc. it’s +$7000 now to rebuild it again, +$9000-$10000 on last generation hardware.
It's not just new hardware, even used hard drives manufactured a decade ago have at least doubled in price. Scam Altman has effectively killed personal computing for all but the most affluent
Will demand for computing ever go down from where it is now? Even if the AI bubble temporarily pops, in the long run I think the demand for computers will be practically infinite.
Market forces will probably bring the price of hardware down in the next decade. Whether it is in a form that is useful for regular people/hobbyists is another question. If not, then hopefully the "cloud" starts to look a lot different.
I think it's possible (10-15%) that the AI bubble pops and we all live without 50M token/day OpenClaw installs and running Opus to do things that should have been done by a shell script to the point that it causes a dip in total compute demand. I think it's likely (75% likely if the AI bubble pop causes a dip in compute demand) that this dip extends longer than the median lifespan of the hardware currently being installed in datacenter.
Of course in 20 years we'll be using more compute than today (99% likely).
EDIT: Of course cryptocurrencies provide a floor compute pricing.
The brief window between the covid gaming bubble pop/PoS ETH switch and the AI hardware blackhole will be fondly remembered as the last golden age of consumer PC hardware accessibility.
If China keeps releasing decent copies of SOTA models that only take 20% of the resources, then we may get some relief when those models become "good-enough"
>copies of SOTA models that only take 20% of the resources
They might be 20% of the price (because they don't have to invest that much in training), but are probably not 20% of the resources (ie. inference), considering they take more tokens to do the same task, and have slower inference speeds.
I've been using deepseek and it's good enough for my personal use. It takes way more time/tokens/course-correcting to get things done, but I spend in a month what I spend in a day with opus 4.6
"Fueled by greed". It would be trivial to say no to AI companies because dollars are dollars, it doesn't matter who pays them, and prioritizing literally all of humanity instead of "five companies" is a choice that every single supplier could make, but decided not to. This problem was 100% manufactured by suppliers.
> required it isn't really a consumer choice, is it?
No one really resists or pushes back. When I resist I hear "that's what consumers want", "it's for security", or that I'm the problem. There is no one to complain to even, except to low paid kiddos in customer service.
PC is the last major open platform. While other platforms like Android and becoming less open, PC in general is becoming more open than it's been in a long time as heavy MacOS/Android/iOS competition is creating a focus on open standards and all-time high strong Linux support gives people a place to land and tinker/hack to their heart's content.
I think we will see an abandonment of consumer grade PC components and individuals are either pushed towards closed hardware like Playstation, MacBooks, and Android devices or they are pushed towards server grade components. I already have home sever rack, and would recommend it for other people.
This will surely bring new energy into opening these platforms, as it did in days before
> While other platforms like Android and becoming less open
ok....
> PC in general is becoming more open than it's been in a long time as heavy MacOS/Android/iOS competition is creating a focus on open standards ...
I'm so confused by what you're trying to say here.
Motherboards used to be $100, $200 for the high end. Now they want $300+, ram is crazy, storage, video cards, etc. I'm not surprised sales for these components is hitting a wall.
My parents bought a mid-tier PC for $3,000 (in 1995 dollars). While things are getting more expensive now (and that sucks) we have had it really good for a long time.
I don't really agree with this. Motherboard prices haven't been moved at all by AI.
I would also say that most consumers, who are almost exclusively buying gaming-oriented boards, do not need anything high end. They can pretty much buy the cheapest board available.
I am shopping around for a mini ITX board and the difference between something at $180 and something at $400 is basically one to two faster USB ports, which are pretty much irrelevant on desktop computers, and a few minor conveniences that I imagine most people can do without.
The higher-end chipsets add no discernible advantage and there are no CPUs that are unsupported by the lower end chipsets (on the AMD side, at least).
The high end stuff is just available for people with a lot of money.
Shortages or not, there's little demand for cool new motherboards and CPUs from the enthusiast corner of the market because hardware platforms themselves are stagnating performance-wise.
