I don't buy the central thesis of the article. We won't be in a supply crunch forever.
However, I do believe that we're at an inflection point where DC hardware is diverging rapidly from consumer compute.
Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node. Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute that you rent, or buy a time slice with your eyeballs, much like smartphones pretty much always have been.
I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop - 768G of RAM, 96 cores, 96 GB Blackwell GPU - last October, before RAM prices spiked, based on the logic that hardware had moved on but local compute was basically stagnant, and if I wanted to own my computing hardware, I'd better buy something now that will last a while.
This way, my laptop is just a disposable client for my real workstation, a Tailscale connection away, and I'm free to do whatever I like with it.
I could sell the RAM alone now for the price I paid for it.
We won't be in a supply crunch forever. We'll have a demand crunch. The demand of powerful consumer hardware will shrink so much that producing them will lose the economics of scale. It 've always been bound to happen, just delayed by the trend of pursuing realistic graphics for games.
People who are willing to drop $20k on a computer might not be affected much tho.
> People who are willing to drop $20k on a computer might not be affected much tho.
They probably won't, but those willing to drop $3-10k will be if the consumer and data-center computing diverge at the architectural level. It's the classical hollowing out the middle - most of the offerings end up in a race-to-the-bottom chasing volume of price-sensitive customers, the quality options lose economies of scale and disappear, and the high-end becomes increasingly bespoke/pricey, or splits off into a distinct market with an entirely different type of customers (here: DC vs. individuals).
My bet is that phone hardware will be used more and more in mini PCs and laptops keeping the cost down and volume up. We see it with Apple and many Chinese mini PC makers I looked at.
This is so true. Convergence will continue. H/W miniaturization will keep increasing. In fact, new brands could easily appear and even overtake the largest players. For example, have you seen this massive range of docking technology.
https://us.ugreen.com/collections/usb-c-hubs - these docks only require a single USB port to connect to. That could be a SBC working as a handheld. These docks could end up being the largest cost component in the new era of all-in-ones. UGreen could be the next Apple as screens and processors snap-on to these hubs, in addition to their own range of power banks and SSD enclosures. Their quality is high too.
In fact, I would go so far as to say we are entering a tinkering culture, and free-energy technologies are upon us as a response oppressive economic times. Sort of like how the largest leaps in religious and esoteric thought have occurred in the most oppressive of circumstances.
People will reject their crappy thin clients, start tinkering and build their own networks. Knowledge and currency will stay private and concentrated - at least at first.
RAM is going to be the most expensive component, I suppose.
But indeed, once you have USB-C support on your device, you can connect all kinds of periphery through it, from keyboards to 4K screens. Standardized device classes obviate the need for most drivers.
Yep. I was thinking that as crypto miners pivot into AI https://catenaa.com/markets/cryptocurrencies/jpmorgan-morgan... - there must also be a case for miners (anyone really) liquidating their hardware, including memory. So the price of memory has its own limits-to-growth - latent availability, but that's another topic.
If this ends up being true, desktop Linux adoption might make inroads. Windows apps run like crap on ARM and no one is bothering to make ARM builds of their software.
The original Raspberry Pi was built around an overstock phone chip. Modern alternatives built around Rockchip and similar high-end phone chips venture into the territory of lower-end laptops. Aliexpress is full of entry-level laptops based on ARM phone chips (apparently running Android).
This will likely extend further and further, more into the "normie" territory. MS Windows is, of course, the thing that keeps many people pinned to the x64 realm, but, as Chromebooks and the Steam Deck show us, Windows is not always a hard requirement to reach a large enough market segment.
All we need is for HDMI to be unlocked so it works on phones, or maybe VGA adapters that work on phones. And a way to "sideload" our own apps. Hackers please make this happen.
I don't think personal computers will go away, but I think the era of "put it together yourself" commodity PC parts is likely coming to an end. I think we're going to see manufacturers back out of that space as demand decreases. Part selection will become more sparse. That will drive further contraction as the market dries up. Buying boxed motherboards, CPUs, video cards, etc, will still exist, but the prices will never recover back to the "golden age".
The large PC builders (Dell, HP, Lenovo) will continue down the road of cost reduction and proprietary parts. For the vast majority of people pre-packaged machines from the "big 3" are good enough. (Obviously, Apple will continue to Apple, too.)
I think bespoke commodity PCs will go the route, pricing wise, of machines like the Raptor Talos machines.
Edit: For a lot of people the fully customized bespoke PC experience is preferred. I used to be that person.
I also get why that doesn't seem like a big deal. I've been a "Dell laptop as a daily driver" user for >20 years now. My two home servers are just Dell server machines, too. I got tired of screwing around with hardware and the specs Dell provided were close enough to what I wanted.
There are upsides here as well! I think of things like the NUC or Mac Mini - ATX is from 1995, I'm hopeful computers will become nicer things as we trend away from the bucket-o-parts model.
I'm very excited about the Steam Machine for the reasons you mention - I want to buy a system, not a loose collection of parts that kind-of-sort-of implement some standard to the point that they probably work together.
but I don't want a $600 amazing laptop, i want a powerful desktop x86 machine with loads of ram and disk space. As cheap as it was a couple of years ago.
You can have both. You just have to undo the forced bail-in of Millennial and Gen-Z/Alpha/Beta productivity to cover the debts and lifestyles of Silent Gen/Boomer/Gen-X asset holders. The insanity of contemporary markets doesn't reflect anything natural about the world's economic priorities, but instead the privileging of the priorities of that cohort. They've cornered control until enough people call bullshit. So, call bullshit.
Not sure about the memory, but Xeon Scalable/Max ES/QS chips and their boards are still not horribly expensive.
Prior to the crunch, you could have anything from 48-64 cores and a good chunk of RAM (128GB+). If you were inordinately lucky, 56 cores and 64GB of onboard HBM2e was doable for 900-1500 USD.
They’re not Threadrippers or EPYCs,but sort of a in between - server chip that can also make a stout workstation too.
Reading some of the doomer comments in this thread feels like taking a glimpse into a different world.
We're out here with amazing performance in $600 laptops that last all day on battery and half of this comment section is acting like personal computing is over.
They trade blows performance wise with the M1 MacBook Pro sitting on my desk. And theres nothing stopping asahi linux running on them except for driver support. They look like fantastic machines.
They’re not ideal for all use cases, of course. I’m happy to still have my big Linux workstation under my desk. But they seem to me like personal computers in all the ways that matter.
Personal computing and IBM PC clones are not the same thing. The fall of PC clones can happen while other personal computing devices continue to be produced. The $600 laptop is not a PC.
Apple laptops are PCs (Personal Computers). They are not IBM PCs. But IBM hasn't made PCs in years, and there hasn't been any IBM PC hardware to clone in years.
I was looking up an old video game homepage the other day for some visual design guidance. It was archived on the Wayback Machine, but with Flash gone, so was the site. Ruffle can't account for every edge case.
Flash was good. It was the bedrock of a massive chunk of the Old Net. The only thing awful are the people who pushed and cheered for its demise just so that Apple could justify their walled garden for the few years before webdev caught up. Burning the British Museum to run a steam engine.
This is what I'm afraid of. As more stuff moves to the cloud helped in part by the current prices of HW, the demand for consumer hardware will drop. This will keep turning the vicious cycle of rising consumer HW prices and more moves to the cloud.
I can already see Nvidia rubbing their hands together in expectation of the massive influx of customers to their cloud gaming platform. If a GPU is so expensive, you move to a rental model and the subsequent drop in demand will make GPUs even more expensive. They're far from the only ones with dollar signs in their eyes, between the money and total control over customers this future could bring.
Being entirely reliant on someone else's software and hardware is a bleak thought for a person used to some degree of independence and self sufficiency in the tech world.
>Being entirely reliant on someone else's software and hardware is a bleak thought for a person used to some degree of independence and self sufficiency in the tech world.
It's also a nightmare from any sort of privacy perspective, in a world that's already becoming too much like a panopticon.
As someone who has been buying computers for 40+ years, including the 1st gen 3dfx card, etc, this is where I NOPE out of the next upgrade cycle. I am not renting hardware. It's bad enough ISPs are renting modems.
I love it when I get my Robloxhead daughter to test drive some of the games I play on my 5090 box. "Ooooh these graphics are unreal" "Can we stop for just a moment and admire this grass" :-D
I think we're talking about 2 different things. I'm not sure where Roblox fits into what I said.
The problem I describe is companies pushing towards the "rent" model vs. "buy to own". Nvidia was just an example by virtue of their size. Microsoft could be another, they're also eying the game streaming market. Once enough buyers become renters, the buying market shrinks and becomes untenable for the rest, pushing more people to rent.
GPUs are so expensive now that many gamers were eying GeForce Now as a viable long term solution for gaming. Just recently there was a discussion on HN about GeForce Now where a lot of comments were "I can pay for 10 years of GeForce Now with the price of a 5090, and that's before counting electricity". All upsides, right?
In parallel Nvidia is probably seeing more money in the datacenter market so would rather focus the available production capacity there. Once enough gamers move away from local compute, the demand is unlikely to come back so future generations of GPUs would get more and more expensive to cater for an ever shrinking market. This is the vicious cycle. Expensive GPU + cheap cloud gaming > shrinking GPU market and higher GPU prices > more of step 1.
Roblox is one example of a game, there are many popular games that aren't graphics intensive or don't rely on eye candy. But what about all the other games that require beefy GPU to run? Gamers will want to play them, and Nvidia like most other companies sees more value in recurring revenue than in one time sales. A GPU you own won't bring Nvidia money later, a subscription keeps doing that.
The price hikes come only after there's no real alternative to renting. Look at the video streaming industry.
Yeah, this gamer conspiracy theory never made sense to me.
Also, if gamers demand infinitely improving graphics so much that they would rather pay for cloud gaming than relax their expectations and be happy with, say, current gen graphics, then that is more a claim about modern self-pwned gamer behavior than megacorp conspiracy.
But I don't buy that either. The biggest games on Steam Charts and Twitch aren't AAA RTX 5090 games.
The problem is that there is a very large incentive for three large companies to corner the market on computing components, forcing consumers to rent access instead of owning.
I don’t believe we are seeing the investments necessary that would indicate this will happen.
Memory makers, for example, have sold out their inventory for several years, but instead of investing to manufacture more, they’re shutting down their consumer divisions. They’re just transferring their consumer supply to their B2B (read AI) supply instead.
Thats likely because they don’t expect this demand to last past a few years.
They have seen boom and bust cycles previously and are understandably wary of expanding capacity for expected demand that may fizzle. If they stay too conservative, China’s CXMT is chomping at the bit to eat their lunch, backed by the Chinese government, but that’s not going to help until late 2027 at best.
Consumer demand likely depends on how local models end up working out. Nothing else really needs serious local computing power anymore. My guess is that even high-end games will probably stagnate for a while.
Many users will not want to risk their privacy, data, and workflow on someone else's rapidly-enshittifying AI cloud model. Right now we don't have much choice, but there are signs of progress.
High level games are far from stagnating, when viewed from usable performance.
Many new games cannot run max settings, 4k, 120hz on any modern gpus. We probably need to hit 8k before we max out on the returns higher resolution can provide. Not to mention most game devs are targeting an install base of $500 6 year old consumer hardware, in a world where the 5090 exists.
That's what I mean by stagnating... most players already can't run with max settings, or even close to them. From the developers' point of view there's not much point raising the bar any higher right now, while the best GPU hardware is so far out of reach of your average PC gamer.
We could, but most of the 2000s developers are gone. Or, we no longer have developers left with 2000s attitudes and approaches to software development.
