[bluejay2387]

The general take here seems to be "everything eventually passes". That isn't always true. I wonder how many people have a primary computing device that they don't even have full control over now (Apple phones, tablets...). Years ago the concept of spending over $1k on a computer that I didn't even have the right to install my own software on was considered ridiculous by many people (myself included). Now many people primarily consume content on a device controlled almost entirely by the company they bought it from. If the economics lead to a situation where its more profitable to sell you compute time than sell you computers then businesses will chose to not sell you computers. I have no idea if that is what ends up happening.

[cmiles74]

It's worth keeping an eye on this HP-rental-laptop thing.

Personally I think it will be a big headache for HP, people can be hard on laptops and HP is already not excited about consumer support (i.e. mandatory 15 minute wait time for support calls). But if they make it work, I think there's probably a good number of people who feel like they need a laptop but don't care so much about the specifics and want to keep their costs low (as all of their costs appear to be rising right now).

[bluGill]

Rental seems to be about corporate laptops. Companies just want things to work at a predictable cost. They are already replacing laptops after 5 years even if they work. They are already replacing a few laptops that break in less than that 5 years. In short they are already renting the laptops, they are just paying the price upfront and then using accounting to balance it out. Rental just moves the accounting, but otherwise nothing changes.

For consumers who don't replace their laptops on a schedule it makes less sense.

[doom2]

I'm also very skeptical of "everything eventually passes" as it pertains to hardware prices. Right now, prices are high because supply can't keep up with demand. But if/when supply increases to meet demand or demand decreases, there's no reason for companies to drop prices now that consumers have become accustomed to them.

[hombre_fatal]

> there's no reason for companies to drop prices

Competition.

[account42]

A good joke.

[margalabargala]

Exactly. Production of RAM, SSDs, etc is spread out enough that no one company/country/fab has a stranglehold on the market. Right now anyone with a memory fab has a money printer. More people will build fabs, just like they did last time. It takes a bit but they'll get built.

[saulpw]

How many companies have a memory fab? How many companies can build a memory fab?

[margalabargala]

In both cases, more than 1!

[saulpw]

Hm, are you sure? I was under the impression that only ASML could build SOTA fabs.

[SirMaster]

Then why did they drop prices the last few times prices spiked like this?

RAM was this price some years back, and yet last summer/fall it was at an all-time low.

[bitmasher9]

My primary concern is for next generation hardware.

Will we continue to see steady improvement in top quality CPU/GPUs? Would they even bother releasing consumer versions of ram faster than DDR5?

[pdimitar]

Why would that concern you unless you are working on the cutting edge and the very limits of that hardware?

The current generation is insanely fast. I am planning to get a gaming PC for my wife and a mix of gaming + workstation PC for me (or maybe just base it off of the Ryzen 9950x3D and call it a day). We plan to hold on to them for 10 years.

I don't care if anything 6x faster comes out. For what I need the current generation is even an overkill.

I'd even go as far as to say that it would be quite OK if that's the very last generation and no further hardware development ever happens.

[bitmasher9]

I am on the edge of current available hardware and do feel the desire to upgrade. As stated before, I am unhappy with the current maximum when combing frame generation, resolution, and graphics quality.

My dream spec is UE5 at 120hz on an 8k oled. I think that sounds like a super sick experience I would buy tens of thousands of dollars of hardware for.

[pdimitar]

One local store drops prices to clear stock and/or gain mindshare. Within a week, everybody else does.

Happened before, will happen again.

[ozgrakkurt]

To be fair the people that have ipad as their only computer device now didn’t have a computer back then

[TeMPOraL]

Not necessarily. Many people grew up with PCs and laptops but now mostly use their phones, because outside of specific jobs or hobbies, everyday computing needs are heavily optimized for mobile-first.

(A large factor here is, obviously, the cloud. With photos, documents, e-mail, IMs, etc. all hosted for cheap or free on "other people's computers", the total hardware demands on the end-user computing device is much less. Think storage, not just RAM.)

It's true even in tech; half a year ago I switched my phone to a Galaxy Z Fold7, and I haven't used my personal laptop since then, not once. I have a separate company laptop for work, and I occasionally turned on my PC, but it turns out that a foldable phone is good enough to do everything on personal side I'd normally use a laptop for. So here I am, with my primary compute device I don't have full control over - and yes, I'm surprised by this development myself, and haven't fully processed it yet.

[audunw]

> Not necessarily. Many people grew up with PCs and laptops but now mostly use their phones, because outside of specific jobs or hobbies, everyday computing needs are heavily optimized for mobile-first.

It's a deeply flawed comparison, because many of the things we do with a phone now wasn't something we'd do at all with the computers we grew up with. We didn't pay at the grocery store with a computer, we didn't buy metro tickets, we didn't use it to navigate (well, there was a short period of time where we might print out maps, but anyway..)

When I grew up, I feel like our use of home computers fell into two categories:

1. Some of us kids used them to play games. Though many more would have a Nintendo/Sega for that, and I feel like the iPhone/iPad is a continuation of that. The "it just works" experience where you have limited control over the device.

2. Some parents would use it for work/spreadsheets/documents ... and that's still where most people use a "real" computer today. So nothing has really changed there.