13-14gen Intel Cores are still more than enough for your average home gamer, Zen 5 shows only marginal improvement over Zen 4 except for a very narrow range of workloads, getting wider than 128bit memory bus is prohibitively expensive while relatively cheap consumer boxes like Mac Mini run circles around dual-channel DDR5 setups, so on, so forth.
Sure, presenting this as a consequence of AI boom is convenient for a news outlet, but even before the craze both Intel and AMD were dragging their feet.
I'm not buying it. Both the premise and the new motherboard, that is.
Not just motherboards. Cases, PC accessories (fans, etc), consumer SSDs, and more. Cases are especially hard hit, apparently, as they're already quite a low margin business.
Personally, I see little reason to upgrade from my AM4 platform. It's never been easier to hold on to aging hardware with the advent of DLSS stretching older cards further, diminishing returns on the newer gen GPUs, and the 'realism' of video games plateauing.
> and the 'realism' of video games plateauing.
I used to think the plateau was here when the Xbox 360 and PS3 came out.
I invested quite a bit in enterprises level homelab equipment 2020 to 2025 (about 10k). Happy I made it before the big bang. Eg. my SAS he8 drives will last at least till 2035. But what then? I want my children to be free, too.
You cannot be fully free if you're attached to physical goods.
It may sound like pseudo-Buddhist claptrap, but it's also true. Or, I suppose, Fight Club claptrap. It's still true.
The choice is "do you want to participate in society, its benefits and drawbacks". You can't have only one side of that.
The first rule of Buddhist Fight Club is that attachment causes suffering.
I should have upgraded my GTX 1060 6GB last year.
Last year I said I should have upgraded my 1060 last year.
I bought it second hand 7 years ago and it is still the same price.
I don't do much gaming, and it runs Immich / etc light inference just fine. One thing I don't regret is getting 32GB of DDR4 when I built the system around the time of the GPU upgrade.
Agreed. I build a system every ten years and I've got 6 years to go. AM4 works great, and I've managed to hoard enough ram and drives to hopefully cover any concerns for the next 4 years. Things work, they are stable, and I feel super lucky for that.
AI is simultaneously the reason you can't buy a motherboard and the reason you don't need to build a PC anymore. The industry is eating itself from both ends.
This is really a two-for-one for the AI companies: they lock up the hardware market for their growth while also making sure no-one can buy hardware to host models locally.
10-12 Months ago I had commented here that people are not realising that AI is going to price us normal people out of computer hardware and we need China to actually reach on parity with node size. And sadly it looks like I was correct in my prediction.
At current prices, Chinese companies could even produce everything possible (~anything but current gen CPUs and GPUs) on slightly older nodes and make a stonking profit while lowering market prices.
China is also short on supply... Capex for these are planned years ahead and just not flexible enough to deal with the supply squeeze right now.
It would unfortunately be considered contraband in the US or tariffed 500%
If only the rest of the world could buy it, it would probably work almost as well. Besides, I'm in the rest of the world ;)
After the recent run-up, where are prices on a per-performance basis? Back to 2019?
Computers were incredibly more expensive when I was growing up. People bought them anyway.
Is a computer that lasts 5-8 really productive years (and is still serviceable for another 5-7) and costs $1500 really a deal-breaker just because it was $1000 and on sale for $850 a year ago? Even if it doubled again, it still doesn’t price normal people out, IMO.
I think your idea of what "normal people" can afford is a bit off. Normal people aren't buying $1500 computers. And they definitely aren't buying $3000 computers.
An 4K Apple ][ cost the equivalent of around $7K when released. A C64 cost the equivalent of around $2K when released. Both were fairly popular and vastly less useful than a computer today.
If the cheapest useful computer ends up costing $3K, it will still be purchased and will still be worth it at around $1/day of useful life.