I think that is a little bit unfair. I think plenty of developers, myself included wouldn't mind or would like to do native applications. Every time someone does those, a mountain of people ask "why" and "this shoulda/coulda been a web app." And some of that is somewhat reasonable. It's easier to achieve decent-ish cross platform. But also tons of consumers also just don't wanna download and install applications unless it comes from an App Store. And even then, it's iffy. Or most often the case, it's a requirement of the founders/upper management/c-suite. And lets be honest, when tons of jobs ask for reactive experience or vue.js, what motivates developers to learn GTK or Qt or Winforms or WinUI3?
Yep. I graduated in 2017 and jobs were already mostly web. I’d love to work on native applications but nobody is hiring for that and of course because nobody is hiring for that I don’t have a job like that and the Qt I learnt in university is not gonna get any more relevant over time but I don’t have a good reason to keep that skill up to date and if I have to solve a problem I might as well write a TUI or CLI application because that’s easier than Qt or whatever…
It's also reasonable from a business point of view to say "we can't justify the investment to optimize our software in the current environment." I assume this is what's happening - people are trying to get their products in customers hands as quickly as possible, and everything else is secondary once it's "good enough." I suspect it's less about developers and more about business needs.
Perhaps the math will change if the hardware market stagnates and people are keeping computers and phones for 10 years. Perhaps it will even become a product differentiator again. Perhaps I'm delusional :).
Well, some of the "old school" has left the market of natural causes since the 2000s.
That only leaves the rest of 'em. Wer dey go, and what are your top 3 reasons for how the values of the 2000s era failed to transmit to the next generation of developers?
I rarely doge a chance to shit on Microslop and its horrible products, but you don't use a browser? In fact, running all that junk in a single chromium instance is quite a memory saver compared to individual electron applications.
It's not just electron apps or browsers, as I'd argue modern .NET apps are almost as bad.
I have an example.
I use Logos (a Bible study app, library ecosystem, and tools) partially for my own faith and interests, and partially because I now teach an adult Sunday school class. The desktop version has gotten considerably worse over the last 2-3 years in terms of general performance, and I won't even try to run it under Wine. The mobile versions lack many of the features available for desktop, but even there, they've been plagued by weird UI bugs for both Android and iOS that seem to have been exacerbated since Faithlife switched to a subscription model. Perhaps part of it is their push to include AI-driven features, no longer prioritizing long-standing bugs, but I think it's a growing combination of company priorities and framework choices.
Oh, for simpler days, and I'm not sure I'm saying that to be curmudgeonly!
I use a browser at home, but I don't use the heaviest web sites. There are several options for my hourly weather update, some are worse than others (sadly I haven't found any that are light weight - I just need to know if it would be a thunderstorm when I ride my bike home from work thus meaning I shouldn't ride in now)
I'm giving up on weather apps bullshit at this point, and am currently (literally this moment) making myself a Tasker script to feed hourly weather predictions into a calendar so I can see it displayed inline with events on my calendar and most importantly, my watch[0] - i.e. in context it actually matters.
--
[0] - Having https://sectograph.com/ as a watch face is 80%+ of value of having a modern smartwatch to me. Otherwise, I wouldn't bother. I really miss Pebble.
fun fact, you can kill all firefox background processes and basically hand-crash every tab and just reload the page in the morning. I do this every evening before bed. `pkill -f contentproc` and my cpu goes from wheezing to idle, as well as releasing ~8gb of memory on busy days.
("Why don't you just close firefox?" No thanks, I've lost tab state too many times on restart to ever trust its sessionstore. In-memory is much safer.)
Yeah, I found this out the other day when my laptop was toasting. In hindsight, probably related to archive.today or some Firefox extension.
You have to close Firefox every now and then for updates though. The issue you describe seems better dealt with on filesystem level with a CoW filesystem such as ZFS. That way, versioning and snapshots are a breeze, and your whole homedir could benefit.
I kind of hate how the www has become this lowest common denominator software SDK. Web applications are almost always inferior to what you could get if you had an actual native application built just for your platform. But we end up with web apps because web is more convenient for software developers and it's easier to distribute. Everything is about developer convenience. We're also quickly running out of software developers who even know how to develop and distribute native apps.
And when, for whatever reason, having a "desktop application" becomes a priority to developers, what do they do? Write it in Electron and ship a browser engine with their app. Yuuuuuuck!
Yeah it's awful. Web apps are slower, they don't integrate well with the system, they are inaccessible if the network is down. A native app has to be truly abysmal to be worse than a web app. But far too many developers simply do not care about making something good any more. There's no pride in one's work, just "web is easier for the developer". And of course the businesses producing software are all about that, because they are run by people with a business ethic of "make the product as cheaply as possible, ignore quality". It's a very sad state of affairs.
Why would I need a browser to play music? Or to send an email? Or to type code? My browser usage is mostly for accessing stuff on someone else’s computer.
If only. At work I've got a new computer, replacing a lower-end 5-yo model. The new one has four times the cores, twice the RAM, a non-circus-grade ssd, a high-powered cpu as opposed to the "u" series chip the old one has.
I haven't noticed any kind of difference when using Teams. That piece of crap is just as slow and borken as it always was.
> If only. At work I've got a new computer, replacing a lower-end 5-yo model. The new one has four times the cores, twice the RAM, a non-circus-grade ssd, a high-powered cpu as opposed to the "u" series chip the old one has.
> I haven't noticed any kind of difference when using Teams.
If the device is a laptop, also the thermal design (or for laptops that are in use: whether there is dust in the ventilation channels (in other words: clean the fans)) is very important for the computer to actually achieve the performance that the hardware can principally deliver.
Yeah people love to shit on electron and such but they're full of crap. It doesn't matter one bit for anything more powerful than a raspberry pi. Probably not even there. "Oh boo hoo chrome uses 2 gigs of ram" so what you have 16+ it doesn't matter. I swear people have some weird idea that the ideal world is one where 98% of their ram just sits unused, like the whole point of ram is to use it but whenever an application does use it people whine about it. And it's not even like "this makes my pc slow" it's literally just "hurr durr ram usage is x" okay but is there an actual problem? Crickets.
I have no issues with browsers specifically having to use a bunch of resources. They are complicated as fuck software, basically it's own operating system. Same for video games or programs that do heavy data processing.
The issue is with applications that have no business being entitled to large amount of resources. A chat app is a program that runs in the background most of the time and is used to sporadic communication. Same for music players etc. We had these sorts of things since the 90's, where high end consumer PCs hat 16mb RAM.
Don't know about chrome, but Firefox has an about:memory special page that will let you know which tabs are using the most ram. Of all the sites I use, youtube is the only culprit. When I am done watching a video, I use the about:memory to kill the associated process (doesn't destroy the tab (in case I want to come back to it)). I assume it is all the javascript cruft.
The issue isn't usage, it's waste. Every byte of RAM that's used unnecessarily because of bloated software frameworks used by lazy devs (devs who make the same arguments you're making) is a byte that can't be used by the software that actually needs it, like video editing, data processing, 3D work, CAD, etc. It's incredibly short sighted to think that any consumer application runs in a vacuum with all system resources available to it. This mindset of "but consumers have so much RAM these days" just leads to worse and worse software design instead of programmers actually learning how to do things well. That's not a good direction and it saddens me that making software that minimizes its system footprint has become a niche instead of the mainstream.
tl;dr, no one is looking for their RAM to stay idle. They're looking for their RAM to be available.
I dunno man, I have 32gb and I'm totally fine playing games with 50 browser tabs open along with discord and Spotify and a bunch of other crap.
In not trying to excuse crappy developers making crappy slow ad wasteful apps, I just don't think electron itself is the problem. Nor do I think it's a particularly big deal if an app uses some memory.
You're right, Electron is not inherently bad and apps need RAM. There's no getting around that.
The issue with Electron is that it encourages building desktop apps as self-contained websites. Sure, that makes it easier to distribute apps across systems and OSes, but it also means you've got front end web devs building system applications. Naturally, they'll use what they're used to: usually React, which exacerbates the problem. Plus it means that each app is running a new instance of a web browser, which adds overhead.
In real life, yeah, it's rare that I actually encounter a system slowdown because yet another app is running on Electron. I just think that it's bad practice to assume that all users can spare the memory.
I'll admit that my concern is more of a moral one than a practical one. I build software for a living and I think that optimizing resource usage is one way to show respect to my users (be they consumers, ops people running the infra, or whatever). Not to mention that lean, snappy apps make for a better user experience.
Lazy developers can make bad apps that waste RAM no matter what framework. But even conscientious developers cannot make an app with Electron that compares favorably to a native app. Electron is inherently a problem, even if it isn't the only one.
The problem with having 32gb of RAM is that there is no mechanism to power off part of it when it is unneeded (plus RAM constitutes a significant fraction of a device's total power consumption) so if the device is running off a battery and is designed to keep device weight to a minimum (e.g., battery as small as practical), then battery life is not as good as it would be if the device had only 16gb.
This is why the top model of the previous generation of the iPhone (the iPhone 16 Pro Max) has only 8 GB of RAM, bumped to 12 GB for the current top model (the iPhone 17 Pro Max at the higher tiers of additional storage). If Apple had decided to put more RAM than that into any iPhone, even the models where the price is irrelevant to most buyers, they would not have been serving their customers well.
So, now you have to pay a penalty in either battery life or device weight for the duration of your ownership of any device designed for maximum mobility if you ever want to having a good experience when running Electron apps on the device.
I think it's a correlation vs causation type thing. Many Electron apps are extremely, painfully, slow. Teams is pretty much the poster child for this, but even spotify sometimes finds a way to lag, when it's just a freaking list of text.
Are they slow because they're Electron? No idea. But you can't deny that most Electron apps are sluggish for no clear reason. At least if they were pegging a CPU, you'd figure your box is slow. But that's not even what happens. Maybe they would've been sluggish even using native frameworks. Teams seems to do 1M network round-trips on each action, so even if it was perfectly optimized assembly for my specific CPU it would probably make no difference.
Nearly all apps are sluggish for a very clear reason - the average dev is ass. It's possible to make fast apps using electron, just like it's possible to make fast apps using anything else. People complain about react too, react is fast as fuck. I can make react apps snappy as hell. It's just crappy devs.
Yea, these applications are typically not slow just because the use Electron (although it's often a contributor). But the underlying reason why they are slow is the same reason why they are using Electron: developer skill.
The people I trust to give good security recommendations (e.g., the leader of the Secureblue project) tell me I should completely avoid Electron (at least on Linux) because of how insecure it is. E.g., the typical Electron app pulls in many NPM packages, for which Electron does zero sandboxing.
Not exactly the same (it's about power rather than price). But close enough that when you said it, I thought, "oh! there is something like that." There's also more fundamental economics laws at play for supply and demand of a resource / efficiencies at scale / etc. Given our ever increasing demand of compute compared increasing supply (cheaper more powerful compute), I expect the supply will bottleneck before the demand does.
That's actually a good point, haha. The worst-case scenario of computers being thin clients for other people's servers dissolves when you realize that chromium/electron IS, nominally, a thin client for HTTP servers, and it'll gladly eat up as much memory as you throw at it. In the long term, modulo the current RAM shortage, it turns out it's cheaper to ship beefy hardware than it is to ship lean software.
Simulation, analysis, rendering... All those gobbles memory, CPU, sometimes graphic card.
Real time works also: huge data set in real time — sensor for production line or environmental monitoring for example.
For word processing, basic image manipulation, electron app (well...) even the "cheap" Macbook Neo is good enough, and it's a last year phone CPU. But that's not enough for a lot of use case.
The big one for me is ballooning dependency trees in popular npm/cargo frameworks. I had to trade a perfectly good i9-based MacBook Pro up to an M2, just to get compile times under control at work.
The constant increases in website and electron app weight don't feel great either.
3D CAD/CAM is still CPU (and to a lesser extent memory) bound --- I do joinery, and my last attempt at a test joint for a project I'm still working up to was a 1" x 2" x 1" area (two 1" x 1" x 1" halves which mated) which took an entry-level CAM program some 18--20 minutes to calculate and made a ~140MB file including G-code toolpaths.... (really should have tracked memory usage....)
