Computing is the means of production. Go figure
this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
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Love how detailed Gamer's Nexus is, but 3.5 hours is waaaaay too much. What's the TLDR?
I'm only half way through but the TLDW so far is that the consumer DIY market is in collapse. Component suppliers are in bad financial shape, and many will probably not survive the down-turn.
Does make you wonder what we will be left with. Probably not all components gone. But likely less choice.
Could get a pi, they seem to be popular enough to not go away any time soon.
Did you see the Pi price increases though? Ouch. A mini-PC is likely better value now.
Part 2: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/more-memory-driven-price-rises/
Mini PC prices are also going up. But yeah they are also an interesting choice to look at.
I'll game on a pi zero before I subscribe to run them on a data center.
My Pi3b is a great little emulator, retropi worked great last time I plugged it in
He repeats information constantly. Any time I watched one of his videos I couldn't stop thinking how it could be cut to a third of the length without losing anything important. For my attention span it's unwatchable.
The problem with that, is if he did that. Then you would see endless people claiming hes bullshit, lying and cherry picking sources endlessly.
You have to make a point, make it again, show proof, make the point again, show different proof of the same thing, make the point a last time, followed by more proof of the same thing with extra sources. ONLY THEN. Does the avg idiot actually believe you instead of just screaming at the top of their lungs that your an idiot.
When you have to compete with misinformation and propaganda, you have to be so overly verbose that it borders on the absurd. Seriously iv watched people argue up and down that Steve lies and makes shit up in every single one of his videos because it doesn't agree with the dude bro crypto cult manosphere twitch streamer they watch.
So while your entirely right he could cut a third of his run time of his longer videos ALL of his videos really. You would just end up with the screaming idiots coming back like they use to on older gamer nexus videos before he started getting really long winded.
This guy is right. I've learned something from posting on the 'net, it's that:
A) The average user is really, really stupid
B) People will never admit they're wrong. They'd rather argue longer and pointlessly than concede a point
C) If they are ever in the complete wrong, there's crickets.
So I've made it a habit to break the habit and agree with people / say they're right when they are
Thanks, Holytimes 😎👍
You are entirely right. Just agree and nod and move on.
Very few people have to actually deal with arguing with idiots. And for them it's typically just a downside of their job. They can't just ignore it. So they have to deal with it.
For the rest of us. Just nod, agree, and move on with your life! You will be happier and have a better mental well-being.
If that were true we wouldn't have anti-vaxxers, flat earth, or religion.
It is true you just have a horrible and woefully lacking view of how truely fucking stupid people are.
Its true and it's the only reason we don't have MORE of those fucking idiots.
No they are right. That was exactly what we learned during the pandemic. You can lay out the most researched fact check argument you want and they still wont believe you.
People are going to still say he is making shit up. No amount of facts are going to help.
Personally, I prefer the method used by a lot of podcasts I listen to. They put a link to all their citation and research instead of cramming it all into the presentation. Often with some discussion items and additional information if I want to check sources.
Video is an exercise in patience, because it is a horrible way to convey information, and really long ones are not helping.
- You can't reason somebody out of a position they didn't reason themselves in to.
- If someone has internalised a position as a part of themselves then an attack on that position is now a personal attack and will be treated as such. ( this is one reason why you see such visceral responses to what would normally be minor disagreements )
- Not everybody is looking for (or will even consider) a differing viewpoint, they will just ignore anything outside of their bubble because they don't care about factual accuracy as much as they care about validation.
- Bad faith isn't always intentional trolling, some people are just natural arseholes ( like babies aren't trying to make your ears bleed with their crying, it's just one of the only means of communication available to them )
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It's a compilation of a handful of previous videos all out under one broad topic. If there's one you care about there's a more dedicated specific video about tariffs, AI, memory, factories, etc.
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I'd rather use a weak single board computer for all my computing needs than rely on some corporate-controlled remote server. As much as these corporations would love for us to only have a dumb terminal, the minimal computer of today has a lot of power.
the minimal computer of today has a lot of power.
Usually enough to watch any sort of video content in HD and play thousands upon thousands of games with zero issue. Just the PS2 library alone is several years worth of content and you can play them all with a good emulator (PCSX2) and a computer from the last 15 years... I'm hoping there's a silver lining in the price hikes, like seeing a renaissance of video game development, with actually optimized games that focus on gameplay and don't take 100gb per map, or maybe people start going back and playing the OG SW: Battlefront II online again.
People use PC for work too.
Most work requiring a PC can be performed by hardware released in the last 15 years.
20 if you are being minimalist.
If all of the work is just typical office stuff, even the software from 15 years ago is more than enough.
I could have done 99% of my last job from an old Atom X5-8500 tablet if I bolted on a good external display and HID. I am perfectly happy navigating with a little J5005 Pentium Silver NUC since everything lived in a browser anyways.
If excel needed more time, let it cook, long as you don't exceed a million rows it'll probably get there someday.
Video and production work requires real compute, but 99% of us desk jockeys could have got by with thin clients and a little elbow grease. But I would contend that we may be living int he golden age of low-watt computing because we have the some combination of all computer games ever written in the history of man, the vast majority of them compilable and runnable on today's ardware or otherwise emulatable
And thanks to Valve, there is it now a very established market for running even AAA 3D titles on dog shit commodity hardware. It's pretty much just the mfps crowd that have to buy each next years release of post-processing laden Call Of Modern Battlefied Spartan Halo 2027, that need to worry about graphics falling behind, when we have such a rich ecosystem of excellent indies. All of my favorite games are like five or eight years old (I play a ton of Crab Champions, and Risk of Rain 2, etc with my gaming crew, these days).
