[Dylan16807]

> I don't think we'll see PC affordable in my lifetime. It didn't happen after Bitcoin crash, didn't happen post pandemics. New price gets normalized and the cartels just agree to not make anything for PCs.

What's your definition of affordable? What years were PCs affordable? By my reckoning PCs are affordable today. If you're not trying to run games they're downright cheap.

I'm not sure what issue you're referring to with bitcoin, but if you want to use bitcoin to buy something it's about as easy/awkward as it ever was.

Food prices went up 15-20% more than they would have with 2% inflation. If PC prices do anything similar, it's not a big deal in the long run.

Cartels just agree not to make anything for PCs? Why would that happen? The point of restricting supply to a market is to maximize profits, not to refuse forever and lose out. They wouldn't even want everything to be in the cloud, because a hundred rarely-idle cloud cores can replace a lot more than a hundred mostly-idle consumer cores, so they end up selling a lot less hardware.

[Ygg2]

> What's your definition of affordable? What years were PCs affordable?

That DIY entry PCs can be built for 400 USD or less. Budget PC should be able to browse net and play a few games on the iGPU (so overall 1TB SSD, some iGPU and 16 GB of RAM). Ideally on current generation of RAM and processors.

> By my reckoning PCs are affordable today. If you're not trying to run games they're downright cheap.

By what reckoning? And not just games, 3D workload, compilation. Hell. Even browsing + some productivity eats 32G of RAM as if it were nothing.

> I'm not sure what issue you're referring to with bitcoin

The first permanent jump in GPU prices. After Bitcoin prices of high-end GPUs remained at +1000 USD.

> Cartels just agree not to make anything for PCs? Why would that happen?

For bigger profits. You can see most hardware manufacturers moving from selling to consumers to selling to governments, cloud, and data-centers.

Why not make anything for PCs? Because individuals can't compete with the coffers of large corporations and governments.

> The point of restricting supply to a market is to maximize profits, not to refuse forever and lose out.

You can maximize profit by leaving a market. In the same way, you can still sell SSDs but for much bigger margins to data centers and governments.

Say all but one/two manufacturers leave the consumer market. The monopoly/duopoly hikes up prices again and again until you have a few stragglers on 40k USD workstations, and everyone else is on an iOS-like platform.

Once you are in the walled-in-cloud-garden, computer is not your own, and you can be monitored perfectly. This is something most governments want and is essentially the endgame for war on general computing.

[Dylan16807]

> That DIY entry PCs can be built for 400 USD or less. Budget PC should be able to browse net and play a few games on the iGPU (so overall 1TB SSD, some iGPU and 16 GB of RAM). Ideally on current generation of RAM and processors.

Does it have to be DIY? Because a quick search says that if 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD is enough then you can get a Zen 2 machine for $300 and a Zen 3 machine for $370.

But man, $400 in 2026 money is a really tight threshold for "affordable". It means PCs were almost never affordable. If I go back to 2017 when that was equivalent to $300, I don't think I can put together a viable build with even 8TB of RAM and 250GB of SSD. I think that standard is too demanding.

> The first permanent jump in GPU prices. After Bitcoin prices of high-end GPUs remained at +1000 USD.

Oh, that was generally other cryptocurrencies but okay I understand.

nVidia has been overcharging, and they've basically increased the prices by one tier. A 70 card costs as much as an 80 used to.

But price per performance continues to improve. A 5050 beats a 1080 for half the price, before even factoring in inflation.

> For bigger profits. You can see most hardware manufacturers moving from selling to consumers to selling to governments, cloud, and data-centers.

> You can maximize profit by leaving a market. In the same way, you can still sell SSDs but for much bigger margins to data centers and governments.

That works when there's enough demand to buy all the chips. AI will stabilize one way or another, and then the remaining datacenter market doesn't need that many chips compared to the consumer market. Manufacturers will have extra supply, and not selling it to consumers would be stupid.

And even if they charged datacenter-level prices to consumers, people would still be able to get PCs. Even if the cheapest new CPU was $500, that's still nowhere near the options being "no PC" and "$40k workstation".