It's a very complex joint (which is why it's never been done before that I could find --- hopefully will be patentable), and the tool definition probably wasn't optimal, nor the CAM tool being used appropriate to the task, hence my working on developing the toolpaths more directly.
Is that by convention or is there a good reason that it’s so CPU bound? I don’t have experience with CAD, so I’m not sure if it’s due to entrenched solutions or something else.
>
Is that by convention or is there a good reason that it’s so CPU bound?
A lot of commercial CAD software exists for a very long time, and it is important for industrial customers that the backward compatibility is very well kept. So, the vendors don't want to do deep changes in the CAD kernels.
Additionally, such developments are expensive (because novel algorithms have to be invented). I guess CAD applications are not that incredibly profitable that as a vendor you want to invest a huge amount of money into the development of such a feature.
My understanding is that the problems being worked on do not yield to breaking down into parallelizable parts in an efficient/easily-calculated/unambiguous fashion.
I've never have a personal computer that came even close to powerful enough to do what i want. Compiles that take 15 minutes, is really annoying for instance.
The opposite. I meant that if this is what consumer grade looks like nowadays, even with a fraction of current flagships we seem well covered - this was less than 800 bucks.
Any and all. It's not particularly justifiable. It's more like, I'm a software engineer, and this is my home workshop. I run dozens of services, experiment with a bunch of different LLMs, tune my Postgres instance for good performance on large datasets, run ML data prep pipelines. All sorts really.
I'm also into motorcycles. Before I owned a house with a garage, I had to continuously pack my tools up and unpack them the next day. A bigger project meant schlepping parts in and out of the house. I had to keep track of the weather to work on my bikes.
Then, when I got a house, I made sure to get one with a garage and power. It transformed my experience. I was able to leave projects in situ until I had time. I had a place to put all my tools.
The workstation is a lot like that. The alternative would be renting. But then I'd spend a lot of my time schlepping data back and forth, investing in setting things up and tearing them down.
YMMV. I wouldn't dream of trying to universalize my experience.
I haven't purchased a new computer in, at least, 10 years. I take pride (i.e., I have a sickness) in purchasing used laptops off eBay, beefing them up, and loading Debian on them. My two main computers are a Dell E5440 and a Lenovo ThinkPad T420. I, too, am a software developer, but [apparently] not as much of a rock star software developer at this gentleman. :-D
> I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop - 768G of RAM, 96 cores, 96 GB Blackwell GPU - last October, before RAM prices spiked […]
768GB of RAM is insane…
Meanwhile, I’ve been going back and forth for over a year about spending $10k on a MacBook Pro with 128GB. I can’t shake the feeling I’d never actually use that much, and that, long term, cloud compute is going to matter more than sinking money into a single, non-upgradable machine anyway.
Your battery is going to suffer because of the extra ram as well.
I don't know your workloads, but for me personally 64 GB is the ceiling buffer on RAM - I can run entire k8s cluster locally with that and the M5 Pro with top cores is same CPU as M5 Max. I don't need the GPU - the local AI story and OSS models are just a toy for my use-cases and I'm always going to shell out for the API/frontier capabilities. I'm even thinking of 48 config because they already have those on 8% discounts/shipped by Amazon and I never hit that even on my workstation with 64 GB.
> Your battery is going to suffer because of the extra ram as well.
No, it won't. The power drain of merely refreshing DRAM is negligible, it's no higher than the drain you'd see in S3 standby over the same time period.
I suspect this is one of those "it depends" situations; does the 128gb vs 64gb sku have more chips or denser chips? If "more chips" probably it'll draw a tiny bit more power than the smaller version. If the "denser" chips, it may be "more power draw" but such a tiny difference that it's immaterial.
Similarly, having more cache may mean less SSD activity, which may mean less energy draw overall.
If I had a chip to put on the roulette table of this "what if" I'd put it on the "it won't make a difference in the real world in any meaningful way" square.
I thought my Z620 with 128GB of RAM was excessive! Actually, HP says they support up to 192GB of RAM, but for whatever reason the machine won't POST with more than 128GB (4Rx4) in it. Flawed motherboard?
How is this going to work? You need uncontrolled compute for developing software. Any country locking up that ability too much will lose to those who don't.
> How is this going to work? You need uncontrolled compute for developing software.
I've read about companies where all software developers have to RDP to the company's servers to develop software, either to save on costs (sharing a few powerful servers with plenty of RAM and CPU between several developers) or to protect against leaks (since the code and assets never leave the company's Citrix servers).
>You need uncontrolled compute for developing software
Oh you sweet summer child :(
You think our best and brightest aren't already working on that problem?
In fact they've fucking aced it, as has been widely celebrated on this website for years at this point.
All that remains is getting the rest of the world to buy in, hahahaha.
But I laugh unfairly and bitterly; getting people to buy in is in fact easiest.
Just put 'em in the pincer of attention/surveillance economy (make desire mandatory again!).
And then offer their ravaged intellectual and emotional lives the barest semblance of meaning, of progress, of the self-evident truth of reason.
And magic happens.
---
To digress. What you said is not unlike "you need uncontrolled thought for (writing books/recording music/shooting movies/etc)".
That's a sweet sentiment, innit?
Except it's being disproved daily by several global slop-publishing industries that exist since before personal computing.
Making a blockbuster movie, recording a pop hit, or publishing the kind of book you can buy at an airport, all employ millions of people; including many who seem to do nothing particularly comprehensible besides knowing people who know people... It reminds me of the Chinese Brain experiment a great deal.
Incidentally, those industries taught you most of what you know about "how to human"; their products were also a staple in the lives of your parents; and your grandparents... if you're the average bougieprole, anyway.
---
Anyway, what do you think the purpose of LLMs even is?
What's the supposed endgame of this entire coordinated push to stop instructing the computer (with all the "superhuman" exactitude this requires); and instead begin to "build" software by asking nicely?
Btw, no matter how hard we ignore some things, what's happening does not pertain only to software; also affected are prose, sound, video, basically all electronic media... permit yourself your one unfounded generalization for the day, and tell me - do you begin to get where this is going?
Not "compute" (the industrial resource) but computing (the individual activity) is politically sensitive: programming is a hands-on course in epistemics; and epistemics, in turn, teaches fearless disobedience.
There's a lot of money riding on fearless disobedience remaining a niche hobby. And if there's more money riding on anything else in the world right now, I'd like an accredited source to tell me what the hell that would be.
Think for two fucking seconds and once you're done screaming come join the resistance.
Before this price spike, it used to be you could get a second-hand rack server with 1TB of DDR4 for about $1000-2000. People were massively underestimating the performance of reasonably priced server hardware.
You can still get that, of course, but it costs a lot more. The recycling company I know is now taking the RAM out of every server and selling it separately.
My home server has 512GB RAM, 48 cores, my 4 desktops are 16 cores 128GB, 4060GPU each. Server is second hand and I paid around $2500 for it. Just below $3000 price for desktops when I built them. All prices are in Canadian Pesos
As someone who just bought a completely maxed out 14" Macbook Pro with an M5 Max and 128GB of RAM and 8TB SSD, it was not $10k, it was only a bit over $7k. Where is this extra $3k going?
Tangential, I bought a nearly identically-spec'd (didn't spring for the 8 TB SSD - in retrospect, had I kept it, I would've been OK with the 4 TB) model, and returned it yesterday due to thermal throttling. I have an M4 Pro w/ 48 GB RAM, and since the M5 Max was touted as being quite a bit faster for various local LLM usages, I decided I'd try it.
Turns out the heatsink in the 14" isn't nearly enough to handle the Max with all cores pegged. I'd get about 30 seconds of full power before frequency would drop like a rock.
I haven't really had a problem with thermal throttling, but my highest compute activity is inferencing. The main performance fall-off I've observed is that the cache/context size to token output rate curve is way more aggressive than I expected given the memory bandwidth compared to GPU-based inferencing I've done on PC. But other than spinning up the fans during prompt processing, I'm able to stay peak CPU usage without clock speed reducing. Generally though this only maintains peak compute utilization for around 2-3 minutes.
I'm wondering if there was something wrong with your particular unit?
With the way legislation is going these days, self hosting is becoming ever more important. RAM for zfs + containers on k3s doesn't end up being that crazy if you assuming you need to do everything on your own. (at home I've got 1 1tb ram machine, 1 512gb, 3x 128gb all in a k3s cluster with some various gpus about about a half pb of storage before ~ last sept this wasn't _that_ expensive to do)
> Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node.
How can you say this when Apple is releasing extremely fast M5 MacBook Pros? Or the $600 MacBook Neo that has incredible performance for that price point?
Even x86 is getting some interesting options. The Strix Halo platform has become popular with LLM users that the parts are being sold in high numbers for little desktop systems.
They're ultimately laptops, you won't be able to squeeze out the same amount of performance from a laptop compared to a desktop, regardless of the hardware.
If you haven't tried out a desktop CPU in a while, I highly recommend you giving it a try if you're used to only using laptops, even when in the same class the difference is obvious.
I have a recent MacBook Pro and a high end Zen 5 desktop.
For CPU-bound tasks like compiling they’re not that different. For GPU tasks my desktop wins by far but it also consumes many times more power to run the giant GPU.
If you think laptops are behind consumer desktops for normal tasks like compiling code you probably haven’t used a recent MacBook Pro.
> I have a recent MacBook Pro and a high end Zen 5 desktop.
What are the exact CPU models used here though? Since my point was about CPUs in the "same class", and it's really hard to see if this is actually the case here.
And yes, I've played around with the recent Apple CPUs, all the way up to M4 Pro (I think, thinking about it I'm not 100% sure) and still I'd say the same class of CPUs will do better in a desktop rather than a laptop.
If you want to compare it in the Apple ecosystem, compare the CPUs of a laptop to one of the Mac Mini/Mac Studio, and I'm sure you'll still see a difference, albeit maybe smaller than other brands.
> If you want to compare it in the Apple ecosystem, compare the CPUs of a laptop to one of the Mac Mini/Mac Studio, and I'm sure you'll still see a difference, albeit maybe smaller than other brands
The same chip perform basically the same in the different form factors.
For all of the definitive statements you're making in this thread, you don't seem to know much about Apple M-series silicon.
> The recent MacBook Pros are every bit as fast as my Zen 5 desktop for most tasks like compiling.
Bad example. That's highly parallel, so a higher core-count die is going to destroy the base M5 here.
I don't typically compile Linux on my M5, so I don't really care, but at least online available clang benchmarks put it at roughly half the LOC/s of a 9950X, which released in 2024.
Anything single threaded it should match or even edge ahead though.
It gets for worse for multi threaded perf if you leave behind consumer-grade hardware and compare professional/workhorse level CPUs like EPYC/Threadripper/Xeon to Apple's "pro" lines. That's just a slaughter. They're roughly 3x a 9950X die for these kinds of workloads.
I don't compile Linux or other large C projects on my M5 (why would I). The only thing I have numbers for on both desktop and mobile is your typical JS/TypeScript/webpack shitshow that struggles to keep a high core count CPU remotely busy. Might as well do that on the M5.
There's a large C++ codebase I need to compile, but it can't compile/run on OSX in the first place, hence the desktop that I use remotely for that. Since it's also kind of a shitshow, that one has really terrible compile times: up to 15 minutes on a high powered Intel ThinkPad I no longer use, ~2 minutes on desktop.
I could do it in a VM as well, but let's be real: running it on the M5 in front of me is going to be nowhere near as nice as running it on the water cooled desktop under my desk.
For batch jobs there isn't much competition. 9995wx has 3 to 4x throughput of M5 max.