The C64 sold "between 12.5 and 17 million units" in its lifetime [0], vs. worldwide PC shipments of "71.5 million units in the fourth quarter of 2025." (emphasis mine) [1] It's truly an apples (hehe) to oranges comparison, and in my opinion it only reinforces the point that "normal people" will no longer be able to purchase computers, just like the C64 was not a mainstream product.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20160306232450/http://www.pageta... [1] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-1-20...
> "normal people" will no longer be able to purchase computers,
Starbucks' revenue was almost $10B in the last quarter. Most people can clearly afford $1/day for something as useful as a computer.
I just looked at some low-end NAS-oriented HDDs. The cost $/TB is 2x similar ones I bought 5 years ago.
That has never before happened in the history of computing, and it violates long-held, fundamental assumptions.
It happened in 2011 when massive flooding in Thailand stopped a huge chunk of global production. Hard drive prices pretty much doubled overnight.
It's an active attack on the Hobbyist space. Qualcomm buying Arduino solidified this idea in my head. They literally want us to own nothing.
Hobbyist equipment is still relatively cheap. You can get previous-gen hardware for formerly current-gen prices, you can run lots of “hobbyist” software on low RAM and no GPU.
It’s bad, but it’s not “literally own nothing”.
Yeah, I'm not sure that fewer people will own computers, I do think people will shift to much longer upgrade cycles.
it just depends on how you define computer.
people will own an increasing number of dumb terminals connected to rented services.
does that reduce the number of computers? well, no..
so, imo : the trick isn't to reduce physical ownership of devices, the trick is to make it so that you need Big Iron in order to do anything.
One way that might be achieved is by forming social and cultural dependence on models so large that no one individual could possibly run them...
The second hand market is going to have much much more lag. But it's very unclear that this is going to sustain indefinitely.
Who cares if Qualcomm owns Arduino. It has never been cheaper to get into embedded computing. You can buy Arduino-compatible STM32 Nucleo boards straight from STMicroelectronics for $15-20, and that's first party. If you're willing to buy third party clones there are boards on AliExpress for $10 or less.
Most things were cheaper last year. But you can still get RP2049 Zero for less than a buck each and run FUZIX. Neat.
Because they own nothing but make believe stocks and life works great for them.
The mega-rich are 100% decoupled from physical reality. May as well treat them more like tribal shaman, priests, preachers, and rabbis.
Just parroting memes the likewise idiot politicians believe are the magic chants that keep gravity itself pulling together the Earth.
"Omg he said the thing! Cut his taxes! Give him welfare!"
Our generation of leaders were raised in a pre-science and information as world. They rely entirely in cult of personality as their meat suit never sees itself engage in the labor it relies on to live. It's well aware intuitively how fucked it is. Must continue to stand in the pulpit!
Nah. The first two thirds of the 20th century was the science and information world. Man gained mastery of the skies, the depths of the sea, the void of space, the atom. We were taming diseases and found a way to end hunger. We started building thinking machines. We were playing with the fire of the gods. Science was working miracles on the daily.
It still is, but nobody gives a shit anymore, we are in the financialization and rent-seeker world now.
Now we are just playing with fire.
>May as well treat them more like tribal shaman, priests, preachers, and rabbis.
Why associate them with roles that have a degree of positive association and human connection?
Treating them as faeries, vampires, or demons seems more accurate.
Bold claim given all the hate out there for covering up Christian leaders diddling kids, slaughter of Palestinian kids for not being Israeli Jews, and the beheadings and assassinations coming out of Muslim-landia over trite offenses.
I think you conflate informed consent with "brainwashed as children into fealty via allegory of the end times, and threats of violence if they don't comply."
I think treating them as the fae, vampire or demons is sort of insulting. Those creatures are at least bound by supernatural laws and can be negotiated with in some way.
Tin foil hat :)
But in a way I do agree with you, I doubt it is as organized as you imply. Yes, companies and governments do not way anyone on a General Computing Device at all. They want to see exactly what content you are viewing and responding to.
