this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2025
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Chapotraphouse

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Looking at what's happening with RAM pricing and Crucial being shuttered, the doomer in me thinks they could just pull the same thing with every other PC component. It's not like some plucky band of upstarts can start 3D printing organic free-range FOSS processors, hard drives and motherboards in their garage- all of this shit comes out of a couple of giant plants in Asia. If porky strangles the supply, that's it. In the end all the average joe schmoe will be left with are cloud-based terminals that rely entirely on subscription services and that require strong identification to even use (and that will monitor and log every single fucking thing you do while drowning you in ads)

Wanna install Linux? Go ahead! What are you going to install it on though, your grandpa's old Pentium? porky-happy

Wanna ditch subscription services and sail the seas? Oops, it looks like hard drives cost 5,000 dollars and are only sold to enterprise customers. I guess you're not storing that media anywhere porky-happy

Our automated content scanning systems found a spicy pro-palestine meme in one of your chats. Your accounts have been terminated and the appropriate authorities have been contacted porky-happy

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[โ€“] TraschcanOfIdeology@hexbear.net 23 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Idk. I think what's more likely to happen is that when the bubble bursts, a lot of these over-leveraged, capital-intensive, hardware tech companies, are to be acquired for pennies on the dollar by private equity or some other locus of fictitious capital, with money they get from a gvmnt bailout that prioritizes finance over any other industry.

After that, the buyers will get to work doing what they've done with other industries: rip the companies to shreds, sell them for scrap, and leave the barest possible operation. At that point, the company has to make a choice: do I spend a lot of money and resources servicing the consumer industry, with all its uncertainty and high overhead, and higher (importantly, only for the long term) margins, or do I go enterprise-only, where revenue is higher, more stable, less overhead, although with lower margins?

Given the quarter-to-quarter cycles these people operate in, enterprise is going to look like the play for most of these companies, at least while they recover from having been ripped apart by vultures which will take years. Some people will step up to serve the consumer market, but they're not gonna have the economies of scale to offer the prices larger companies used to do, so stuff is going to remain expensive, or get more expensive.

Whatever choice they make though, private equity getting their cut is going to mean mass lay-offs, delayed or no maintenance of equipment, and inevitable loss of know-how and efficient production practices, as the people working there move on to other industries and can't wait 3-5 years for the 1 in 50 chance of going back into consumer semiconductors again, so it's going to be a while before affordable computer parts reappear, if they ever do.