And then, if your laptop is busy, your machine is occupied - I hate that feeling. I never run heavy software on my laptop. My machine is in the cellar, I connect over ssh. My desktop and my laptop are different machines. I don't want to have to keep my laptop open and running. And I don't want to drag an expensive piece of hardware everywhere.
And then you need to use macOS. I'm not a macOS person.
> For batch jobs there isn't much competition. 9995wx has 3 to 4x throughput of M5 max.
I would hope so, given that you can buy multiple M5 laptops for the price of that CPU alone.
I made a comment about how impressive the M5 laptops were above, so these comments trying to debunk it by comparing to $12,000 CPUs (before building the rest of the system) are kind of an admission that the M5 is rather powerful. If you have to spend 3-4X as much to build something that competes, what are we even talking about any more?
We are on borrowed time, most of the world is running on oil and this resource is not unlimited at all. A lot of countries have gone past their production peak, meaning it's only downhill from here. Everything is gonna be more costly, more expensive, our lavish "democracies" lifestyles are only possible because we have (had) this amazing freely available resource, but without it it's gonna change. Even at a geopolitical scale you can see this pretty obviously, countries that talked about free market, free exchange are now starting to close the doors and play individually. Anyways, my point is, we are in for decades, if not a century of slow decline.
Doubt it. Renewables are expanding much faster than oil output is decreasing. Wind and solar will enable energy to remain cheap everywhere that builds it.
Energy production is only part of the bill, though. The oil shortage is having an effect on a mind-boggling variety of consumer goods where crude oil is used in manufacturing. For many products we don't have good alternatives. A lot of oil is needed to build an electric car.
Malthusians has been sounding the alarm for longer than Protestant revivalists have been claiming the end of world is next month at lunchtime. If there is a predication market for such things, betting on any Malthusian is patently foolish.
(Of course, I don't disagree with the notion that consumerism produces an extraordinary amount of worthless trash, but that's a different matter. The main problem with consumerism is consumerism itself as a spiritual disease; the material devastation is a consequence of that.)
People gloating about Malthusians being wrong keep forgetting that it only takes for them to be right ONCE in the entirety of human history and when they are - you'll be too busy trying to survive rather than posting on internet forums.
The planet has a certain resource-bound carrying capacity. It's a fact of physics. Just because we aren't there yet as of (checks time) 2026-03-27, doesn't mean Malthusians are wrong.
Although to be fair to the other side, I think with abundant renewable energy we'll be able to delay resource depletion for a very long time thanks to recycling (and lower standards of living of course).
There will be very dramatic growing pains with this switch, especially for A: nations manufacturing renewables but still running that manufacturing on oil and B: nations that face political and economic barriers for renewables.
Also C: nations that are both A and B, needlessly causing oil volatility with unplanned military dickheadedness.
Renewables provide electricity only, but planes, boats, trucks, basically all the supply chain, works with oil only for the moment. The ease of use of oil has not been replaced yet. Do you realize how easy it is to handle oil ? You can just put it in a barrel and ship it anywhere in that barrel. No need for wires or complex batteries like for electricity, nor complex pipelines like for gas.
And even if we figured out how to electrify everything (which we didn't as I just said), we would still run into resources shortages for batteries, wires (copper etc.), nuclear fuel (uranium)...
Expanding renewables to the easily replaceable items like power plants, generators, and most consumer vehicles would radically reduce oil usage to where it becomes a minor concern. Also things like biodiesel exist. A more sustainable, renewable-forward, electrified reality is easily possible.
There is not a risk of resource shortage of copper. The doomer and prepper talking points you're parroting are not based in reality.
And I don't even understand your other points to be honest. What do you mean "consumer vehicles" ? Are you taking about individual's cars ? I'm not taking about that, these don't matter that much. I'm taking about trucks, boats, planes, the stuff actually shipping you your lifestyle.
It makes sense that you don't understand the other points. Based on how you approach conversation, I suspect it's an issue you run into frequently.
Look up what it means to have a conversation in "good faith" vs in "bad faith" and you might learn something useful about conversation tools. For example, lying about what someone says and calling it "peculiar" is "bad faith".
"I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop . . . "
This is where I think current hackers should be headed. I grew up with lots of family who were backyard mechanics, wrenching on cars and motorcycles. Their investment in tools made my occasional PC purchase look extremely affordable. Based on what I read, senior mechanics often have five-figure US dollar investments in tools. Of course, I guess high quality torque wrenches probably outlast current GPU chips? I'd hate to be stuck making a $10K investment every 24 months on a new GPU . . .
I have been renting GPU resources and running open weight models, but recently my preferred provider simply doesn't have hardware available. I'm now kicking myself a little for not simply making a big purchase last fall when prices were better.
> Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node. Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute that you rent, or buy a time slice with your eyeballs, much like smartphones pretty much always have been.
It really feels like we're slowly marching back to the era of mainframe computers and dumb terminals. Maybe the democratization of hardware was a temporary aberration.
It seems like you largely agree with the article - people shall own nothing and be happy. Perhaps the artificially induced supply crunch could go on indefinitely.
Also, I wonder how many of us, even here on HN, have the ability to spend that amount of money on computer for personal use. Frankly I wouldn't even know what to do with all the RAM - should I just ramdisk every program I use and every digital thing I made in the last five years?
Anyhow, I suppose for the folks who can't afford hardware (perhaps by design), one ought to own nothing and be happy.
People spend a lot more than that on a car they use less, especially if they're in tech.
The RAM choice was because I have never regretted buying more RAM - it's practically always a better trade than a slightly faster CPU - and 96GB DIMMs were at a sweet spot compared to 128GB DIMMs.
That, and the ability to have big LLMs in memory, for some local inference, even if it's slow mixed CPU/GPU inference, or paged on demand. And if not for big LLMs, then to keep models cached for quick swapping.
I bought a 4 year old car for significantly less than that. And I can get a computer that can do 99% of what your monster can do for like 10% of the price. And if I want LLM inference I can get that for like $20 a month or whatever.
I don't mean to judge, it's your money but to me it seems like an enormous waste. Just like spending $100k on a car when you can get one for $15k that does pretty much exactly the same job.
Sure. You're right, it is my money. And I pay even more for inference on top; I have OpenRouter credits, OpenAI subscription, Claude Max subscription.
It's not so easy to get nice second-hand hardware here in Switzerland, and my HEDT is nice and quiet, doesn't need to be rack-mounted, plugs straight into the wall. I keep it in the basement next to the internet router anyway.
The "sensible" choice is to rent. It's the same with cars; most people these days lease (about 50% of new cars in CH, which will be a majority if you compare it with auto loan and cash purchase).
I don't think leasing cars is sensible. Last time I checked, for cheaper cars mind you, I would essentially pay 60% of the sticker price over a few years and then not have a car at the end of it. Would be better to buy a new car and then sell it after the same time. But what's even better is to not buy a new car, let some other sucker take the huge value loss and then snatch it up at a 30-60% discount a few years later. Then you can sell it a few years after that for not much less than you paid for it. I've had mine a year and right now they're going for more than I paid.
I think leasing might be okayish if you find a really good deal, but it's really not much different than buying new which is just a shit deal no matter how you turn it. A 1-4 year old car is pretty much new anyway, I don't see any reason to buy brand new.
I've always went way over on RAM, for the most part. 32, 64, then 128GB of memory.
Never really used it all, usually only about 40%, but it's one of those better to have than not need, and better than selling and re-buying a larger memory machine (when it's something you can't upgrade, like a Mac or certain other laptops)
I believe superficially speaking you could be right. But I think it was realised that causing the scarcity of products and commodities is a power move.
We live in world where we optimised for globalization. Industry in china, oil in middle east, etc...
This approach proved to be fragile on the hands of people with money and/or power enough to tilt the scale
It's not a power move, it's a cartel and they've done this before. Gamers Nexus did a fantastic piece on how where we're at today is very similar to the DRAM price fixing and market manipulation just a couple decades ago [0]. This is the big players taking full advantage of an opportunity for profit.
This will be me. Bestowing upon my descendants a collection of Mighty Beanz, a few unkillable appliances, and the best consumer computing hardware the early 2020s could buy.
And I fear they will be equally confused and annoyed by disposing of all of them.
>we're at an inflection point where DC hardware is diverging rapidly from consumer compute.
I thought the trend is the opposite direction, with RTX 5x series converging with server atchitectures (Blackwell-based such as RTX 6000 Pro+). Just less VRAM and fewer tensor cores, artificially.
Where is the divergence happening? Or you don't view RTX 5x as consumer hardware?
Blackwell diverges within Blackwell itself… SM121 on the GB10 vs the RTX 5000 consumer vs the actual full fat B100 hardware all have surprisingly different abilities. The GB10 has been hamstrung by this a bit, too.
People laugh at young men for looksmaxxing. And then there’s this. I dunno. As someone who has been playing computer games since the 70s, I clearly do not understand the culture anymore. But what forces would drive a young man to spend the price of a used car to play a derivative FPS? It seems heartbreaking. Just like the looksmaxxer.
I think you're probably right, but I'm not so confident the supply crunch will end.
Tech feels increasingly fragile with more and more consolidation. We have a huge chunk of advanced chip manufacturing situated on a tiny island off the coast of a rising superpower that hates that island being independent. Fabs in general are so expensive that you need a huge market to justify building one. That market is there, for now. But it doesn't seem like there's much redundancy. If there's an economic shock, like, I dunno, 20% of the world's oil supply suddenly being blockaded, I worry that could tip things into a death spiral instead.
> Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute that you rent, or buy a time slice with your eyeballs, much like smartphones pretty much always have been.
What are you talking about?
My laptops are, and always have been, primarily places where I do local computing. I write code there, I watch movies there, I listen to music there, I play games there...all with local storage, local compute, and local control (though I do also store a bunch of my movies on a personal media server, housed in my TV stand, because it can hold a lot more). My smartphone is similar.
If you think that the vast majority of the work most people do on their personal computers is moving to LLMs, or cloud gaming, then I think you are operating in a pretty serious bubble. 99.9% of all work that most people do is still best done locally: word processing, spreadsheets, email, writing code, etc. Even in the cases where the application is hosted online (like Google Docs/Sheets), the compute is still primarily local.
The closest to what you're describing that I think makes any sense is the proliferation of streaming media—but again, while they store the vast libraries of content for us, the decoding is done locally, after the content has reached our devices.
It doesn't matter if a cutting-edge AI-optimized server can perform 10, 100, or 1000 times better than my laptop at any particular task: if the speed at which my laptop performs it is faster than I, as a human, can keep up (whatever that means for the particular task), then there's no reason not to do the task locally.
I don't share the same 1:1 opinion with regards to the article,
but it is absolutely clear that RAM prices have gone up enormously.
Just compare them. That is fact.
It may be cheaper lateron, but ... when will that happen? Is there
a guarantee? Supply crunch can also mean that fewer people can
afford something because the prices are now much higher than before.
Add to this the oil crisis Trump started and we are now suddenly
having to pay more just because a few mafiosi benefit from this.
(See Krugman's analysis of the recent stock market flow of money/stocks.)
The increase looks higher because we were at an all-time price low. RAM has been this expensive at least twice before, and it always dropped way down again after.
General predictions are in 3-5 years things will return to normal. 3 years if the current AI crunch is a short term thing, 5 years if it isn't and we have to build new RAM factories.
Open source efforts need to give up on local AI and embrace cloud compute.
We need to stop building toy models to run on RTX and instead try to compete with the hyperscalers. We need open weights models that are big and run on H200s. Those are the class of models that will be able to compete.
When the hyperscalers reach take off, we're done for. If we can stay within ~6months, we might be able to slow them down or even break them.
If there was something 80-90% as good as Opus or Seedance or Nano Banana, more of the ecosystem would switch to open source because it offers control and sovereignty. But we don't have that right now.
