I know this is long so summary: The market is down 90%. All these companies don’t think it’s coming back. They think there’s a strategy in play here to deliberately kill the personal computing market to end ownership and force rentership.
SXM gpus from datacenters are dirt cheap in relation to their performance. just saying.
Okay, I finally finished watching the whole thing. I think personal computing will radically change, but outside of companies preventing refurbished EOL enterprise PCs from being sold to consumers, personal computing will still exist on some level. You might have far less choices, so instead of having 8 colors for a case, you would only get a gray with the expectation that you would paint the case with whatever color you want or even not sell cases at all with the expectation that you would make your own case out of wood, plastic, and metal with your own power tools. You might have to remove certain chips and add other chips onto a motherboard with a soldering iron in order to install Linux on your PC and so on. Building your own PC would be just like building your own ham radio.
Of course, they don’t necessarily need to completely ban personal computing but just make the barrier of entry high enough that the vast majority of people would not bother and instead just doomscroll on their phones instead. This is easily seen by people putting up with Windows 11 instead of spending less than 5 hours to learn the basics of Linux.
Yeah it’s an economic pushing out of the market for personal computing, which will relegate it to an enthusiast hobbiest tinkerer space. This honestly might be kinda good for techies because the people building PCs are going to revert back to something like the 80s and early 90s where it forced people to learn technology just to engage with the hobby, spaces for people doing this will become a lot more specialised.
The price isn’t going to be fun though.
We’re almost certainly in the twilight of personal computing at this point. The AI bubble was simply the catalyst of its downfall. Once it pops, all of that datacenter buildout is likely to be used for something rather than scrapped, and that something is cloud computing. Gaming and compute heavy workloads will likely be offloaded to the cloud where we’re going to end up paying some form of subscription to use it for any reason or purpose. Home PCs will end up being nothing more than thin clients.
If the personal computer market somehow survives, it’s going to look very different 5-10 years from now.
We’re almost certainly in the twilight of personal computing at this point.
Personal computing only became a thing during the mid 70s with microcomputers like the Altair 8800. It wasn’t the norm til then nor an inevitability. We can very well live in a future where your personal computing device is your phone with peripherals (keyboard, mouse, monitor, speakers) connected through a docking station. Your phone is completely locked down and spies on you, and your router is remotely administered by your ISP. Everything is done on the cloudTM.
impersonal computer
(I haven’t watched the video yet, and it’s also 3+ hours, so it might take a while lol)
Is the video talking about gaming PCs or PCs in general? What about enterprise PCs?
All the companies involved are in the market for self-build or refurbish work. Can’t really say if it’s also affecting the general PC market, sounds pretty likely though.
It wouldn’t even be very hard to takeover the enterprise PC market with rental compute. That actually sounds easier than killing off the gaming/hobbiest market who will hold out longer because they like ownership. Businesses on the other hand will just look at it in a pure economic way and if you give them cloud compute that’s cheaper than ownership they’ll take that.
I’m guessing there would be issues with security. If nothing else, the IT staff that specialize in security won’t like rental PCs, and they have pretty significant sway within most enterprise environments. But then again, people are already renting servers in data centers anyways. A lot of enterprise PCs are just glorified clients for whatever servers and web app they have to access, which is why refurbished enterprise PCs are (were?) a great choice for buying relatively cheap PCs that have pretty good specs for their price tag and not too much wear in them since they were mostly used for Teams and Outlook.
I’m guessing there would be issues with security. If nothing else, the IT staff that specialize in security won’t like rental PCs
Part of the economic proposition put forwards to execs will be “you won’t have to pay your security salaries anymore” because it won’t be your problem, it will be cloud compute’s problem.
Businesses on the other hand will just look at it in a pure economic way and if you give them cloud compute that’s cheaper than ownership they’ll take that.
Hell, most enterprise computers are under some kind of rent or lease scheme already. When I had an office job they would replace my ThinkPad every 2 years or so because the company didn’t own them, they just paid a fee for a machine x or y years old.
It makes very little sense financially to have money parked in computers unless it’s absolutely mission critical, when you can just write the rental cost off much more easily
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
