PC Gaming

I should have clarified better. To date, there are no instances I know of where GPU manufacturers are bricking people's GPUs. When I said manufacturers, I meant it more broadly in terms of gadget/tech manufacturing.

Sony removed other OS function after units were sold, which bricked online function for those that wanted to keep it, since the only way to keep that function was to not update the console or take it online. There have been instances of manufacturers bricking devices, in this case robot vacuums, when the user discovered it was reporting location data about his house to the home company. The user stopped that data collection, and the company remote bricked the device. Spotify bricked a piece of hardware, car thing, after people had already paid for it, with a limited 1 month refund window from when it was discontinued. Belkin is bricking some of it's smart home products on January 31, 2026. In 2019, Sonos launched a trade-up scheme that offered existing owners 30% off the cost of a new speaker. But owners had to activate "Recycle Mode" on their existing Sonos speaker, making it permanently unusable - even if there was nothing wrong with it.

My brain went, kill = brick, then thought about all of the shit I've seen where tech manufacturers fucked over their customers in the past, and just assumed the worst from the start before reading the article.

They didn’t force them to throw away PCs. They have alternative options. People chose to be angry instead of doing anything about it.

It’s the shit people bitch about Apple for doing, but it’s somehow adorable when Microsoft does it.

Linux has entered the chat. I installed linux on my older machine that's ~ 7 years old. My new machine has windows 11 and I fucking hate it.

if tsmc only makes datacenter chips from now on, then "we" are shut out from the huge privacy (and fine tuning specialization) gains given by small efficient cheap to run models (or play games on new hardware). US datacenters will serve US empire/political establishment both with government as main LLM customer, but also for data collection/palantir ontology/social credit scores on every American.

I suspect that better datacenter chips won't actually reduce their cost due to supply limitations, but even for small efficient models, personal hardware has a long payback period compared to a per token "rental" cloud charge. It is unlikely that all of the datacenter chip buyers will have non-government customers to use them all, and so either bailout or bankruptcy followed by megatech buying the datacenters for cheap followed by a bailout in government revenue for big tech global/citizen control applications.

Eventually, even the government has too much AI resources, at planned expansion pace, and then consumer/business computing/gpu market comes back. Could be as soon as 2026 that a collective understanding of absurdity occurs.

Chinese emerging players who are shut out from tsmc/taiwan/ROK chips and memory sources.

If the big two completely abandon the low-mid market Intel, Lisuan, Moore Thread or whatever might put the little DRAM they manage to grab on that orphaned market. A large proportion of gamers aren't into buying 2000$ GPUs. Those companies might not succeed right away but they've been cooking for a while already so I wonder.