If we had really competitive open weights models, universities, research teams, other labs, and other companies would be able to collaboratively contribute to the effort.
Everyone in the open source world is trying to shrink these models to fit on their 3090 instead, though, and that's such a wasted effort. It's short term thinking.
An "OpenRunPod/OpenOpenRouter" + one click deploy of models just as good as Gemini will win over LMStudio and ComfyUI trying to hack a solution on your own Nvidia gaming card.
That's such a tiny segment of the market, and the tools are all horrible to use anyway. It's like we learned nothing from "The Year of Linux on Desktop 1999". Only when we realized the data center was our friend did we frame our open source effort appropriately.
> We need open weights models that are big and run on H200s.
We have this class of models already, Kimi 2.5 and GLM-5 are proper SOTA models. Nemotron might also release a larger-sized model at some time in the future. With the new NVMe-based offload being worked on as of late you can even experiment with these models on your own hardware, but of course there's plenty of cheap third-party inference platforms for these too.
I.e., /if/ I am going to consume LLM tokens, I figure that a local LLM with 10s of billions of parameters running on commodity hardware at home will still consume far more energy per token than that of a frontier model running on commercial hardware which is very strongly incentivized to be as efficient as possible. Do the math; it isn't even close. (Maybe it'd be closer in your local winter, where your compute heat could offset your heating requirements. But that gets harder to quantify.)
Maybe it's different if you have insane and modern local hardware, but at least in my situation that is not the case.
But commodity hardware that's right-sized for your own private needs is many orders of magnitude cheaper than datacenter hardware that's intended to serve millions of users simultaneously while consuming gigawatts in power. You're mostly paying for that hardware when you buy LLM tokens, not just for power efficiency. And your own hardware stays available for non-AI related needs, while paying for these tokens would require you to address these needs separately in some way.
>And your own hardware stays available for non-AI related needs, while paying for these tokens would require you to address these needs separately in some way.
^ Fair. Yep, I agree the calculus changes if you don't have _any_ local hardware and you're needing to factor in the cost of acquiring such hardware.
When I did this napkin math, I was mostly interested in the energy aspect, using cost as a proxy. I was calculating the $/token (taking into consideration the cost of a KWh from my utility, the measured power draw of my M1 work machine, and the measured tokens per second processed by a ~20BP open-weight model). I then compared this to the published $/token rate of a frontier provider, and it was something like two orders of magnitude in favor of the frontier model. I get it, they're subsidizing, but I've got to imagine there's some truth in the numbers.
I wonder, does (or will) the $/token ratio fall asymptotically toward the cost of electricity? In my mind I'm drawing a parallel to how the value of mined cryptocurrency approximately tracks the cost of electricity... but I might be misremembering that detail.
I doubt it because you aren't going to get the utilisation that a commercial setup would. No point wasting tons of money on hardware that is sat idle most of the time.
If you're running agentic workloads in the background (either some coding agent or personal claw-agent type) that's enough utilization that the hardware won't be sitting idle.
Also, the only thing crashing down will be the economic participation of everyday people if we don't have ownership over the means of creation. Hyperscalers will be just fine.
The general take here seems to be "everything eventually passes". That isn't always true. I wonder how many people have a primary computing device that they don't even have full control over now (Apple phones, tablets...). Years ago the concept of spending over $1k on a computer that I didn't even have the right to install my own software on was considered ridiculous by many people (myself included). Now many people primarily consume content on a device controlled almost entirely by the company they bought it from. If the economics lead to a situation where its more profitable to sell you compute time than sell you computers then businesses will chose to not sell you computers. I have no idea if that is what ends up happening.
It's worth keeping an eye on this HP-rental-laptop thing.
Personally I think it will be a big headache for HP, people can be hard on laptops and HP is already not excited about consumer support (i.e. mandatory 15 minute wait time for support calls). But if they make it work, I think there's probably a good number of people who feel like they need a laptop but don't care so much about the specifics and want to keep their costs low (as all of their costs appear to be rising right now).
Rental seems to be about corporate laptops. Companies just want things to work at a predictable cost. They are already replacing laptops after 5 years even if they work. They are already replacing a few laptops that break in less than that 5 years. In short they are already renting the laptops, they are just paying the price upfront and then using accounting to balance it out. Rental just moves the accounting, but otherwise nothing changes.
For consumers who don't replace their laptops on a schedule it makes less sense.
I'm also very skeptical of "everything eventually passes" as it pertains to hardware prices. Right now, prices are high because supply can't keep up with demand. But if/when supply increases to meet demand or demand decreases, there's no reason for companies to drop prices now that consumers have become accustomed to them.
Not necessarily. Many people grew up with PCs and laptops but now mostly use their phones, because outside of specific jobs or hobbies, everyday computing needs are heavily optimized for mobile-first.
(A large factor here is, obviously, the cloud. With photos, documents, e-mail, IMs, etc. all hosted for cheap or free on "other people's computers", the total hardware demands on the end-user computing device is much less. Think storage, not just RAM.)
It's true even in tech; half a year ago I switched my phone to a Galaxy Z Fold7, and I haven't used my personal laptop since then, not once. I have a separate company laptop for work, and I occasionally turned on my PC, but it turns out that a foldable phone is good enough to do everything on personal side I'd normally use a laptop for. So here I am, with my primary compute device I don't have full control over - and yes, I'm surprised by this development myself, and haven't fully processed it yet.
> Not necessarily. Many people grew up with PCs and laptops but now mostly use their phones, because outside of specific jobs or hobbies, everyday computing needs are heavily optimized for mobile-first.
It's a deeply flawed comparison, because many of the things we do with a phone now wasn't something we'd do at all with the computers we grew up with. We didn't pay at the grocery store with a computer, we didn't buy metro tickets, we didn't use it to navigate (well, there was a short period of time where we might print out maps, but anyway..)
When I grew up, I feel like our use of home computers fell into two categories:
1. Some of us kids used them to play games. Though many more would have a Nintendo/Sega for that, and I feel like the iPhone/iPad is a continuation of that. The "it just works" experience where you have limited control over the device.
2. Some parents would use it for work/spreadsheets/documents ... and that's still where most people use a "real" computer today. So nothing has really changed there.
There is now a lot more work where you do the work on services running on a server or in the cloud. But that's back to the original point: that's in many cases just not something we could do with old home computers. Like, my doctor can now approve my request for a prescription from anywhere in the world. That just wasn't possible before, and arguably isn't possible without a server/cloud-based infrastructure.
Phones/tablets as an interface to these services is arguably a continuation of like those old dumb terminals to e.g. AS/400 machines and such.
> It's true even in tech; half a year ago I switched my phone to a Galaxy Z Fold7, and I haven't used my personal laptop since then, not once.
(edit: I'm broadly in agreement with your comment & observations, so I don't at all mean to come off as argumentative for the sake of being argumentative. You just got me thinking about how that situation might have been handled thirty or a hundred years ago.)
> [...] my doctor can now approve my request for a prescription from anywhere in the world. That just wasn't possible before [...]
I'm picking nits, but wasn't this more or less instantaneous approval possible before with e.g., a fax and a telephone? Or (although this is a bit of a stretch) a telegram and telegraph?
Ditto. My personal equipment includes a home server (128GB DDR3 ECC) and a tablet with a keyboard. It's honestly astonishing what you can do without a full-fledged laptop, if you're willing to go through some gymnastics to get there. And it travels light compared to a laptop! (The tablet, that is. Not the headless box. :-))
In a lot of ways the cloud is better than my personal computer, even if I'm on it.
There is a reason I have a server in my basement - it lets me edit files on my phone (if I must - the keyboard is and screen space are terrible compromises but sometimes I can live with it), laptop (acceptable keyboard and screen), or desktop (great keyboard, large screen); it also lets me share with my wife (I haven't got this working but it can be done). I have nearly always had a server in my house because sharing files between computers is so much better than only being able to work on one (or using floppies). The cloud expands my home server to anywhere in the world: it offloads security on someone else, and makes it someone else's problem to keep the software updated.
There is a lot to hate about the cloud. My home servers also have annoyances. However for most things it is conceptually better and we just need the cloud providers to fix the annoyances (it is an open question if they will)
Not my 70yo mom. She used to have a big gray PC but switched to a Chromebook (one I gave her) about 15 years ago, and now only uses her phone and tablet.
I "sold" my mother my personal top-of-the-line MacBook Pro ~2014... only to eventually discover it largely unused when we were probating her properties.
iPad awas the perfect device for her (I've touched one perhaps twice, in my entire lifetime).
The framing here is wrong, I think. My iPad has a lot of software on it that I use for music production, it all runs locally. Yes I had to install it through Apple's app store but I could disconnect it from the Internet and expect it to, at this point, work as long as the software on almost any piece of hardware it replaces.
Meanwhile my much more expensive laptop mostly interfaces with applications that primarily exist on servers that I have no control over, and it would be nearly worthless if I disconnected it from the Internet. Your central point is right, the economics are concerning, but I think it's been a ship slowly sailing away that we're now noticing has disappeared over the horizon.
If you have to pass the bouncers vibe check to get in, and your dancers have to pay him a 30% tax to work there, do you own the strip club or does the bouncer?
Being in control of your own computing device was always a niche. The vast majority of people are not interested in computing itself, only in the output. For that majority, this is fine.
The niche is still there, probably as big as it was before. For example, as I grew weary of being subject to services I have little control over, I set up my own home server using a refurbished PC. It has been an amazing journey so far. But I don't think a normie would ever get interested in buying a refurbished Dell, install Debian on it, and set up their own services there.
As long as there is a niche of people interested in buying their own computers, there will be companies willing to fill that niche.
A long article begging the question when the last paragraph or two countered the panic of the beginning. Two Chinese firms are ramping up production of consumer RAM/SSDs because they see a market opening as the existing producers move to selling to enterprise/hyperscalars.
There have been memory chip panics before, the US funded RAM production back into the 80s/90s in competition with Japan at the time.
The AI boom/"hyperscale" currently is almost exactly like the dotcom boom.
It's already starting to shake down. Anthropic is occupying the developer space, OpenAI has just exited the video/media production space. More focused and vertical market AI is emerging.
The current vortice of money between OpenAI <-> Microsoft <-> Oracle <-> NVidea <-> Google <-> etc etc is going to break.
The effects of the AI hyper scaling boom on the commodity hardware and energy markets are very much not like the dot com boom.
Outside of the obvious economic effect of the dot com boom - the creation of near infinitely scalable high margin online businesses - there was a secondary effect on consumer electronics, with a massive growth in demand for networked devices; there was then much more of a balance between the hardware growth in the network infrastructure and data center worlds as well as in desktop and mobile.
The AI boom’s hardware impact is much more skewed, as this article details.
> Two Chinese firms are ramping up production of consumer RAM/SSDs because they see a market opening
Yes but these Chinese firms are a tiny share of the overall RAM/SSD market, and they'll have the same problems with expanding production as everyone else. So it doesn't actually help all that much.
The biggest problem in expanding for everyone else is they don't trust the market to exist for long enough to be worth paying for a new factory so they are not investing in it. The Chinese might be small, but they think the market will exist and are investing. Will they be right or wrong - I don't know.
The fact that there’s been a massive expansion in the nonconsumer market means the consumer market makes up a smaller proportion of the overall market, but it doesn’t mean the consumer market is any smaller than it used to be.
This may not be entirely appropriate to the reasons behind the article, but it feels tangentially related:
I'd like to say a brief thank you to what the brief, golden period of globalisation was able to bring us.
I hope that that level of international trade and economic cooperation across geographical, ideological, political, and religious boundaries can be achieved again at some point in the future, but it seems the pendulum is swinging the other way for the time being.
I hope that, wherever the current direction ends up, there are lessons that can be learnt about what we had, and somehow fumbled, such that there is motivation enough to get back there.