All that to say, old hardware will keep us gaming indefinitely if the will is there. I think the big threat is people forfeiting the sovereignty of their compute and consumption for the illusion of convenience, the same way so few people own ebikes in my country while everyone has Uber and Lyft fees every month on their statements.
Wair till people figure out they can be their own GeForce Now for $0 with Tailscale and Artemis/Apollo.
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Thank god I bought those two 32 TB drives last November for 750 Euro each. With the feeling of getting ripped off.
Now one of those drives is at 1100 Euros, and every day prices go further up. I made the right call, this will last me a couple of years.
But this is all fucked up.
Used to be in Tech you got more for the same or the same for less. Fuck hyperscalers.
I already commented on the video that i currently own a PC and when it breaks i'll find another hobby rather than give money to those greedy AI skinsuits.
I'll just replace it with comparable performance parts. What used to cost £500 now costs more like £200 if you are happy with a similar level of performance. Look at the steam deck, and that includes the price of a battery, touchscreen and controller inputs!
I wonder how far we are from onboard graphics being comparable to my now 8 year old GPU...
Edit - just looked it up, Radeon 780M is from last gen Ryzen CPUs, not sure when/if G series processors are coming for 9000s CPUs or not. Looks like it might be comparable to a 1050Ti, so they are getting there and that isn't exactly bad performance.
You should watch the video, because your comment misunderstands it completely. The point is that in the future there will be no new consumergrade PC components on the market at all, because only a couple of huge corps will survive and they will achieve total monopoly of the market.
It is not a question of price or anything like that, they will simply stop producing it in favour of datacenters, where you can lease computerpower (through AI agents).
Phone sales are massive aren't they? You can buy computers with the same components that some phones use. Currently not overly popular but that might be where we end up.
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I don't want to not be able to have consumer computer parts, although part of me is ready to be done with computers again all together.
In any case, I was just at a Tool collective today to get some tools for a project, and it seems like every time I turn around the solution, or at least mitigation, to this modern world is CO-OP's. If I can't have consumer computers and have to use shared resources, I would definitely prefer to do it as a non profit collective with a management board beholden to the members, not a corporate entity.
Ironically, the "own nothing and be happy" line comes from an essay envisioning a future of co-ops.
3.5 hours!!!! Love ya Steve, but I ain't got time for all that
You can have my PC when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
and also
Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.
cyberpunk cowabunga it is then
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American (maybe more broadly Western) Computer Consumer Products companies are indeed getting fucked.
The thing is, that doesn't mean that the Future is one were Consumers are forced to not have PCs and have all their computing needs served from Big Companies' Servers.
I think, going from evidenc of the former to expecting the latter is a jump too far to take since it's only looking at one side of the equation in one part of the World.
It's perfectly possible that it's the Chinese companies that end up gaining from this, similarly to how in the EV space the result of Western auto companies not offering what most consumers actually wanted (which wasn't a Tesla, since those are too expensive for most people) was that the Chinese created and expanded that industry are now handily outcompetting those Western companies in their home markets.
Chinese parts and Mini-PC (an area where there are still a lot of products well bellow $500) manufacturers are still happilly selling their products to buyers from all over the World on platforms like AliExpress and, as we've recently discovered, Chinese memory makers (actual makers using actual chip fabs, not memory module assemblers) are expanding their production and selling more and more product to consumer market module assemblers in China and Taiwan, filling in the void created by the big memory makers focusing on supplying the AI datacenter boom.
(PS: That said, the China side seems to be covered in the video)
Further, there are other natural reactions in other areas which go against a dystopian future of No More Personal in Personal Computing - for example, software makers, most notably game makers, when they're scoping their products to the computing power that the expect will be available in 5 years, aren't going to be targetting hardware significativelly more powerful than what is common now (because if they did otherwise their stuff wouldn't sell), which means that naturally (though with some delay) the demand for more computing power and storage in personal devices is adjusting to the reduced availability of new devices with more storage and computing power, so rather that demand rather than going to go up it's probably going to stagnate, meaning that the future is most likely one of people running old computers for longer and just repairing what breaks with parts from that generation (one where DDR4 memory is more popular than DDR5) that one where everybody (both consumers and software makers) meekly accepts that the only option is computation running on servers (something which, by the way, game makers have already tried with things like Stadia, which failed miserably).
In summary, yeah the consumer personal computing hardware industry in the West is hurting, but just that is nowhere enough to support this idea that in the Future, Worldwide there will be no more Personal Computers.
(PPS: My expectation of the likely future is probably closest in that video with that of the guy from Corsair).
Is there already x86 silicon from china that is viable? I would hope this at least gives risc architectures a goodd boost, for industry the biggest problem seems to be decent documentation, in embedded stuff hardware on paper often looks good but lacking support can be a huge dealbreaker for developing firmware.
"Son, why are you collecting all those old PCs?" This is why, I'm not going to use a fucking Windows Portal or a xAI TerminalX (or whatever the elongated muskrat will name it) to use whatever OS they allow, while surveilling me 24/7 for my own safety.
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