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.
And if you get everyone on cloud? Then you can control Internet same way you can control TV or the press.
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.
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.
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.
We simply don't know how long this bubble will last