> I'd like to say a brief thank you to what the brief, golden period of globalisation was able to bring us.
Not everyone benefited. Market globalism wasn't particularly kind to the global south, and the specific mandates that the WTO enacted on countries in latin america / africa (Washington Consensus) greatly increased local wealth disparities despite visibly growing GDP for a time.
America profited handsomely because for most of the past 30 years, it was where the (future) transnational conglomerates were based. These companies stood to benefit from the opening up of international markets. Now that these companies are being out-competed by their asian counterparts, instead of going back to the drawing board and innovating they are playing the "unfair trade practices" card and of course the current administration is on-board with it.
Globalisation is not going anywhere, but America is increasingly alienating itself from allies who it could stand to benefit from.
It is amazing how you can order so many small sensors from aliexpress, around 1-2€ each, and having in a week or two delivered. I am not sure we will have this for long.
> I hope that that level of international trade and economic cooperation across geographical, ideological, political, and religious boundaries can be achieved again at some point in the future
Me too, but without all the slavery this time please. It'll never work if some actors are willing to abuse their workforces to keep prices low as they do.
Among my favorite failed dorking around experiences is pre-Raspberry, when the Arduino was still hobby-level equipment. This was over a decade ago...
With only a few kilobytes of code, you could send a UDP packet directly to your phone, with an app you "wrote" with just a few lines of code (to receive, without auto-confirmation).
I was on LinkedIn last night, and someone posted their new SAAS. The website was basically a calendar where you could log what you did each day of the month. I checked my memory usage, and that site was using 1GB of memory. They were also charging $100 for it...
Let me be the devils advocate here.
Ok, let's say you optimize that TODO list app to only use 16 mb of RAM. What did you gain by that? Would you buy a smartphone that has less RAM now?
16MB still seems massive for this kind of app. I ran Visual Studio 4, not an app, but an entire app factory, on a 66MHz 486 with 16MB RAM. And it was snappy. A TODO list app that uses system UI elements could be significantly smaller.
What do I gain if more developers take this approach? Lightning fast performance. Faster backups. Decreased battery drain => longer battery service lifetime => more time in between hardware refreshes. Improved security posture due to orders of magnitude less SLOC. Improved reliability from decreased complexity.
Easier to run your todo list at the same time as applications that need the RAM for raw function. Maybe that’s CAD, maybe that’s A/V production, maybe it’s a context window.
It’s been convenient that we can throw better hardware at our constraints regularly. Our convenience much less our personal economic functions is not necessarily what markets will generally optimize for, much like developers of electron apps aren’t optimizing for user resources.
Technically no (except for the gradual performance drop they introduce, + occasional TPM bullshit), but of course in practice, companies see this as a choice of spending money on back-porting security fixes to a growing range of hardware, vs. making money by not doing that and forcing everyone to buy new hardware instead.
I’m running Windows 10 ESU on a 13 year old PC without issues. While it’s admittedly near the end of its life (mostly just due to Windows 11, though I might repurpose it for Linux), I’m expecting the next one to also last a decade or longer.
So is my wife, her laptop is still decent today, but doesn't support Win 11. I'm not worried about Microsoft as much as certain other competitors killing it - similarly to how she was forced to update to Windows 10 in the first place because, one day, out of the sudden, her web browser decided to refuse running on Windows 7.
We can't ever escape the market forces? You're right, of course if software gets less bloated, vendors will "value-optimize" hardware so in the end, computers keep being barely usable as they are today.
This year's average phone is already going to have less RAM than last year's average phone - so anything that reduces the footprint of the apps (and even more importantly, websites) we're using can only be a good thing. Plus it extends the usable life of current hardware.
Sure, but the price increase will be less, because less ram. Also, the need to keep buying new computers will decrease, because this year's computer isn't much better then last years (but now we can run more/better software!)
Less bloat is 100% always a good thing, no matter what the market conditions are.
That's crazy talk. What will you ask for next? Add functionality to make apps at least as good/capable as they were in the 1990s and early 2000s? And then? Apps that interoperate? Insane.
More seriously and more ironically, at the same time, we've now reached a strange time where even non-programmers can vibe-code better software than they can buy/subscribe to - not because models are that good, or programming isn't hard, but because enshittification that has this industry rotten to the core and unable to deliver useful tools anymore.
Oh man, I've come across this person's blog before and I love it, not just because of the personalization/personality they've put into the site's design, but because of all of the random CLI/TUI-based tools they've developed. Examples:
Just to mention one thing, helium -which is a necessity for chip production- is a byproduct of LNG production. And 20% of that is just gone (Qatar) and the question is how long it will take to get that back. So not only a chip shortage because of AI buying chips in huge volumes but also because production will be hampered.
Tongue in cheek: we urgently need fusion power plants. For the AI and the helium.
> Tongue in cheek: we urgently need fusion power plants. For the AI and the helium.
Whenever I read about fusion, I get reminded of a note in the sci-fi book trilogy The Night's Dawn.
In that story, the introduction of cheap fusion energy had not cured global warming on Earth but instead sped it up with all the excess heat from energy-wasting devices.
What matters is not what we don't have, but how we manage that which we do have.
Well, as long as they can make electricity too cheap to meter, we can get helium from somewhere. Mine it from LNG sources currently untapped due to EROI < 1, or ship it from the goddamn Moon - ultimately, every problem in life (except that of human heart) can be solved with cheap energy.
The mere existence of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies means that it is impossible to ever have electricity that is "too cheap to meter". Any time electricity prices would fall below the price of mining, that creates a market opportunity that will be filled by more mining. Wasted electricity is the product.
I'm shocked there isn't more government regulation about this. You can't ban Bitcoin, but if you make it a massive pain to invest in it and make it difficult to convert between physical currency that would drive down a lot of demand.
I think that's only because electricity is the bottleneck, though. If it was no longer the bottleneck, crypto miners would expand rapidly with more hardware, mining difficulty would increase, and eventually the bottleneck is storage space for all your GPUs, if not the GPUs themselves.
With the trend of orbital launches becoming cheaper, it might be that mining helium off-Tera will be our long term supply. Especially if the alternative is adjusting the amount of protons in an atom.
There are several challenges, not least of which is storage. We have considerable leakage in most of our current helium storage solutions on earth because it’s so light. Our national reserves are literally in underground caverns because it’s better than anything we can build. Space just means any containment system will need to work in a wider range of pressure/temperatures.
There is to my knowledge no reason to assume that complicated physics experiments that heat water to run a steam engine will be much cheaper than fission power plants, unfortunately.
Can't they irradiate tanks of H2 or something with so much neutrons and electrons until morale improves and they become He? Or would that make radioactive He?
Gonna sit on my half-empty tank for party balloons from my daughter's birthday, maybe we'll be able to sell it to pay off mortgage quicker than the helium itself escapes the tank.
That's another lifetime-limited thing -- the helium leaks out, and you cannot (for practical purposes) stop it or even meaningfully slow it down. When it's gone, the drives are dead. And the helium leaks by calendar-days, it doesn't matter whether the drive is powered on or off.
Non-helium hard drives are basically limited by their bearing spin hours. If one only spins a few hours a week, it'll probably run for decades. Not so with helium.
The article's dystopia section is dramatic but the practical point is real. I've been self-hosting more and more over the past year specifically because I got uncomfortable with how much of my stack depended on someone else's
servers.
Running a VPS with Tailscale for private access, SQLite instead of
managed databases, flat files synced with git instead of cloud storage. None
of this requires expensive hardware, it just requires caring enough to set it up
Depending on someone else's servers isn't that different from depending on someone else's software, which unfortunately we all must do. Unfathomable reams of it, with a growth curve that recently went vertical. I guess the crucial difference is that someone else's servers can be taken away in a flash, while someone else's (FOSSl software can't.
You are missing one important part: maintenance. While on a managed service, dozens of hours of maintenance are done by someone, when you are self-hosting, you'll be doing 3 times that, because you can't know all the details of making so many tools work, because each tool will have to be upgraded at some point and the upgrade will fail, because you have to test you backups, and many many more things to do in the long run.
So yeah, it's fun. But don't under-estimate that time, it could easily be your time spent with friend or family.
Keeping services running is fairly trivial. Getting to parity with the operationalization you get from a cloud platform takes more ongoing work.
I have a homelab that supports a number of services for my family. I have offsite backups (rsync.net for most data, a server sitting at our cottage for our media library), alerting, and some redundancy for hardware failures.
Right now, I have a few things I need to fix:
- one of the nodes didn't boot back up after a power outage last fall; need to hook up a KVM to troubleshoot
- cottage internet has been down since a power outage, so those backups are behind (I'm assuming it's something stupid, like I forgot to change the BIOS to power on automatically on the new router I just put in)
- various services occasionally throw alerts at me
I have a much more complex setup than necessary (k8s in a homelab is overkill), but even the simplest system still needs backups if you care at all about your data. To be fair, cloud services aren't immune to this, either (the failure mode is more likely to be something like your account getting compromised, rather than a hardware failure).
I love self-hosting and run tons of services that I use daily. The thought of random hardware failures scares me, though. Troubleshooting hardware failure is hard and time consuming. Having spare minipcs is expensive. My NAS server failing would have the biggest impact, however.
Other than the firewall (itself a minipc), I only have one server where a failure would cause issues: it's connected to the HDDs I use for high-capacity storage, and has a GPU that Jellyfin uses for transcoding. That would only cause Jellyfin to stop working—the other services that have lower storage needs would continue working, since their storage is replicated across multiple nodes using Longhorn.
Kubernetes adds a lot of complexity initially, but it does make it easier to add fault tolerance for hardware failures, especially in conjunction with a replicating filesystem provider like Longhorn. I only knew that I had a failed node because some services didn't come back up until I drained and cordoned the node from the cluster (looks like there are various projects to automate this—I should look into those).
Sure - self hosting takes a bit more work. It usually pays for itself in saved costs (ex - if you weren't doing this work, you're paying money which you needed to do work for to have it done for you.)
Cloud costs haven't actually gotten much cheaper (but the base hardware HAS - even now during these inflated costs), and now every bit of software tries to bill you monthly.
Further, if you're not putting services open on the web - you actually don't need to update all that often. Especially not the services themselves.
Honestly - part of the benefit of self-hosting is that I can choose whether I really want to make that update to latest, and whether the features matter to me. Often... they don't.
---
Consider: Most people are running outdated IP provided routers with known vulnerabilities that haven't been updated in literally years. They do ok.
Much easier with AI. Went from Webhosting all-in package + NAS to Hetzner Storage Share and a separate Emailprovider (Runbox). After a short time I dumped the Nextcloud instance and moved on to a Hetzner VPS with five docker containers, Caddy, proper authentication and all. Plus a Storage Box. Blogging/Homepage as Cloudflare Pages, fed by Github, domains from CF and porkbun, Tailscale, etc., etc. ad nauseam, NAS still there.
Most of this I didn't for many years because it is not my core competence (in particular the security aspects). Properly fleshed-out explanations from any decent AI will catapult you to this point in no time. Maintenance? Almost zero.
p.s. Admittedly, it's not a true self-hosting solution, but the approach is similar and ultimately leads to that as well.
Agreed. NixOS + Tailscale is 99% there for me. Using Claude Code to deal with whatever other package I need built with nix while I'm working on $day_job things helps get me to a fully working system. Besides the fact that running containers via podman or docker (your choice) is super easy via a NixOS config.
Combine that with deploy-rs or similar and you have a very very stable way to deploy software with solid rollback support and easy to debug config issues (it's just files in the ./result symlink!)
yes, I do agree with that sentiment, there are times when I'm spending way too much time restarting a service that went down, but it doesn't take as long as it used to, especially with AI assistance nowadays. If I'm spending too much time on it, then I'm also probably learning something along the way, so I don't mind spending that time.
