Never thought I'd be living in a world where my tech hardware purchases INCREASE in value over the years.
The only hope is China spoils the party.
Something one could say about a high fever being a sign of the immune system working. There are obvious temporary and permanent risks to how the system works, and there are limits beyond which everything simply breaks down. It's best not to have a fever at all.
Well put. Indeed non-free market solutions typically rely on some impossible conditions, in your comparison that would be "just don't get sick". But people will get sick. You can't just "not have a fever at all".
PPE, quarantining and other containment measures exist to broadly prevent sickness, but I imagine not in a universe that is about the free market at all costs, to strain the allegory further. If people keep getting sick with a recognizable pattern, someone ought to look into that, and prevent future outbreaks.
But people won't wear PPE and quarantine and do other containment measures (and not because of free market). Also PPE, quarantining and other containment measures are not perfect and probably will never be. So yeah, again naive, idealistic view that perfectly fits naive anti-free market narratives that require impossible conditions to work.
Of course, my hallucination does not dismiss the possibility that we are in a bubble. Wasn't CSCO something like 200x PE during the dot com bubble? People see immense potential in an idea but don't know how to properly price it, and so we get what is seen as essentially infinite expected growth priced into companies and their products.
My $3k laptop has nearly the best components on the market right now. The problem is that it has a poor build (MSI) and is falling apart in a way that's not repairable. I looked into purchasing an equivalent-or-better laptop, and I couldn't find anything under $6 for essentially the same specs, and over $10k for a significant upgrade. Though I need my laptop for work, I decided just to ride it out till it's death.
GPUs, flight controllers, etc went sky high during the pandemic and we still buy them today.
Hard drives got way more expensive during flooding, and we still have local storage.
And right before that, was it dirt cheap? No? Slightly different scenario then.
> GPUs, flight controllers, etc went sky high during the pandemic and we still buy them today.
They're even more now...
> Hard drives got way more expensive during flooding, and we still have local storage.
Nowhere near as expensive as they are now, nowhere near as high a jump in price in a short period of time as now. Plus, there was a defined end point of "flood over, back to normal." There is no "AI data center build out over, back to normal" in sight.
The AI datacenters are making things more expensive and at the same time destroying existing electronics. All this is happening at the same time that the major OS vendors are locking down their operating systems and creating device attestation frameworks.
Whether it is a coordinated effort behind the scenes is irrelevant, the real outcome of all of this is that the average home tech prosumer will not be able to afford to maintain personal hardware that remains compatible with mainstream services.
In light of the consumer market RAM shortages, all the consumer devices will transition to thin client architectures that offload all their real compute to the centralized cloud. You will not be allowed to modify these devices, and there will be nothing you can modify them to do. They will have no ports, using wireless charging and wireless connectivity, and likely even any UART will be left off the board, if you can get them open at all. Like the Apple Watch or Airpods, they will not be built to be openable, and opening them will be an irreversibly destructive act.
You will not be able to buy these devices, they will only be available on a subscription basis. You will own nothing and be told you should be happy.
Online major digital services will only be compatible with these devices, offering no endpoints for third party devices to connect.
Brown-outs are arguably more dangerous to your electronics, and those are more common now with more frequent heat waves during the summer, stressing the electric grid and triggering public safety shutoffs on the US west coast.
I also think the concerns in the article are overblown. I grew up in the mountains where the electric grid was notoriously poor quality, especially when buildings would fail over to (often poor-quality) generators. It would make computer monitors misbehave, but rarely did it actually damage anything.
The death of Mac was already a discussion topic a few years ago, they only need do XCode on iPadOS or iCloud, Android Studio style.
they don't price gouge on other stuff from shenzhen really do
Eventually ASML will get in same boat as all of the Western industries from shipbuilding and car manufacturing to everything else.
It may take one year or twenty, but law if it's a matter of national security for them, eventually they will get ahead.
I didn't say it was likely, but one of these two outcomes is possible.
I also found out recently my matched, working 3d hardware from the '90s was worth more than my actual year-old medium-high end video card, so who knows!
/s for obvious reasons, except the rise in prices of 3dfx cards ffs (wtaf).
I don't have to imagine what it would be like under communism in order to see what it's already like under capitalism.
Yeah, things are going great over there