Microsoft and Apple have been slowly adding various forms of spyware and locking down what applications you can use. And Cell Phones ? Those are the Holy Grail of what Microsoft and Apple want to move your Laptop/PC to.
Right now Linux and BSD are the only games in town for non-spyware systems. But the new Age Verification Laws seems to be a first attempt to lock-down even Linux :( Since the Linux Foundation is owned by large corporations, I feel that will succeed. For the BSDs ? Right now seems they are flying under the radar.
Why do you doubt this when the rich also have Signal? They meet and talk out of view? The insider trading coming out of Washington?
Why when emails from discovery in labor disputes between google and apple in the 2010s revealed they engage in exactly the sort of manipulation you disbelieve?
And currently the US government is actively trying to ban chinese hardware from the consumer market [1]. So gonna be real fun.
Maybe we'll get a chinese hardware black market.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
I'm thinking about how I jumped on getting a new PC a little over a year ago anticipating tariffs would balloon prices. Turns out I made the right choice but for the wrong reasons (not like the tariffs are helping either, but just wasn't as big of a factor).
I guess my hasty purchase meant as only a temporary, times were tight, placeholder Dell Inspiron in 2015 has to do me for another ten years.
High end resins and epoxies are in a critical supply shortage right now. I suspect that there are going to be some serious resource driven PCB shortages in the very near future.
Is anything not in a shortage?
> Is anything not in a shortage?
Technofascism
...no. If anything the GPU situation would cause it to ease up as less low-middle end gets even build
I'm sure the AI shortages are hurting, but also I'm still using my same motherboard from 2020 and I see no reason why I should have to upgrade in the next 2-3 years (whenever I buy my RTX 7070Ti, it might be time, but maybe not even then).
Who will be the first motherboard maker to put out a board with 12 slots for legacy RAM?
Weren't we supposed to be living in the post-scarcity era?
We are, it's just very unevenly distributed.
I was looking into self-hosting deekseek v4 pro since frankly cache reads are an absolute scam and they're 90% of the cost, but then I looked at the ROI and it will never pay off fast enough because the hardware will become obsolete faster even if you were running 10 token generation streams 24/7.
The napkin math resulted that renting is around 27 times cheaper than owning (not including power). I think we're really screwed when it comes to having owned access to AI unless intel comes out swinging with a c series card that has 128gb vram so we can run them in a 4x128gb configuration, but seems unlikely since nvidia has a large share in them.
This was calculated expecting around 30tok/s, of course you can get 2-5tok/s much much cheaper, but it's unusable for my workflow.
Ironically the few people not scamming you for cache reads are Deepseek.
Everyone else charges a ridiculous amount but Deepseeks API is $0.003625 / M tok.
I'm surprised no one talks about this because of how significant it is. GPT 5.5 for example costs a ridiculous $0.50 / M tok cached. It's literally almost 140 times cheaper which matters a lot for tool calls.
it's a temporary promo, deepseek will return to only 10x cheaper after.
I would say that since more and more of the world wants/needs sovereignty in this space, more and more options would come up in the next 5 years. They will probably not be the cutting edge we have now but personal computing will not die. It will just get a (healthy) reset.
I assume manufacturers were making enough motherboards in 2025 to fulfill demand, so what happens when the demand is the same but the production is 25% less? Crazy.
See Permacomputing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48044638
I know it's going to be extremely painful, but the sooner this ridiculous unsustainable AI bubble pops the better off we'll be. The more it inflates the more collateral damage it will cause, and we're probably already looking at 2008 levels of financial chaos.
There are probably multiple goals of AI investment. It's entirely possible that they are deliberately killing the affordability of how personal electronics like home computers are made and will instead replace them with terminals that stream everything to the cloud. You can make a lot more money off consumers if you can turn their entire computing experience into a utility.
What’s the feedback loop that leads to a total financial collapse? This looks much more like dotcom bubble. Everyone knows where the exposure is.