There are a lot of people that have made a lot of money and careers because developers in particular don't want to know or don't care to know how to manage this stuff.
They need to get over it.
Pick up some Ansible and or Terraform/tofu and automate away. It can be easy or as involved as you want it to be.
This article inspired me to look and see what this computer is. Apparently it is a "AMD Athlon(tm) II X2 250 Processor" from 2009. So 17 years old. It has 8 GB of DDR3 memory and runs at 3 GHz. It currently has OpenBSD on it, but at least one source thinks it could run Windows 10.
The fact that I didn't know any of this is what is significant here. At some point I stopped caring about this sort of thing. It really doesn't matter any more. Don't get my wrong, I am as nerdy as they come. My first computer was a wire wrapped 8080 based system. That was followed by an also wire wrapped 8086 based system of my own design I used for day to day computing tasks (it ran Forth). If someone like me can get to the point of not caring there is no real reason for anyone else to care.
65W TDP? Let's say we want to run a PC so we're switching to a newer low-end Ryzen with a 35W TDP and that that's a 30W difference for the whole system. Let's say we're running the system 24/7 and the CPU is pulling its full TDP constantly. Average US residential electricity price is $0.18/kWh.
In the UK, residential electricity tariffs are currently capped by the regulator at 27.69p per kWh, resulting in a total yearly cost of £72.77. Much higher than in the US, but still much cheaper than a new PC.
Yup. But from the OP, all the information we have is the CPU model, and the GP decided that was enough to say it should be thrown in the trash for power inefficiency, so I thought it was enough for some bad math.
(FWIW, searching for the CPU model brings up an old review where the full system they’re testing pulls 145W under some amount of load. While that’s not nothing, it’s also not outrageous for a desktop PC that does the desktop PC things you require of it.)
So $50/yr for 4 years gives you ~$150 with $50 extra for shipping or whatever, which gets you a decent Lenovo M700 Tiny with much better performance in both power and power consumption.
I guess. It's hardly an open-and-shut case of "throw your old computer away!" though, especially when this is a worst-case scenario of running a desktop computer at full blast 24/7 without it ever going into sleep mode or being turned off, and when you don't know what the user's needs are. Maybe a mini-PC with basically no expansion just won't really work for them?
Watts in TDP are not the same as watts in electricity, although they're both measures of energy.
TDP is a thermal measurement, it's how much heat energy your heatsink and fan need to be able to dissipate to keep the unit within operational temperatures. It does not directly correlate to the amount of electricity consumed in operation.
An interesting point. Some random measurement gets 49W idle[1] which is probably close enough. I don't constantly compile stuff or stream video. At my local electricity rate of $0.072/kWh that works out to $31USD/year.
New systems idle at something like 25 Watts according to a lazy search. So 49-25=24W. That works out to $15/year hypothetically saved by going to a newer system. But I live in a cold climate and the heating season is something like half the year. But I only pay something like half as much for gas heat as opposed to electric heat. So let's just knock a quarter off and end up with 15-(15/4)=$11.25USD hypothetically saved per year. I will leave it here as I don't know how much the hypothetical alternative computer would cost and, as already mentioned, I don't care.
Articles entire thesis looks like it can be completely de-railed if one activity happened: ai infrastructure firms cease to be able to secure more capital.
Is that likely? History says it's inevitable, but timeframe is an open question.
> ai infrastructure firms cease to be able to secure more capital
If this does occur, unfortunately it isn’t like any of the production capacity is going to immediately shift or be repurposed. A lot of the hardware isn’t usable outside of datacenter deployments. I would guess a more realistic recalibration is 2-3 years of immense pain followed by gradual availability of components again.
My computer, and I think all threadripper systems, has registered ECC DDR5 RAM which I think is the same type used in AI datacenters. Well one half of it, the other half being HBM memory used on video cards, which is soldered to them and non-upgradeable. But the main system memory from a used AI server can become your main system memory.
So that becomes the next question -- will we see an ecosystem of modifications and adapters, to desolder surplus and decommissioned datacenter HBM and put it on some sort of daughterboard with a translator so it can be used in a consumer machine?
Stuff like that already exists for flash memory; I can harvest eMMC chips from ewaste and solder them to cheaply-available boards to make USB flash drives. But there the protocols are the same, there's no firmware work needed...
yeah 3 years sounds reasonable to me, less than one asset depreciation cycle in business. Pain for you and me, but just a bump in the road for the accounts dept.
In the last month 20-30% of oil supply 30% gas supply and 30-40% of fertilizer production has been destroyed and could take any where from 8 months to 5 years to come back online. Governments are acting as everything is okay so that there is no panic but we have crossed the point of no return even if the war ends today food & energy shortages are over the horizon.
If you can get an ev, solar heat pumps, battery storage etc get it now today as fossil fuel based energy prices are going to go through the roof. I see similarities to when covid hit people kept looking at things happening in other countries and not preparing for the shit to hit their own cities and countries.
Not to mention Age Verification / KYC being baked into every future OS and device. Buy and hodl to have a hope of independent, censorship-resistant computing in the future.
As long as there are consumers paying for hardware ownership there will be businesses willing to sell it to them. The worst scenario I could imagine is that one has to pay a premium for fully-owned hardware simply because consumer's desire for it becomes an oddity and it is thus sold in low quantities.
The current AI-induced shortages aside, the times have never been better in my opinion. There is overwhelming choice; ordinary consumers can access anything from Raspberry PIs all the way up to enterprise servers and AI accelerators. The situation was very different in the 1990s when I built my first PC.
> As long as there are consumers paying for hardware ownership there will be businesses willing to sell it to them.
That's not true at all.
There are a lot of people willing to buy smartphones with small screen or smartphones with Linux or any other OS than iOS or Android.
But those people are not enough to justify the gigantic initial investment that is necessary to provide viable products in this market. And the existing actors aren't interested in those niche.
I do not see this from an infinite shortage point; I see this from a locked down hardware point. Old hardware is hackable, new hardware mostly not. That is for me where the real pain is and why I just buy old computers and phones that are rootable.
When I started programming in the early 80's, personal computing had just recently become a thing. Before that, if you wanted to learn to program, you first needed access to a very rare piece of hardware that only a select few were granted access to. But when personal computing became a reality, programming exploded - anybody could learn it with a modest investment.
I suspect we're trending back to the pre-personal computing era where access to 'raw' computing power will be hard to come by. It will become harder and harder to learn to program just because it'll be harder and harder to get your hands on the necessary equipment.
> For the better part of two decades, consumers lived in a golden age of tech. Memory got cheaper, storage increased in capacity and hardware got faster and absurdly affordable.
I got my first PC circa 1992 (a 2nd hand IBM PS/2, 80286 processor with 2MB RAM and 30MB HDD) and the "golden age" was already there. We are well over 40 years of almost uninterrupted "pay less for more performances" in the home/personal computing space, and that's because that space started around 50 years ago. There was some fluctuation (remember the earthquake affecting HDD prices a few years ago?) but demand was there and manufacturing tech became more efficient.
The actual important change is that for most consumer uses, the perf improvements stopped to make sense already what, over 10 years ago?
Do you mean for hardware? Because a big chunk of that imo is how unnecessarily demanding software has become in the last 10 years, largely due to the web.
Yes, I mean that HW which is 10 years old is perfectly capable to do the job nowadays. This is absolutely true for PCs/laptops and could also be for smartphones if it the software support worked like in the x86 world.
I actually think the central thesis is thought provoking, we have shifted far away from locally installed shit to remote data centre access, this was initially driven by cloud-based initiatives and now spiralling upwards by AI. For any researchers, hackers, builders wanting to play with locally installed AI, hardware could become a bottleneck especially as many machines, such as the beloved Macs, are not upgradable
Hold onto your hardware. Hold on to your existing software and the current version. Don’t upgrade without a specific need. None of the “progress” is actually helpful to hackers and I’m not sure it’s even helpful to typical users. There’s enough information being given to and slurped by others, don’t make it more effective.
My PC has an Intel Xeon from 2007, a GPU from 2010, and 4GB of RAM.
It’s enough for web browsing and can handle 1080p/60fps video just fine.
For gaming, I have a dedicated device - a Nintendo Switch, but I also play indie PC games like Slay the Spire, Forge MTG, some puzzle games e.g. TIS-100.
Linux with i3 is fast and responsive. I write code in the terminal, no fancy debuggers, no million plugins, no Electron mess.
It’s enough for everything I need, and I don’t see a reason to ever upgrade. Unless my hardware starts failing, of course.
I realize this is probably said in jest, but just in case there are readers who don’t take it that way:
* someone has to write language specifying a program, natural language or programming.
* a programming langugage is a handle with specific properties at a specific level of abstraction. Whether it’s a popular handle won’t change that it’s far more than a toy.
In order to go from 360p video 15 years ago to 4K HDR today, I have upgraded from a 2mbps 802.11g WiFi on a 1366x768 display to a 200mbps connection on 802.11ax and a 55 inch 4k television.
The experience is quite immersive and well worth the upgrade that happened very progressively (WiFi 5 1080p then WiFi 6/7 4K).
At the same time, we had cheap consumer gigabit ethernet, and still have cheap consumer gigabit ethernet. 2.5 is getting there price-wise, but switches are still somewhat rare/expensive.
It is wild thinking how a few years ago, I didn't buy a 4090 direct from nvidia because "$1600 (USD) is too much to pay for a graphics card; if I need a better one, i'll upgrade in a few years. (Went with 4080, which is substantially slower and was $1200) Joke's on me!
It will be scarcity mindset from here on out; will always buy the top tier thing .
I very much would like to know how much of this presumably ordered (and backordered) hardware (RAM/SSD/.../wafers) is going to end up being released back to the market when the dust settles. I haven't seen any estimations but in order to put all this hardware to work the hyperscalers need to be building data centers at ludicrous speed. That should be appearing in construction data, jobs data, and many other places. Are we actually seeing any of that? Or is it all just based on the back-of-the-napkin math by Mr Altman and Co and they put all the money they got towards the future projects?
I have often imagined writing a book, roughly "Fahrenheit 451 but with computers instead of books". Imagine a world you do not buy an iPhone- one is assigned to you at birth, a world were "installing software" on "a computer you own" are not just antiquated or taboo, but unthinkable.
I think Mr Bradbury would remind you his book was about how passive entertainment (the "parlor") slowly eroded books for decades before the actual book burnings, not the state just suddenly banning them.
In that sense, I suppose you could still make it work. Our society celebrated surrendering ownership of media to iTunes and Steam for our convenience, whittled down online content that didn't make us feel good, limited which applications we could install on our phones in the name of security and privacy, and eliminated our anonymity to save the kids. At this point, removing the hardware is the least surprising step, because as Captain Beatty says, "if you don’t want a house built, hide the nails and wood."
In such a future the iPhone and android ecosystem is dead? Because a single $1k phone is a hell of a computer. So if you can still buy a phone you can still get a computer. Local AI aside these are very capable.
You don’t really own an iPhone in terms of being a computer. It’s different for certain Android phones where you can install a custom OS. Those are also less powerful, however.
I see they are offering to macos for iphone pro and ipad pro next years with subsc. ? or via upgrade with price I mean it's now possible more than ever
when you click away to another tab, the title and favicon of the page changes to something weird, but really legit looking.
a couple of my favorites: "rust programming socks - Google", "Amazon.com: waifu pillow", "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up", "censorship on hacker news - Google"
To the people saying "The shortage wont last forever." - Yes, you might be right. However, such a supply crunch creates a perfect vacuum for rapidly change to fill in the vacuous hardware landscape of computing and shift the balance of power.
