Just a reminder that "consumer" means human. They're fucking over everyone in favour of "corporations" (aka a few select humans)
this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2026
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Human...capital?
Part of this has been a long-standing move by every industry to prioritize business-to-business sales as opposed to consumer sales simply because businesses have money and consumers don't, because businesses are pocketing all the profits and refusing to pay their employees (consumers) a living wage, let alone a thriving wage.
It's been a long time coming for the PC industry, because it's been a general trend for at least two decades as sales to business have become more profitable over consumer sales ever since the late 90s.
It's just more evidence that the bottom 90% of earners are just being priced out of anything but bare subsistence and the wealthy do not give a single fuck about it, in fact, they're embracing it.
This is an important point in general. The old story of "voting with your wallet" is now more and more obviously mathematically absurd.
You can only vote with your wallet if there's something in it.
Which is exactly why conservatives want to push that line of ideology, because in a democratic society we all have equal say, but under capitalism the landowning aristocrat class become de facto lords and kings. Which is exactly what we are seeing happening right now.
It's the same bullshit they say about wanting "small government"- no, they want no government, not a democratic one at least, because that is the only thing keeping them from wielding their capital as a political tool, something it is already feebly equipped to do because of the power inherent in capital and unregulated ownership. Low taxes- same thing; high taxes are an equalizer that aims to create benefit for all of society together, low taxes, as conservatives always want, mean proportionally more for those who are already most well off.
On a long enough timeline, capitalism will always and causally turn into a form of feudalism. Shit, it IS feudalism, with extra steps.
Happening? don't you mean happened? Most top politicans come from the same familys and schools and have done for significantly longer than I've been alive.
We are feeling the brute force of what you are saying right now on a scale previously not seen. Of course this has been a generational play, that lies at the core of feudalism and patriarchal rule- inheritance of wealth.
Top 10% owns 93% of stocks and accounted for 55% of market activity in early 2025, before tariffs and mass layoffs and an unnamed recession. They're probably at 60 -65% of revenue now. You're absolutely right. The rich have been working to remove us from the equation for decades. In our buying power, and in our labor power with AI.
and in our labor power with AI.
Let's be real though, this is less about actually replacing workers with AI that is often completely wrong because it's not actually "thinking" and doesn't actually know what it is doing. It's much more about using the specter of AI and over-hyped arguments about what it could do, given time, to justify workforce reductions and pay reductions.
It has far less to do with actually replacing workers with AI and far more to do with justifying worse working conditions and worse pay without as much social fuss over why.
AI has some very useful tightly-specific niche applications, but "general purpose AI" is a joke that isn't going anywhere realistic at the moment. Especially if we have to burn down our planet burning up fossil fuels to power software that is only doing a best guess of what the next string of text should be.
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I am so glad to see someone else talking about this. Yeah, We're going back to feudalism... And only the upper ranks of society will be able to afford goods and be able to engage in trade.
I mean, it's very arguable that we've just been doing "feudalism with extra steps" for a very long time anyway.
To be less US/Europe-centric than my original post, the majority of the world has been in the "priced out of anything but bare subsistence" basket for most of the history of modern capitalism. Only the citizens of the Imperial Democracies of the Western world were benefiting while the majority of the Southern and Eastern hemispheres were simply locked out from being beneficiaries either through trade embargoes or outright exploitation via not paying foreign workers the home-country equivalent, and instead paying them a much lower "localized" rate.
It's really that the Imperial Boomerang has finally made it's way home to the citizens of the West.
Yet another lie of capitalism- that demand dictates supply. If people want something, capitalism will solve the problem because greed will solve every problem, right? WRONG. It doesn't take into consideration that scale and logistics and infrastructure and mass production all collude and interact in ways that can and will easily create isolated and unexpected functional consequences just like this one.
Capitalism itself is such a dumb and evil creation that the only thing that keeps it running is to have laws that limit its destructive power- unfortunately, since money is power, capitalism quickly supersedes rule of law and democracy, creating a system of government where feudal lords rule over what basically amounts to serfdom. Surely a more comfortable serfdom than in the 1300's, but most certainly lacking the basic freedoms of a democratic society, and only so long as the lords so wish and comfort isn't taken away at their whims due to opposition or otherwise.
Fuck this shit.
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Kind of makes sense really when you think about it. The vast majority of consumers have had all their wealth eroded over decades to the point no one can buy anything. Better to let the AIs buy everything now.