PCs and higher-end IoT devices (like RPi) are no longer affordable. The web is saturated with slop and bot traffic. We are rapidly losing several of our major technological ecosystems that have driven economic growth in the past few decades. It's not at all clear what economic benefits we will be getting in return.
No point in buying motherboards if you can't afford to put any RAM in it.
We are in AI mania right now. I dont think this will continue forever.
Smaller manufacturers will fold, and larger ones will leave the consumer market (like Micron/Crucial did), before the market has a chance to bounce back. If and when it does recover, it will be a market of much fewer choices.
A somewhat comparable historical example is the destruction of the Swiss watch industry in the 70s with the advent of quartz and digital watches.
A Rolex Daytona today is known as a very fancy and even hard-to-get watch. In the 70s they were practically giving them away with other watch purchases because electronic watches were taking their lunch.
The bigger takeaway, I think, is the destruction and folding eventually lead to the Swatch group. People forget Rolex, Omega, et. al. were tool watches that were expensive but fairly attainable. Even into the 90s you could walk into a Rolex store and walk out with the watch you wanted. Nowadays you basically have to buy a watch to prove you're good enough to get the one you want.
I forsee a similar thing happening with computing hardware. There will be a small high-end side industry for non-datacenter customers.
The digital watch user will be renting time for a thin client via a datacenter provider. The wealthy or high status user will be able to purchase the expensive boutique home computing hardware they want.
It's sad when our best hope is that the pumped economy dumps and tanks all the other industries so we can buy computers again.
hard to tell.
even if volume and hype decreases from the general pop there doesn't seem to be much of a cap on model requirements -- so at least one sector will be pushed into purchases one way or another.
considering how unsustainable this whole AI Business is and how much it ruins everything, I can't wait for the crash.
Why did we listen to the Worldcoin guy again?
Because he killed the Open part of openai and the PEs went nuts
Maybe with AI we can finally kill user-owned computing, and make almost everyone renters.
It's really wrong that the common people have access to things like PCs. It leaves a lot of money on the table the corporations can extract, and makes control much harder. PCs should cost at least as much as a car, so only the right people can afford them.
Own nothing and be happy.
Sarcasm aside, yep. There will be three classes: the owned, the owners and the unownable. I aim to be unownable.
There will be two classes: those who are part of the perpetual underclass and those who are not. And 98 percent of the population will be part of it.
There are _already_ two classes:
Those who earn their living from their labor, and those whose income is derived simply by owning things they (often) didn't create themselves and charge for access.
The root of most of society's problems right there...
Also the root of most of society in the first place. We would probably not be able to sustain our current standard of living without this horrible system.
> Those who earn their living from their labor
If any of these people don't work or don't work enough, they undeserving immoral moochers and should be miserable and in pain.
> and those whose income is derived simply by owning things they (often) didn't create themselves and charge for access.
It totally fine if these people never lift a finger in their lives. In fact, they deserve it. NEVER question that. N-E-V-E-R! It's great! Capitalism is great! Capitalism is fair!
> There will be two classes
That confident "will" in that prognosis may ultimately stimulate a consensus "why?" response in the population to explore alternative outcomes ..
Sounds like my kid's friends talking about betas, alphas and sigmas. I think they aim to be sigmas.
i've said something similar, but i shorten it to labour and capital. similar conclusion.
It will be the same two classes there are now and always have been. Those who need to sell their labor and those they sell it to. Class struggle is the only way out. Find some solidarity, you aren't exempt.
How will you do that?
To be owned, someone needs leverage over you or the ability to coerce you.
I spent the last half a century making sure they have no leverage and I am not interested in being coerced.
It's called security.
If you don't care to go into detail, that's fine, but your answer is vague. E.g. do you have a hidden, off-grid, underground lair?
> If you don't care to go into detail, that's fine, but your answer is vague
No lairs necessary. You can read up on people who do FIRE.