There is now a lot more work where you do the work on services running on a server or in the cloud. But that's back to the original point: that's in many cases just not something we could do with old home computers. Like, my doctor can now approve my request for a prescription from anywhere in the world. That just wasn't possible before, and arguably isn't possible without a server/cloud-based infrastructure.

Phones/tablets as an interface to these services is arguably a continuation of like those old dumb terminals to e.g. AS/400 machines and such.

> It's true even in tech; half a year ago I switched my phone to a Galaxy Z Fold7, and I haven't used my personal laptop since then, not once.

I do agree, I am in a similar situation.

[nhecker]

(edit: I'm broadly in agreement with your comment & observations, so I don't at all mean to come off as argumentative for the sake of being argumentative. You just got me thinking about how that situation might have been handled thirty or a hundred years ago.)

> [...] my doctor can now approve my request for a prescription from anywhere in the world. That just wasn't possible before [...]

I'm picking nits, but wasn't this more or less instantaneous approval possible before with e.g., a fax and a telephone? Or (although this is a bit of a stretch) a telegram and telegraph?

[nhecker]

Ditto. My personal equipment includes a home server (128GB DDR3 ECC) and a tablet with a keyboard. It's honestly astonishing what you can do without a full-fledged laptop, if you're willing to go through some gymnastics to get there. And it travels light compared to a laptop! (The tablet, that is. Not the headless box. :-))

[bluGill]

In a lot of ways the cloud is better than my personal computer, even if I'm on it.

There is a reason I have a server in my basement - it lets me edit files on my phone (if I must - the keyboard is and screen space are terrible compromises but sometimes I can live with it), laptop (acceptable keyboard and screen), or desktop (great keyboard, large screen); it also lets me share with my wife (I haven't got this working but it can be done). I have nearly always had a server in my house because sharing files between computers is so much better than only being able to work on one (or using floppies). The cloud expands my home server to anywhere in the world: it offloads security on someone else, and makes it someone else's problem to keep the software updated.

There is a lot to hate about the cloud. My home servers also have annoyances. However for most things it is conceptually better and we just need the cloud providers to fix the annoyances (it is an open question if they will)

[daveidol]

Not my 70yo mom. She used to have a big gray PC but switched to a Chromebook (one I gave her) about 15 years ago, and now only uses her phone and tablet.

[ProllyInfamous]

I "sold" my mother my personal top-of-the-line MacBook Pro ~2014... only to eventually discover it largely unused when we were probating her properties.

iPad awas the perfect device for her (I've touched one perhaps twice, in my entire lifetime).

[threetonesun]

The framing here is wrong, I think. My iPad has a lot of software on it that I use for music production, it all runs locally. Yes I had to install it through Apple's app store but I could disconnect it from the Internet and expect it to, at this point, work as long as the software on almost any piece of hardware it replaces.

Meanwhile my much more expensive laptop mostly interfaces with applications that primarily exist on servers that I have no control over, and it would be nearly worthless if I disconnected it from the Internet. Your central point is right, the economics are concerning, but I think it's been a ship slowly sailing away that we're now noticing has disappeared over the horizon.

[Lord-Jobo]

If you have to pass the bouncers vibe check to get in, and your dancers have to pay him a 30% tax to work there, do you own the strip club or does the bouncer?

[_the_inflator]

Yes, I agree.

Windows PCs were essentially a hacker's paradise and almost all of my friends assembled their PC or let their PC get assembled by a friend.

There was so much variety in the components, in fact you carefully had to adjust mainboard and its chipset with the CPU and GPU as well as the RAM type. This was a lot of work, since all components had downsides and there were hidden gotchas, like for example the huge and looming CPU fan of later Intel CPUs.

If you not went for a large tower PC, you were essentially doomed. CPU fan and GPU could overlap, number of slots were a thing also whether there were enough host slots available.

Bus system, cable length, jumper settings - so many ways to make your hardware bite you.

But at least it felt even after many years as your system, that ran locally. There was a lot of protest, when Microsoft started online activation. This marked the inflection point at which autonomy of your system suddenly eroded. Also downloading huge driver updates in order to get your NVIDIA GPU working - you needed a permanent online connection which wasn't needed earlier.

[surgical_fire]

Being in control of your own computing device was always a niche. The vast majority of people are not interested in computing itself, only in the output. For that majority, this is fine.

The niche is still there, probably as big as it was before. For example, as I grew weary of being subject to services I have little control over, I set up my own home server using a refurbished PC. It has been an amazing journey so far. But I don't think a normie would ever get interested in buying a refurbished Dell, install Debian on it, and set up their own services there.

As long as there is a niche of people interested in buying their own computers, there will be companies willing to fill that niche.

[bombcar]

This is the correct stance - even in the era of "total personal computer control" the vast majority of people were not in control - they had a friend or child or parent or IT department who was really in control, they were just along for the ride.

And a large number of those people jump at getting them an iPad instead of the perpetual tech support required.

This has been a thing for so long that the jokes were already old in 2005 - 21 years ago! https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/12/12/one-day-in-the...

[mattfrommars]

Yah but browser and computing are so much powerful, who needs to install software on their machine when web app and apps store is sufficient for general consumers