This is yet another thing I blame on American Business sacrificing itself on the altar of Shareholder Value. It's no longer acceptable for a public business to simply make a profit. It has to grow that profit, every quarter, without fail.
So, simply having a good consumer product division that makes money won't be enough. At some point some executive will decide that he can't possibly get his bonus if that's all they do, and decide they need to blow it all up to chase larger profits elsewhere.
Maybe we need a small, private company to come along and start making good consumer hardware. They still need components, though, so will have to navigate getting that from public companies who won't return their calls. And even once they are successful, the first thing they will do is cash out and go public, and the cycle starts again.
Maybe we need a small, private company to come along and start making good consumer hardware.
I've always wanted to start a business like this. "Generic Brand" household goods. Not fancy, just solidly functional base models but with modular upgradability. Wish you bought the WiFi capable washer? Buy the module for $30. Everything would be fully user serviceable and upgradable (within reason), so parts sales ensure sustained income once market saturation is reached.
It's not totally out of the realm of possibility. Michael Dell did it, after all, but he did it in a different time.
And Dell is actually a good case study for all this. It went public rather quickly after it started growing, but grew a bit stagnant by the 2000's. So much so that 2013, Michael Dell orchestrated a leveraged buyout of his own company (with the help of venture capital) to make it private again. He pretty much admitted that the changes he wanted to make to the company would be impossible while it was still public. It stayed private for a while, but went public again as part of some deal made after it acquired the parent company of VMware.
Another notable thing is that Carl Ichan owned a large chunk of Dell, both in its first public incarnation and in its private incarnation. When Dell tried to take it private, Ichan challenged the plan, and thought about putting in his own bid, only to back off when he decided it wasn't worth the effort to revive the company. Still, he was publicly against Dell's buyout plan but was outvoted by other shareholders. Yet, he must have still held a part of the private company, because Ichan also protested it's second plan to go public, and sued to force Dell to increase its terms to the private holders.
Michael Dell is no saint, but I conclude that he realized that the company meant more than a spreadsheet, and needed a purpose to justify its existence. He also realized that in order to sustain a business over the long term, having to constantly sustain quarterly numbers may be counterproductive. I think Carl Ichan, on the other hand, only cares about Number Go Up, and doesn't care at all about how the company makes that happen. Over the long term, that will never be sustainable, but fuck you all, he got his bag already.
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I see a future where all computing is done in the cloud and home computers are just dumb terminals. An incredibly depressing future. Customers not users is the goal.
They can pry my hardware from my cold, dead hands.
Also my car with knobs. I will continue to maintain that car for as long as possible.
Cars without knobs shouldn't be allowed. Knobs are awesome.
This has been predicted and worked towards since the 90s.
ChromeOS was exactly mean for that
AMERICAN manufacturers, just waint until the Chinese industries swoop in to fill the gap. I seriously feel America just wants to kneecap itself.
Wants to kneecap itself?
Dude, the US is going full seppuku and we're going to gut ourselves on the floor.
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I'm looking forward to cheap Chinese video cards that out perform Nvidia shit for 1/4 the price.
Hopefully Linux supported. That's the main selling point of AMD GPUs right now for me, since there's less problems with trying to get stuff like HDR running on it than NVIDIA.
I wonder why China is still for the most part ignoring Linux in favor of Windows. Like to update 8bitdo controllers they only provide a Microsoft program and no Linux version.
You'd think they'd be rushing towards pushing Linux adoption.
That's capitalism for you. But also Linux, where it's typical to upstream hardware support and rely on existing ecosystems rather than release addon drivers or niche supporting apps.
China has made some strategic investments in Linux over the years though -- often domestically targeted, like Red Flag Linux, and drivers for chinese hardware, etc.
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I hope you're right because Intel and AMD still can't compete with high end Nvidia cards, and that's how we ended up with a $5000 5090.
AMD can already beat nvidia at the price tiers most people actually buy at, and Intel is gaining ground way faster than anyone expected.
But outside of the GPU shakeup, I could give a shit about Intel. Let China kill us. We earned this.
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In early 2022, consumer GPUs [Nvidia] accounted for 47% of Team Green's total revenue; by early 2026, that share had fallen to just 7.5%. Over the same period, data center revenue surged to $51.2 billion, representing roughly 90% of the company's earnings.
Wow, that's a complete wipeout of GPUs for home computing.
