Discussion
RE: https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/117412472741486889
RAM and SSD prices have shot straight through the ceiling and meanwhile the OSs they come with are bloated with memory-and-storage guzzling AI garbage nobody asked for—not to mention that for actual productivity or gaming purposes, today's PCs are barely ahead of ones from 2020.
Who'd want a new PC right now?
Another problem is that the chips data centers want may be different from the ones consumer things want.
So once the current round of AI stupidity is over, it'll take the industry a while to get back to responding to consumer needs.
The current round of AI is very very bad: intellectually, economically, and for the gross slop it creates.
Exactly. The barely 20% improvement every 2-year generation thing is old news. E.g., GeekBench reports the 5080 is less than 1.5 times faster than my 3080.
And often performance improvements come at the cost of vastly increased power requirements.
I used to joke one should always wait TWO generations to upgrade. Now it's THREE minimum.
So I'll be waiting until after the AI crash and the few years it takes the industry to recover to upgrade my 12th gen Intel/3080 box. Sigh.
@cstross - I still pull out my 2017 MacBook Air (running Monterey) for work, travel and the occasional cafe visit.
The OS is roughly half the size of the one on my M2 Mini (running Golden Gate) and manages to run 95% of the apps on the newer unit.
And - dare I say it - does everything I need it to do.
@cstross yeah even if you had the spare cash, you'd feel like such a fucking eejit paying current prices
@cstross I work in IT. Big company. for months they've pound in us "you must use AI", " How can you use AI more?", "you're not using AI enough". Then they shut down travel expenditures because memory is so expensive. no shit, more AI drives demand for data centers! more data centers means less memory for end users. I'm glad I'm close to retirement!
@cstross, hmm, well, sticking with Devuan here. Unfortunately, also Android, which means a certain amount of switching off Google's Abhorrent Infestation bloat from time to time. And the next Devuan release (likely in about a year from now) will have some slopware in it…
As for hardware – well, all that I've replaced this year is CPU & motherboard (I recall something from some months ago about board price hikes being likely due to fewer sales; and the old hw needed some maintenance anyway so… replace and retain as backup) and PSU (due to impending failure).
No way am I buying new GPUs, RAM or storage (even spinning rust, which is still the mainstay here) without actual or impending failures. And anyway, I don't actually need faster ray-tracing.
Come on, AI bubble, burst. Or, probably better, be like a balloon with a fast-enough leak…
@cstross I would genuinely pay additional money for a PC that is aggressively non AI.
@cstross One of the proud trademarks of bloated #Capitalism, exacerbated by #TechBros megalomaniacs.
@cstross *Makes hardware 30% more expensive and OS almost usable*
*People stop buying*
Tech companies:
@cstross This seems to be missed by a lot of people oddly. I mean it isn't like PCs are getting super faster or better every couple of years like they used to, so *any* back pressure on demand is going to shut it down.
@ChuckMcManis I bought a Macbook Neo when it launched (right before the shortages drove component prices up) and it's a LOT of laptop for what it is. I've got a very high end Macbook Pro from 2012 and the Neo kicks sand in its face (not to mention 14+ hour battery life vs. 3h30m when the Pro was new).
@cstross Yeah. Would you buy it now, same hardware, a 3x the price? That's kind of the classic Adam Smith back pressure on demand by higher prices. PC buying practices have never been price insensitive in the 45 years I've been buying them. You said you got the Neo it was cheaper and kicks sand in the face of the older MacBook. That's a level a value that isn't there today, I think demand responds to that lack of value.
@cstross
Absolutely.
OS are becoming terrible.
I had to buy a laptop for work and I forced myself to buy a MacBook M5 because, at the time, it was absolutely the best hardware at that price range (strange, I know).
God I miss Linux so much.
@cstross I refreshed my laptop before tariffs. Laptop got to skip the queue ahead of my 2014 desktop.
Desktop still chugs along but I do notice its aging and now i wish I just bit the bullet and replaced both.
@cstross I do. My workstation could use an upgrade for non-AI ecosystem model work. You know, real work.
@cstross I'd love to build a new PC to upgrade one of my now fairly old ones. I expect to pay about the same total as I did for the last one and get something significantly better for the money. That's just not possible in the current market so I struggle to see why anyone looking to upgrade drop cash today?
Install bonfire.cafe
Get the full app experience
@cstross use open source and you do not need all the RAM and use the cloud instead of SSD