No. I don't need to work. I outright own my accomodation. I have no hard technology dependencies.
if you are on land, you are (or someone is) still paying rent to the government. rent can be raised and you will be evicted if you don't pay.
if you are living mobile, you probably need gas or batteries for warmth or cooling. if your climate is currently comfortable, temperatures can be raised.
or maybe you are a nomad hunting and gathering your own food? the wilderness can be pillaged and sold and "secured" until there's nothing left to eat.
there is no perfect security.
Hey guys, Richard Stallman is on HN!
Hey I clean my toes before they become snackable.
I kinda felt like this was coming so mid last year I built a local rig with the top of the line parts I could afford at the time lol (rtx5090/ryzen9 etc) now I just need to build out my inference setup (sadly m3 ultras r insanely expensive now) - I have a feeling they will try to lock down usage of open source LLMs too. I don’t get how token moat can exist if local inference rigs can be built out and serve open source models locally for nothing (besides power cost).
I'm sure this makes the billionaire class happy but there are some legit economics involved. We all want frontier class models running on our home PC but that takes 100x or 1000x the computer we've been running. The market isn't going to instantly adapt and make that kind of machine for the same price we've been paying for 1% of it, so that we can leave it sitting idle 99% of the day.
It's unfortunate but personal general-purpose computing has being under attack for a long time, this is only another nail in the coffin.
On HN it's not always clear when sarcasm is in use. Especially given that I have seen AI bros basically cheering this on.
Not to mention the comment agents. The true AI bro/sis won't waste her/his time commenting when an agent can do it for him/her.
If you want it to be sarcasm, treat it like sarcasm. What's the worst thing that could happen?
Well, the last time I assumed everyone was being sarcastic and ironic, until they actually elected the guy president.
Haha, ah yes, good old GWB.
AI bros and crypto bros. One and the same thing. Same optimism. Same arguments. Same blind faith. Same zero knowledge of how economy, society or even the technology they are evangelizing works under the hood and what are its shortcomings that are impossible to overcome because physics won't allow.
PCs are also made by corporations, together with PC parts. The reason computing became so cheap during the last 50 years was competition between said corporations. Competition that is also pushing the AI token price down and also encouraging - corporations - to come up with models that can run on user hardware.
So what are you ranting against?!
> Own nothing and be happy.
Ah, here it is. Only governments can confiscate our property and force us into that. Governments and politicians that keep telling us how evil corporations are…
In the digital age corporations can and do confiscate things we thought we owned. Amazon removing paid-for kindle books, devices getting bricked, paying a recurring fee to use some features in your car.
The “own nothing and be happy” quote is from a blog post made by the World Economic Forum. I find meta-governmental organisations even more troublesome, and you can’t vote them out.
It isn’t only conspiracy theorists who should be disturbed by whatever politico-corporate freemasonry that goes on in Davos.
> Only governments can confiscate our property and force us into that.
... Do you want corporations to have that power too or something? What are you saying here?
You sound like a useless-eater manager. Just the kind of roles we'll be happy to have in our future Utopia. The people will be happy to be led by such visionaries such as yourself.
Hey, I'm pretty sure the person you're replying to is being satirical, and you're both in alignment on this one.
We were both being satirical. Seems like people couldn't seem to attribute me the same generosity and benefit of the doubt as the OP. Funny and yet the starkness of the hostility onto my post and not his is real.
Shortage of ram and ssds, and soon, cpus. Motherboards aren’t selling because theres no point buying a motherboard if you can’t by the ram or ssd it needs.
It’s brutal. I’ve just built a workstation with DDR4 and two-gen old cpu. I paid more for the ddr4 than it originally cost, four years ago. The same amount of ram for the latest motherboard would have been 10x ($10,000). So used DDR4 has gone through the roof, which impacts hobbyists who used to rely on “hand-me-downs”.
15 months ago I saw writing on the wall on several fronts. I suggested my community commit to their buys/builds ASAP and be forward-looking, before things changed.