Plus people could buy old datacenter chips for pennies on the dollar.

> Once you are in the walled-in-cloud-garden, computer is not your own, and you can be monitored perfectly. This is something most governments want and is essentially the endgame for war on general computing.

Governments might want it, but that doesn't transfer to chip makers.

[Ygg2]

> Does it have to be DIY?

Yes. Because only DIY allow your computer to be repaired at will. Go laptop or corporate and those get increasingly hard to fix. Not to mention if DIY market is healthy the non-DIY market is even cheaper.

> But price per performance continues to improve. A 5050

If 5050 didn't beat a 10 year old graphics card it would be an even greater waste of sand.

> Governments might want it, but that doesn't transfer to chip makers.

If governments want it, there is money to be made.

> Plus people could buy old datacenter chips for pennies on the dollar.

Sure, but no one will be able to afford all the other amenities. Buying a server CPU isn't the issue. It's buying every other part of the server rack. Namely the board, the cooler, the memory and the storage. And housing and power for it.

[Dylan16807]

> If 5050 didn't beat a 10 year old graphics card it would be an even greater waste of sand.

It beats the 10 year old high end. That's not necessary to avoid being a waste of sand.

But that's not the point. As long as you can keep getting better performance for less money, things are getting more affordable.

> Buying a server CPU isn't the issue. It's buying every other part of the server rack. Namely the board, the cooler, the memory and the storage. And housing and power for it.

Motherboards are looking at the smallest price hikes of all. Coolers are dirt cheap and a quality thermalright is less than $20. Housing for a server is about the same as a desktop and not changing. Half this list is nonsense.

Memory is going up a lot. But that's the one we started on. And you can get a reasonable amount for a couple hundred dollars, and acceptable storage for less than one hundred. Power isn't going crazy either.

And you didn't address how your threshold for "affordable" would exclude every year before about 2019. It's too strict.

> Because only DIY allow your computer to be repaired

Listen, if I can get a whole computer for $300 then I don't need repair. It's a real downside, but if the CPU and motherboard are soldered together and take each other out then it's like I doubled the risk they break within seven years. And after seven years I'd replace both anyway. So that's like a $50 penalty, not a disqualifier. And the mini PCs I was citing have detachable memory and storage.

[Ygg2]

> It beats the 10 year old high end. That's not necessary to avoid being a waste of sand.

I remember when GPUs didn't need to wait 10 years for same chip makers worst offering to beat the top of the line.

> Motherboards are looking at the smallest price hikes of all.

For now.

And for the record I bought a bargain bin Xeon. Only to realize later the only motherboard that accepts it costs $1000. And I needed another Xeon chip. This was around 2020

> And you didn't address how your threshold for "affordable" would exclude every year before about 2019. It's too strict

Honestly. It's the last time hardware prices were close to sane.

> Listen, if I can get a whole computer for $300 then I don't need repair.

If you are willing to bear externalities of e-waste. Fine.

Also replace them with what? You think industry will care about power users? Nah. They can eat cock. Everyone gets a tightly sealed mobile phone that LARPs to be a computer.

[Dylan16807]

> I remember when GPUs didn't need to wait 10 years for same chip makers worst offering to beat the top of the line.

It sucks, but it's nowhere near being the kind of barrier you're describing.

> Honestly. It's the last time hardware prices were close to sane.

What I mean is such a standard says that 1990-2018 was all unaffordable. 2019 was basically the only year that qualifies.

> If you are willing to bear externalities of e-waste. Fine.

In terms of e-waste, if you look at an unfixable mini computer with core parts that on average die 2 years sooner than a full-size computer, it causes less e-waste because it's so much smaller.

> Also replace them with what? You think industry will care about power users? Nah. They can eat cock. Everyone gets a tightly sealed mobile phone that LARPs to be a computer.

They can sell bigger chips that cost more money to power users, why would they not care?

But even if it was just phone chips, that would only set back the exponential speed increases by a few years. It wouldn't destroy the market. My brand new phone is way more powerful than my aging desktop. If I could let the desktop borrow its CPU I would do so instantly.