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Comment by eagerpace | Hacker News Reader

People have the option of just not buying stuff. I sold my Tesla in 2021 for a stupid price, drove a beater for two years, and bought another new car a couple years later. Now, certainly not everyone has that luxury, but this is computers, not real estate. Prices will crash.

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>People have the option of just not buying stuff.

Unless you know, your main and only PC/notebook just died and need a replacement ASAP, they you don't really have an option to not buy. And no, the used market (where I live) is just as fucked, proportionally reflecting the retail gouging, with people wanting quite a lot of cash for tower PCs and notebooks from the Pentium 4 - Core 2 Duo era.

> Prices will crash.

Does your crystal ball also say when exactly? If my laptop broke, then I need a replacement now in the overpriced market, not in X years when prices will crash.

If there were such a crystal ball, the same market doing the gouging would be pricing it in already ;) does suck that "wait and see" is the optimal answer to the average consumer but I guess that's the capitalist hellscape we have wrought

> Does your crystal ball also say when exactly?

last news I heard was end of 2027, when several new production lines from existing producers start operations

If this goes on long enough the prices crashing won't matter because the manufacturers of all the other PC hardware will be gone.

I think we're seeing the end of the PC as we know it, personally.

I think this is the goal. They too powerful for the plebs, enable too many things. Like thinking and learning. Can’t have that.

/s if you need it

I think it's more likely the industry would rather rent us our compute and storage than let us own it ourselves.

We can have our Raspberry Pis and our ESP32s, but meaningful amounts of compute and especially storage will be rental-only.

Requiring proof-of-humanity using device-bound cryptographic attestations (which the "age verification" camp will rally behind) will insure the toy computers we are allowed to own won't be able to conduct meaningful online discourse. Only phones and other locked-down platforms will be trusted to make the attestations necessary to interact with banks, merchants, and governments.

Edit (now that I'm not on mobile):

I think storage ownership, more than RAM or compute, is the cornerstone of digital sovereignty. Big tech will be happy to let us store our data on their servers for a fraction of the cost of self-hosting, so long as we let them train their models on our data. Any storage, be it self-hosted or rented, where the data is inaccessible for model training, mass surveillance, or censorship will command top dollar.

It'll be just like "dumb TVs" going extinct. "Dumb storage" will be impossible to get for any reasonable cost for consumers.

They're coming for business computing too, BTW, but consumers are the low-hanging fruit.

I hope so. I feel so, so, so terribly guilty for not building my wife a computer for her in 2023. She is rocking a 1080ti, and I really wish I had at least upgraded her system, but now I just straight cannot afford to even consider it, given the price of rent, food, gas, energy, all on top of the actual hardware prices.

And I am a SWE.I am not making bad money. I can't imagine what others are going through.

I was so lucky to buy a high-end miniPC to replace my home PC for about $1,500 USD in 2025. The same model now sells for more than $8,000 USD, without disk or RAM. Triple that if you match my original disk and RAM buy. Everything got incredibly expensive, not only storage and RAM.

Way to miss the whole point of the article and fail to understand the point. Do you think if significant part of US industry goes bankrupt because they can't source parts for their products, work machines and consumers disappear... you'll still have luxury of running around in a Tesla?

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