Honestly, I’m becoming convinced that crashing the availability of meaningfully performant consumer-purchasable machines is an intentional and explicit element of the plan. The captains of industry are predicating a HUGE part of their value proposition on making “edge compute” live in datacenters, and never on client machines, full stop.
The dream of the Captains of Industry is to sell us subscriptions for literally everything and anything they can. You can already see this happening with PC remote gaming services getting more and more prevalent.
Go on eBay (or <insert-regional-equivalent-here>); look for good condition enterprise components; build a homelab. The cloud is just someone else’s computer - be your own cloud.
Also, check out and get into mesh networking.
You don’t need to become convinced. This is the plan - full stop.
I would like to throw some caution in the wind about this. Before getting anything be very to sure to check
- how power hungry the platform is (even on idle)
- check the drive types used by a mobo always
- make sure you get something of which memory is normal as expected
Aside from that, by all means always try to make a small home lab first (a laptop with a broken monitor can work for this, even a phone really) and then commit to something bigger once use cases are found
Feels like I read this headline 5 times this year… and I probably have. The hardware industry sucks so hard.
Manufacturing cost is a rather small part of CPU pricing so don’t expect things to get that bad. You get very little silicon for your money anyway.
if you’ve been on the fence about upgrading or building a new pc, now is the time. i took out a loan to do so in early 2025, and holy fuck i’m glad i did. the ram i got for ~$130 is now well over $500. and that’s just one of the many components i bought which are insanely higher priced now
prices are going to keep going up for a long time. get whatever you can now
To anyone else reading this, please don’t take out a loan to buy a computer.
also cut up your credit cards. if you can’t afford it, don’t buy it. but if you can, and you’re waiting for things to “get better,” they’re not going to any time soon. if ever
Will have to disagree on that one. I’ve gotten hundreds of dollars of cash back on credit cards each year.
Not buying things you can’t afford still applies.
