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.
this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
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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.
I upgraded last December from almost top tier 2014 pc to mid level pc from 2024 and it's a significant upgrade. From ddr3 to 5, i7 4790k to AMD 5 7600. I draw and can do it on an old ipad pro, still new pc feels good, mostly from the stability point.
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.
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 set up an enterprise grade firewall on a computer I got from a deceased relative. It was probably already 8+ years old when I got it and had been replaced with something newer. I had it for a long damn time; during covid when everyone was home and a lot of people were having their home internet connection clogged up with multiple users doing zoom sessions and remote work, my crusty machine was doing a good job of balancing out and shaping our meager 100mbps connection for five people. I think the CPU maybe got to about 10% at peak, but usually ran closer to 4% most of the time. It used up all the memory, but that was how it was supposed to work. It had a traditional spinning hard drive in it.
I kept it until it was about 18 years old when I finally retired it. It never broke, never failed, hardware just quietly ran and ran. I never turned it off unless the power went out. I only retired it because it was too big (full desktop tower case) for the home I had moved into. I wiped the disk, loaded a minimalist linux on it and donated the whole thing, monitor, keyboard mouse all in perfect order.
Hardware lasts and you don't even have to be nice to it.
Computing is the means of production. Go figure
3.5 hours!!!! Love ya Steve, but I ain't got time for all that
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.
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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 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.
"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.
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!
The US has more guns than people and perp walked a compromised predator into office. The whole purpose of these weapons has come and gone.
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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.
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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).
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