Originally Posted by damien c
I have had this conversation with a few people over the last few years and frankly the death of the personal computer started when nVidia and others were allowed to get away with pricing everything so high during Covid.
Laptop's, PC Components, white goods etc and the materials required for those things all were allowed to have the price increased because "safety", "no drivers" and "no workers"
As soon as the manufacturers, the miners, transport companies etc were all able to get away with increasing the prices by up to 500% and no one batted an eye lid in governments and did nothing to stop them, that is when the end started.
I remember speaking to a guy who was looking at starting his own company just before covid hit, he was quoted just over £7k for 10 windows laptops, when he actually went to buy them, it was nearly £15k for those same 10 windows laptops, they had more than doubled in price because "we don't know when we will get the next lot because of covid", that is very near what he was told.
I told him to get some macbook pro's because although they would be a little pricey at the time, the support, the warranty, the hardware etc would twice as long if not longer than the Windows laptops and save him money in the long run, he went with them and still has not had to replace one, they still run as fast as day 1, still supported by his software and other than a minor issue with a screen, he has had no faults.
Now we have "Ai" which has sent prices soaring and they are not going to get any better for a long time.
We have Minerals and Materials trying to be withheld by the countries that they are obtained from, we have limited competition if there is competition between manufacturers and mining companies, governments putting more and more red tape on material extraction etc, all of which is impacting the production and sales of hardware and components.
Micron who recently pulled out of the consumer Memory Market have recently announced they have locked in with something like 16 companies a 5 year contract with prices at the current rate, so you can bet your last dollar that SK Hynix, Samsung and smaller nand production companies have done or are doing the same.
So the price you see now will be the same for at least, at least the next 6 to 10 years.
Consoles are going to be around £1200 for the next gen
Handhelds are all going to be over £1500
Ram for pc's and laptops are going to increase by around 30%
GPU's are going to increase by 25% over the already inflated prices which are on average 60% higher than they should be
CPU's are going to increase by 25%
Motherboards have started to come down in price, but they are about to be hit with another 10% to 25% increase
SSD's are going to be hit with up to 50% increase again
Hard drives yes spinning rust are going up by up to 75%.
DDR2 and DDR3 prices are soaring because the companies that still produce it are struggling to keep up with demand and material costs
Rumours are that Apple are struggling and will potentially be increasing their prices by up to 150% over the next 2 years, the first of the increases was the 20% recently.
Microsoft has already increased some stuff by up to 33% and is looking apparently at another 50% on top of that.
Sony is apparently doing the same, Nintendo are looking at increases.
Game Publishers are apparently looking at a 30% increase in game costs because "DVD disc's are so expensive" and "Server costs are increasing"
I know these are all private companies, but something should be done about the clear collusion and corruption going on with Micron, SK Hynix and Samsung and it doesn't help that we have governments around the world obsessed with starting wars, introducing self harming "Net Zero" policies which do nothing but cause cost's to sky rocket and transport costs for materials to sky rocket.
So yeah the "Personal Computer" is dying, so is the ability to have a tablet, a phone, a laptop, a car etc because all of it is going to be priced out slowly from normal gutter folk from having it.
But hey the good thing about it, is the Government won't be able to track you or send you to prison for a mean worded tweet because you won't have anything for them to track you with or for you to post online, also means the companies will have no data to collect and sell.
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