My high-end HEDT would now be +$2300 to build mostly due to memory and SSD pricing. 96GB of memory going from $430 -> $1800 is wild. One community member literally wouldn’t be able to buy their Mac Mini configuration anymore, plus the self-upgrade SSD would be price hiked.
Where I blanche most is my storage server running TrueNAS. Built it 3.5 years ago, future-proofing in mind. Strong SSD cache layer, plus two spare HDDs as spares. It wasn’t cheap then, but I think between disks, storage, ECC memory, etc. it’s +$7000 now to rebuild it again, +$9000-$10000 on last generation hardware.
It's not just new hardware, even used hard drives manufactured a decade ago have at least doubled in price. Scam Altman has effectively killed personal computing for all but the most affluent
Will demand for computing ever go down from where it is now? Even if the AI bubble temporarily pops, in the long run I think the demand for computers will be practically infinite.
Market forces will probably bring the price of hardware down in the next decade. Whether it is in a form that is useful for regular people/hobbyists is another question. If not, then hopefully the "cloud" starts to look a lot different.
I think it's possible (10-15%) that the AI bubble pops and we all live without 50M token/day OpenClaw installs and running Opus to do things that should have been done by a shell script to the point that it causes a dip in total compute demand. I think it's likely (75% likely if the AI bubble pop causes a dip in compute demand) that this dip extends longer than the median lifespan of the hardware currently being installed in datacenter.
Of course in 20 years we'll be using more compute than today (99% likely).
EDIT: Of course cryptocurrencies provide a floor compute pricing.
The brief window between the covid gaming bubble pop/PoS ETH switch and the AI hardware blackhole will be fondly remembered as the last golden age of consumer PC hardware accessibility.
If China keeps releasing decent copies of SOTA models that only take 20% of the resources, then we may get some relief when those models become "good-enough"
>copies of SOTA models that only take 20% of the resources
They might be 20% of the price (because they don't have to invest that much in training), but are probably not 20% of the resources (ie. inference), considering they take more tokens to do the same task, and have slower inference speeds.
https://x.com/scaling01/status/2050616057191072161
Even at 2x the tokens (max from that tweet), that makes them 40% of resources. Which is still only 40% of the resources.
I've been using deepseek and it's good enough for my personal use. It takes way more time/tokens/course-correcting to get things done, but I spend in a month what I spend in a day with opus 4.6
As an example?
...just as the kleptocrats wanted, to stop the spread of self-hosting and desktop computing now that society is tentatively starting to go digital.
"Fueled by greed". It would be trivial to say no to AI companies because dollars are dollars, it doesn't matter who pays them, and prioritizing literally all of humanity instead of "five companies" is a choice that every single supplier could make, but decided not to. This problem was 100% manufactured by suppliers.
It would be equally "trivial" to say no to personal compute as well. So maybe the problem is manufactured by all of us.
poor Joe Rogan
Waiting for the future where the only computing devices you can buy as a consumer are locked-down phones and PCs are simply not available anymore...
That does seem to be where this is headed. Especially after googles last announcement possibly bricking 99% of the phones from accessing the internet
This looks like a consumer choice and producers are following up with the demand.
Given that the AI companies are still operating at a loss and running on investor money, I'm not sure it's actually driven by consumer choice.
Consumers are not helping though. They do everything on a smartphone and don't even blink when mobile app is required for most trivial things.
To echo the post you are responding to: when the app is required it isn't really a consumer choice, is it?
> required it isn't really a consumer choice, is it?
No one really resists or pushes back. When I resist I hear "that's what consumers want", "it's for security", or that I'm the problem. There is no one to complain to even, except to low paid kiddos in customer service.
Eeey its toms hardware, an embarrassment 20+ years and counting
I can't speak to it now, but it used to be the go to source of CPU and 3D card benchmarking.
They've turned into a pretty unserious, non-critical, non-hardcore ad page.
So, they're like an LLM?
It's still my go-to. Their GPU benchmark pages are useful.