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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Nah. The first two thirds of the 20th century was the science and information world. Man gained mastery of the skies, 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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
It's unfortunate but personal general-purpose computing has being under attack for a long time, this is only another nail in the coffin.
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…
> 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?
On HN it's not always clear when sarcasm is in use. Especially given that I have seen AI bros basically cheering this on.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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!
>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.
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.
Nah. The first two thirds of the 20th century was the science and information world. Man gained mastery of the skies, 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
...no. If anything the GPU situation would cause it to ease up as less low-middle end gets even build
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.