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It will never bounce back.
The "plan" is to effectively kill the market for personal PCs. PCs won't be gone, but with the bulk of the population buying phones, tablets, or thin clients, it becomes far more niche and kills its critical mass for platform development.
It sounds tinfoil hat-ish yeah, but... well, explain 2026 to your 2011 self.
I foresee what happens is consumer level hardware just stops getting made, except devices like phones and tablets.
Oh, you wanted DDR5? We stopped making that. Hyperscalers pay a 20x markup for the same wafers. You want a motherboard? Sorry, demand dried up and we don’t make them.
You can rent our computers through GeForce Now and stream straight to your iPad though!
Yeah, this is exactly what I meant, worded better.
There needs to a critical mass of PC demand for us to get anything at all.
not tinfoil hat, once everything is strictly on the cloud, you'll have no choice but to pay a monthly bill for everything.
And then eventually we will just have screens and operating system will just be streamed from the cloud.
I'm not that tin-foil-hat-ish. I think Apple will keep iPhones and Macbook Neos, and some scaled up versions for devs. Maybe Intel will morph their laptop platforms to lower power. Maybe Valve will press on with Steam Machines for a bit.
But I think the "Windows PC platform" as we know it will be stagnant.
You won't be able to just buy an RTX 7080 laptop, or build an ATX PC, because volume sales of those platforms will dry up. Without "Best Buy laptops" to fund them, why would Intel and AMD spend $billions on those chip designs for a few enthusiasts who can't afford them anyway, when younger generations don't even know how to use PCs?
Instead, they focus on servers, which shifts more people to thin clients and perpetuates the trend.
I could be wrong about that even.
The new Xbox CEO is making noise about PCs. Sony would be stupid not to do the same thing. The AI bubble could pop faster than I anticipate.
But still, its hard to see a future for PCs.
I think you're 100% right. There just too much profit incentive on the table. With AI continuing to cash strap companies, the best way to cover some of that debt is by finding other revenue streams. Microsoft already has cost models in place for virtual machines, and dummy hardware specifically for accessing VMs in the cloud. Extrapolate that out as the more "affordable" option ($200 entry free for an HDMI dock with a WiFi card and 32MiB of onboard storage for credential storage) and it becomes very appealing to most people just on the convenience proposition. Then Microsoft data mines the info stored by users to sell for advertising, and suddenly Microsoft isn't in debt, it's profitable again.
I'm having a hard time seeing this but time will tell.
I currently have an ok PC and when it inevitably breaks i'll buy one of those old handhelds and play Tetris.
I won't pay 1 cent to those bastards to play on their servers, they can die and eat shit in hell.
Bezos already showed what will happen with Luna and the other assholes will do the same if you are stupid enough to fall for that scam.
You can build a streaming box. My gaming pc is a vm with a dedicated GPU that I stream to my laptop.
That sounds like an idea but will we be able to afford the parts to build one?
Ram has doubled I think. Gpus are probably close. It's a nightmare
I'm surprised the drop is not a lot bigger... Who in their right mind would buy a PC right now unless they had absolutely no choice?
What'll get really bad is when the hardware OEMs become insolvent due to high prices killing consumer demand for their products, and then we are left with few to no options for PC parts.
If nothing else, this could spell the end of the modular ATX/ITX PC.
DDR4 is still relatively addordable right now and works fine for gaming
Most consumers don't research purchases a ton, much less have any idea what's going on in the hardware market. They wander around Best Buy or the first two pages of Amazon search, and buy.
And then you have businesses who are just gonna procure stuff they have to have anyway.
...I would have liked to see data more split by segment and form factor, though.
What'll get really bad is when the hardware OEMs become insolvent due to high prices killing consumer demand for their products, and then we are left with few to no options for PC parts.
They're certainly on their way. The Raspberry Pi foundation, and many clones give me hope for a future for personal "hobby" computing, at least.
Businesses
Good news, you can rent your PC in the cloud!
AHH, so that's how the rich get ultra-tech while everyone scraps old machines for parts!
I wondered how we'd take that step to cyberpunk dystopia.
7% so far....
These prices staying high will eat into people replacing old machines as the years go on. There will be PC manufacturers closing up shop before this situation even thinks about getting better.
Perfect for when it'll be time for me to upgrade, as I got a new system in 2025.
I’m convinced this is all to normalize keeping your data in the cloud and other 3rd party hands. It’s hr decline of the PC market, the fact that games, movies and music no longer come on media you own, instead is now just a license to use the content..
This is all part of the strategy of ensuring we do not own our data. They want all storage of all the data to be something we have to pay to access. They want to control everything, and make access to it a subscription.
🤣 Gabe now has three more years to make fab