Technology

These mother fuckers are nickel and diming us on fucking tin now? That's how you get riots

Thanks for the correction, I meant CPU coolers, which ironically are even less affected by the "key upstream materials" you quote since they are mostly made out of aluminum alloys. The price hike on raw materials, while real, is much less than the effect of surplus should be on the market, and they affect everything through inflation. Don't just take their word for it, look at the 10-year historical graphs, they follow a general trend.

It'll be cloud-based rental computing with compulsory AI spyware and tiered pricing that determines what they allow you to do. The base tier will have just a whopping 2GB of RAM and 30GB for all your file storage needs for just $25 per month. If, one month, you can't afford it, no computing for you, and goodbye software and data. The small print will specify that anything you create on Microsoft 365 Cloud Copilot Windows Home Edition for Teams of Peasants and Serfs is Microsoft's property for all eternity to use, share or sell as they see fit, and you waive any right to ever challenge them legally and will accept a $5 Copilot 365 for Teams gift card in compensation should Microsoft's AI incorrectly recommend you for death by ICE. Private messaging will be impossible and Linux or (heaven forbid) non-vibe programming will be punishable by up to 20 years in prison and a fine of millions of dollars.

Innovation is so exciting. It will have cute little animated AI chums tailored to our individual personalities and consumption profiles, reporting our every move to the authorities for our own safety and the safety of the children! I can't wait!

'New AAA gaming' you mean.

We have millions of good gameplay hours in old titles.
Unevolve, unadapt!

Hell, I have a Sandy Bridge based machine I built in 2012. It's getting there, 14 years old now, and with its 1080ti in there it can still play most games just fine. It's not my primary rig anymore but it's still trucking the same as it ever was.

Mainstream PC performance really hit its plateau by, when, like 2018? I imagine somebody with a machine that's only 8 years old will probably do just fine unless some critical and irreplaceable component in it explodes.

I think we're already there.

More like you'll access better hardware over the web with a subscription fee.

I'd recommend to dystopia a bit harder - if this type of CaaS happens, I expect you won't get to lay a finger on any real local computing hardware. I think you'd have a computing equivalent of a Raspberry Pi which is DRM-locked to a specific service provider's cloud computing services, and a remote desktop or streaming GPU service.

Yeah, just read that article here. Follow the money. They never stop enshittifying, trying to force people into walled gardens that are as shittily built and expensive as possible.

Never attribute to profit?

Especially since servers can do more sophisticated cooling systems than the average home user, like dunking the entire system in oil.

I looked around a bit more after this site wouldn't load and it seems like you are ahead of me, you hit the real reason.

Raw material costs seems to be the primary problem.

Yeah, but these are not exactly complex parts, especially compared to RAM/etc. RAM fabrication is orders of magnitude more difficult than the parts we're looking at here.

I'm not saying it's something someone could get going tomorrow, but beyond the PCB for the PSU everything else is fairly standard and mostly interchangeable. People have made PSUs in their basements. And, for CPU coolers, it's effectively a piece of metal with a fan attached. If we've lost the capability to machine more aluminum and copper I feel like our problems have evolved beyond computer hardware.