Good. Great. Amazing.
$1,000 RAM prices and now GPUs are also going to become unaffordable.
this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2025
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I must have blinked and missed when they were affordable.
more unaffordable.
I think we might be seeing the end of consumer desktop computers coming to pass. The market will split into phones and tablet, which most people use for most things traditionally a computer would be used for. Laptops are widely used for more work like stuff. Thin clients connecting to virtual desktops is already the norm in a lot of companies. Desktop computers might go back to where they were in the 80s and early 90s, very expensive high end prosumer equipment. Only for real enthusiasts, who see it as a hobby and want to invest heavily, or professionals that need the local compute power of a workstation. The computer industry was already in big trouble just before covid, then we suddenly all needed work from home setups or spent more time at home so wanted a new better computer, which caused the industry to pick back up. This AI bubble might just kill it finally, with prices skyrocketing, people will be hesitant to buy new hardware for a while.
Thin clients connecting to virtual desktops is already the norm
I can't believe I have lived long enough to see the return of the dumb terminal.
I was there, from the start* to the end* of the golden era of Personal Computer.
* 3000 years ago
** 2990 years ago
It won't be the end. The bubble will burst, likely violently after being pushed far too far and for far too long, and when it does, the manufacturers will need clientele again. We'll likely see yet another greed-fuelled standardised increase in base prices due components but it won't be the end of the customisable desktop. At the very least, I absolutely won't be buying a tablet. No corpo can force me to do that and I know a lot of people in the space will agree.
You are probably a prosumer, somebody who knows their stuff and doesn't want an inferior experience like on a tablet, console or notebook. Something upgradable, to invest in and use for many years. That market will certainly exist, but prices will be much higher than they are today.
I remember back in the day when I bought my 40MB hard drive it was around $3000 in todays money. I had to really save up to get that thing. I labelled the partition "LARGE" because my mind was blown at 40 whole megabytes of storage.
No idea where we are headed, it's pretty uncertain at this point.
At the very least, I absolutely won't be buying a tablet. No corpo can force me to do that and I know a lot of people in the space will agree.
I said exactly the same thing. Then I bought a set of standalone DJ decks from a coworker and it REQUIRES windows to run the program to analyse the tracks and load a USB. Cheapest thing I could find in spec was a Microsoft Surface Pro 5. £50 delivered. Don't care about it being stuck on win10 because I don't connect it to the net. It's only job is to run that one program and some standalone synths so I can noodle on the midi keyboard and mix at the same time.
Well.... it's also got an ebook/manga reader installed too. I load those files from a usb or SD card though.
greed-fuelled
Companies who build AI datacenters or NVIDIA are just as "greedy" as the company that sold the other user a 40MB hdd or the company you bought your last piece of equipment from. It's driven by the dynamic of the free market, not by individuals who you could attribute something like greed to.
I'm referring to how there's been a trend of "cost of X just increased 15%". Granted I can't, and won't presume to, speak for every individual case but we have access to know enough that these increases often aren't tied to necessity within a company. When profits are increasing year-over-year but the price still goes up, that's a decision made by a greedy someone(s) somewhere up in the pecking order.
If higher prices wouldn't throttle demand, virtually every company (extremely few "ethical" exceptions) would increase prices. That's how prices are set in the first place: probe what customers are willing to pay. It's the game that's greedy, not the players. Even you and me could become corrupted if we've find ourselves higher up in the pecking order.
This could screw over some smaller board partners. They might not have the deals in place to secure the RAM chips they need.
Wasn't this all happening because Nvidia bought all the supply
They've gotta save that supply to feed the AI bubble, though.
…I wonder what it would take for Intel to get in the memory business.
Or GloFo? WTF are the euro fabs doing these days?
Bring back Optane! I'm still using a couple PCIe cards in raid as my boot drive on my home server. The RAM versions of Optane were quite interesting too.
Probably the end of many, if not all, third party vendors.
Is this only going to affect graphics cards or is this going to also bottleneck gpus for servers and high end workstations?
High end workstation is the same silicon/memory as gaming cards.
They’re presumably “saving” it for the high margin server GPUs, under the presumption that memory makers will allocate more production to HBM.