I wonder if the diminishing returns in gaming graphics has something to do with it as well.
Imma remember what Curcial and others are doing, so when the AI bubble pops I'll skip on all their products.
The silver lining is that hardware performance gains have been so minor from generation to generation that upgrading isn't really that important anymore. Like if i upgrade from next generation equivalent GPU it would give like 8% more fps... and it costs like 1,5k... No thanks.
You used to get a fairly significant upgrade ever few years for about the same cost as the old hardware. Transistors aren't really getting much smaller anymore, so more performance needs a bigger die and costs more money.
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Also, this has been the case (or at least planned) for a while.
Pascal (the GTX 1000 series) and Ampere (the RTX 3000 series) used the exact same architecture for datacenter/gaming. The big gaming dies were dual use and datacenter-optimized. This habit sort of goes back to ~2008, but Ampere and the A100 is really where "datacenter first" took off.
AMD announced a plan to unify their datacenter/gaming architecture awhile ago, and prioritized the MI300X before that. And EPYC has always been the priority, too.
Intel wanted to do this, but had some roadmap trouble.
These companies have always put datacenter first, it just took this much drama for the consumer segment to largely notice.
This will not stop until the ultra-rich are destroyed as a class. They have constructed a parallel economy, and we are all their serfs. History shows this situation can't last and the question is whether they can be parted with their wealth peacefully or not
Generally speaking, the consumer market has been entirely eclipsed by business to business sales. The only entities with expendable cash are businesses.
Consumer sales are very very trackable. Off channel bulk sales can be very hard to verify and I'm sure that's not being used to prop up valuation. Not at all.
With the exception of a few tasks most modern hardware should last a while doing everyday tasks. If you’re due for an upgrade do it and then get off the consumerism train for a while. If you’ve got something within the past two or three years you’re set for a while.
I thought I needed to upgrade my core components but since I'm no longer detailed graphics chasing like I was it's not as important. It's still fairly old at this point but it's doing me just fine.
I’ve been looking into self-hosting LLMs, and it seems a $10k GPU is kind of a requirement to run a decently-sized model and get reasonable tokens / s rate. There’s CPU and SSD offloading, but I’d imagine it would be frustratingly slow to use. I even find cloud-based AI like GH Copilot to be rather annoyingly slow. Even so, GH Copilot is like $20 a month per user, and I’d be curious what the actual costs are per user considering the hardware and electricity cost.
What we have now is clearly an experimental first generation of the tech, but the industry is building out data centers as though it’s always going to require massive GPUs / NPUs with wicked quantities of VRAM to run these things. If it really will require huge data centers full of expensive hardware where each user prompt requires minutes of compute time on a $10k GPU, then it can’t possibly be profitable to charge a nominal monthly fee to use this tech, but maybe there are optimizations I’m unaware of.
Even so, if the tech does evolve and it become a lot cheaper to host these things, then will all these new data centers still be needed? On the other hand, if the hardware requirements don’t decrease by an order of magnitude, then will it be cost effective to offer LLMs as a service, in which case, I don’t imagine the new data centers will be needed either.
This is not true. I have a single 3090 + 128GB CPU RAM (which wasn’t so expensive that long ago), and I can run GLM 4.6 350B at 6 tokens/sec, with measurably reasonable quantization quality. I can run sparser models like Stepfun 3.5, GLM Air or Minimax 2.1 much faster, and these are all better than the cheapest API models. I can batch Kimi Linear, Seed-OSS, Qwen3, and all sorts of models without any offloading for tons of speed.
…It’s not trivial to set up though. It’s definitely not turnkey. That’s the issue.
You can’t just do “ollama run” and expect good performance, as the local LLM scene is finicky and highly experimental. You have to compile forks and PRs, learn about sampling and chat formatting, perplexity and KL divergence, about quantization and MoEs and benchmarking. Everything is moving too fast, and is too performance sensitive, to make it that easy, unfortunately.
EDIT:
And if I were trying to get local LLMs setup today, for a lot of usage, I’d probably buy an AI Max 395 motherboard instead of a GPU. They aren’t horrendously priced, and they don’t slurp power like a 3090. 96GB VRAM is the perfect size for all those ~250B MoEs.
But if you go AMD, take all the finickiness for an Nvidia setup and multiply it by 10. You better know your way around pip and Linux, as if you don’t get it exactly right, performance will be horrendous, and many setups just won’t work anyway.
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Yeah no shit?
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