The artificial scarcity of components due to the ai craziness is all a plot to make people give up on local computing and use only phones and cloud services for everything /s (I'm afraid that I may not need that /s at all...)
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2026
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No need for the /s. That's exactly what it is. It's a money grab and a bid for more control and surveillance we cannot dodge.
For the VAST majority of people, a computer is just a tool and as long as they can send some email and surf the web, they don’t really care about them. Most 8 year old computers are generally cast enough to handle these tasks so they’re just not updating. A lot of those who care , did so with the EOL announcement of Win10 so there are other factors at play as well as insane costs.
Got couple of hand me downs from work at the end of the lease cycle - 7th gen i7 HP mini desktop and 8th gen i7 EliteBook x360, for nominal price (so they could show them as “sold” in the books). I did run Win 11 on the laptop for a while (since it is officially supported), then converted both to Linux (Debian Stable, laptop with KDE, desktop with XFCE since it is a “home server”). With Linux, they run faster and cooler than they ever did on Win10/11. I don’t think I will be looking into any upgrades or hardware refresh for at least 5 years, if not longer.
Ram prices. Those of us who saw it coming, apparently a number between 7% and 15%, bought a bridge PC before the price gouging started.
Those who saw it coming and also had capital available to act on it did so.
And now SSD and hard drive prices. Keep your tech going, it's going to be a long few years, if ever, before affordability returns. They (cloud and AI tech-holes) want local compute and storage to be unaffordable so we use their crap. F-ck that, I'm gonna scavenge whatever I can to keep self-hosting to the bitter end.