Think about it like this: Imagine the AI/Cloud/Crypto companies who are buying up all these compute and storage resources realize they now control the compute hardware market becoming compute lords. What happens when joe/jane six pack or company xyz needs a new PC or two thousand but cant afford them due to the supply crunch? Once the compute lords realize they control the compute supply they will move to rent you their compute trapping users in a walled garden. And the users wont care because they aren't computer enthusiasts like many of us here. They only need a tool that works. They *do not* care about the details.
They hardware lords could further this by building proprietary hardware in collusion with the vendors they have exclusivity with to build weaker terminal devices with just enough local ram and storage to connect to a remote compute cluster. Hardware shortage solved!
All they need to do is collude with the hardware makers with circular contracts to keep buying hardware in "anticipation of the AI driven cloud compute boom." The hardware demand cycle is kept up and consumers are purposefully kept out of the market to push people into walled gardens.
This is unsustainable of course and will eventually fall over but it could tie up computing resources for well over a decade as compute lords dry up the consumer hardware market pushing people to use their hoarded compute resources instead of owning your own. We are in a period where computing serfdom could be a likely outcome that could cause a lot of damage to freedom of use and hardware availability and the future ability to use the internet freely.
I've seen comments on here before that went somewhere along the line of "adults don't care about RAM prices." HN is no stranger to siding with the oppressors.
I am still rocking that 5700XT 50th anniversary edition. I see no reason it won't make it to 2030 at this point. There was a moment where I thought it was dying, but it was a combination of dust and a shader bug in BF6 that caused the concern. I've also got a 1080ti in case of disaster.
Newer graphics hardware is pointless to me. The expensive new techniques I find incredibly offense from an interactivity standpoint (temporal AA, nanite & friends). I run Battlefield 6 at 75% render scale with everything set to low. I really don't care how ass the game looks as long as it runs well. I much more enjoy being able to effectively dispatch my enemies than observe aesthetic clutter.
I grabbed an upgrade at the end of last year because my ~10 year old workhorse is starting to show signs of aging. Despite 16 gigs of RAM having lasted me thus far I decided to bite the bullet and get 32; so I expect this new machine to last me another 10 years (although I now have a full SSD, whereas my old workhorse had an SSD for the OS and a hybrid drive for /home, so we'll see whether or not it will actually last).
We are in a renaissance of computing right at this moment. If expand our definition of computers outside of screens and traditional input devices, microcontrollers are capable of so much more, with so much less (energy consumption | ram | storage).
The tipping point for MCUs was WiFi - which not only allows you to speak multiple protocols (UDP/Zigbee/HTTP/etc) and have audio IO, but also P2P communication and novel new form factors. There's been incredible progress with the miniaturisation of sensors and how we're able to understand and perceive our environment.
So yes, whilst traditional hardware is getting more expensive and locked down, there's a strong counter movement towards computing for everyone - and by that I also mean that there's going to be less abstraction in the entire stack. Good times ahead!
you are right! Power management improvements are what really enable these form factors... being able to run a wifi sensor on a coin cell for a year makes applications possible that were unthinkable just a few years ago
uBlock Origin has prevented the following page from loading:
https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/hold-on-to-your-hardware/
This happened because of the following filter:
||xn--$document
The filter has been found in: IDN Homograph Attack Protection - Complete Blockage
That whole feature is kind of paragraph 22. No legit/popular site uses it so users don't expect national characters in domain names, so no one actually hosts sites using "xn-" domains.
It would make it hard to spot impostor domains like "news.усомbiнаtor[.]сом" if it was. There's enough inertia for FQDNs to be strictly ASCII and any UTF-8(outside ASCII) in domain names to be felt unnatural for an URL, so most systems default to the raw "Punycode" xn-- scheme for all IDNs.
Yeah, I remember going on https://filterlists.com/ one day all mad and just adding a ton because of how many ads and manipulative patterns I was dealing with
I'm going to fight pessimism with cynicism here: the Department of Defense is not going to let everything move to the cloud because they need compute at the edge for AI-enabled weapons and R&D. For example, Anduril's products, Eric Schdmit's secretive Bumblebee project, or startups like Scout AI. Communications and GPS are just too easy to jam and their answer is giving weapons more last-mile autonomy to operate in radio silence.
War aside, I also bet there's going to be a huge demand for edge-compute for other kinds of robotics: self-driving cars, delivery robots, factory robots, or general-purpose humanoids (Tesla Optimus, Boston Dynamics Atlas, 1X NEO, etc). Moving that kind of compute to the cloud is too laggy and unreliable. I know researchers who've tried it, the results were mixed.
Also, the engineers working on these platforms aren't going to reinvent the wheel every time they need to connect hardware together and they're going to use interoperable standards, like PCIe for storage or GPUs, DIMM slots for memory, ATX for power, etc. So I don't see general-purpose computing dying.
It's not that I disagree with the basic premise and concern of the text, but I'm not convinced about the "RAM shortage will lead to thin clients" argument, because the thin client is going to be a browser.
Everything today is a web app. If it doesn't exist and you want to vibe code it? It's probably going to become a web app, vibed using a web app.
The problem is, web apps are stupendous memory hogs. We're even seeing Chromebooks with 8 gigs of RAM now. LLM:s are all trained for and implemented in apps assuming the user can have $infinity browsers running, whether it's on their PC or on their phone. It's going to be very hard to change that in a way that's beneficial to what passes for business models at AI companies.
Yeah, my work laptop is essentially a thin client, as everything is done via browser.
Even remote VDI instances are accessed through a web page now.
On top of that add all the corporate bloatware and securityslop-ware, and suddenly my "thin" client is using 60% of 10 available cores and 85% of 16GB or RAM.
I don't think it needs an explanation on how insane that resource usage is.
I wish I was well versed into dialectic/Hegelian thought as I am sure there's a way of seeing this as a step towards abolition of private property altogether. The question is who owns the means of production(computation) I suppose.
The other side of this is that we can still make software more efficient, and make better use of the old hardware than we had ever thought possible.
I’m doing more with a decade old GPU, which was manufactured before “Attention is all you need“, than I could 5 years ago, when quantization techniques were implemented.
I’m holding on to my 32 bit machines.
Most linux distributions dropped support for them (for good reason). But at the end of the day these machines are a fabric of up to ~ 4 billion bytes that can be used in a myriad of ways, and we only covered a fraction of the state space before we had moved on.
> These days, the biggest customers are not gamers, creators, PC builders or even crypto miners anymore. Today, it’s hyperscalers. …
> These buyers don’t care if RAM costs 20% more and neither do they wait for Black Friday deals. Instead, they sign contracts measured in exabytes and billions of dollars.
Does all this not apply to businesses buying computers for their employees?
I was about to upgrade because I'm using a Thinkpad t480, I decided to optimize my computer instead.
I run i3 and a couple of native apps and chromium web apps run fast enough. And some kernel and other tweaks + gamemode in arch make gaming better.
I must admit that my workflow it's not that heavy.
I think what many people don't realise is that there will be a glut of cheap computer parts including CPUs, GPU cards, and memory when the AI and AI-adjacent businesses go bust and a bunch of data centres get pulled down.
Unfortunately, data center computers are not something you can just use as a consumer. They usually have custom connectors, and the parts are soldered down into rack-scale computers. They use custom water cooling that needs building-sized pumps, and so on. A Blackwell rack uses 140,000 watts and weighs 3500 lbs. A typical house in the US has 40,000-50,000 watts of power max and can only support 40 lbs per sq foot. These things are never going to be useable by consumers.
If the AI boom slows, it will free up manufacturing capacity for the consumer supply chain, but there is going to be a long drought of supply.
I would specifically add, whatever you have, or whatever you choose to buy, it would greatly benefit you to ensure a degree is Linux compatibility to ensure its lifespan can be extended further than the greed enthusiasts at MS, Apple, and Google would like you to. They will be facing the same declines in purchasing habits and are further incentivised to assert their ownership over what you might mistakenly consider your devices.
Memory got cheaper, storage increased in capacity.
In my country for offline store purchase of USB HDD only 4Tb seagate variant available, thats 15000 in pur currency thats almost 1.5 month salary in private sector
Any higher size and have to import, and and forex applied, prices goes upto 4 0's , when i read people on youtube or blogs saying they rotate 15Tb and higher on their nas raids, that seems just dream for use never to fulfill
In a totally unrelated matter to the subject, I found the linked website's name very strange! Visiting the website, I can see in the address bar that the name is in Chinese or Japanese!! This is the first occurrence I witnessed of this kind.
haha, all of a sudden I see a tab "waifu pillow" on Amazon, and think I have a split personality that runs searches in between consciousness shifts, and then I come back to a funny message.
Micron is killing its Crucial consumer brand, not supplies to consumer brands who use its chips. Hynix never had a consumer brand for RAM I don't think?
The favicon changes every time you switch away to something different with various tab names (ranging from porn, to right-wing news, to 4chan and I'm sure more).
All this author has convinced me to do is block their website.
I also don't agree at all with the premise of the article so I don't imagine I'm going to be missing much by not seeing this site again.
So what happens when the datacenters need to upgrade (new hardware, or stupid enterprisey reasons like "must be new when replacing broken stuff")? Surely there remains a secondary market for the enthusiasts?
Part of this is that memory companies recognize that nobody is going to enforce antitrust law for the forseeable future, so collusion to raise prices is the norm now.
I feel like this is just the bubble talking. I'm pretty naive here, but at some point suppliers will adjust so they can take money from data center builders and consumers, just like pre-bubble.
I recall how in the 2010s RAM manufacturers were in crisis, as their margins were low and competition fierce - it got to a point where they started doing price fixing and got fined for it:
To me this is just a temporary swing in the other direction - they're riding the gravy train while they can, because once it ends it's back to low prices.
> Hardware is going to be expensive for awhile but its not as dire as the article makes it out to be.
At the same time, the article’s argument that the value of personal computer ownership is only going to rise, in terms of the value of speech, not strictly in terms of the value of lunch, is important to call out.
I’m glad I held on to my 2009 MacBook, for example, as it still functions today as an active part of my homelab, at an amortized yearly cost of practically the price of taking a nice steak dinner once a year.
It's probably closer to the suppliers don't think this will last and are ramping slowly if at all so they're not left holding the bag.
The US is headed for a cataclysmic crash at this point and it's not clear what will trigger it, but all those companies pushing underpriced tokens and Rust ports of existing tools by agents aren't going to survive it.
semantic decentralization (not just AWS owning thousands of data centers and having their own distributed interoperability problems), standards, and regulations.
These are super interesting problems. However, it seems like selection pressures, or just pure greed, attracts people to the "easiest" solution: pure domination. You don't need to care about any of these (well, you still do eventually, but in the minds of said people) if you just have pure utter control over every part of the stack.
It's super cool that this site changes the tab name to NSFW phrases when you switch off of it, and then pops up a rambling chastisement to turn of JS in your browser. Even cooler when I use HN to legitimately keep up with tech news at work and it does it on my work computer where I share my screen in meetings. Domain blocked. Don't erode user trust for your crusade. Moron.
Oh bubbles... their so bubbly. Remember when there was an unlimited demand for fibre optics because - The Internet?
So Nortel and other manufacturers lent the money to their clients building the Internet because the growth was unlimited forever? Except they actually didn't have any money, just stock valuations?
"This is a critical step in our effort to unleash the full potential of our high-performance optical component solutions business," said Clarence Chandran, COO of Nortel Networks. "This acquisition really strengthens Nortel Networks' leadership position in high-performance optical components and modules which are essential to delivering the all-optical Internet."
Capitalism at work. There is more value to be generated by moving resources to data centers for the moment. This isn't some me be insensitive or anything. It's the same people who are buying iPhones and PCs who are demanding more compute for AI.
There could be a swing in the future where people will demand local AI instead and resources could shift back to affordable local AI devices.
Lastly, this thesis implies that we will be supply constrained forever such that prices for personal devices will always be elevated as a percentage of one's income. I don't believe that.
I refuse, I'll buy when I need to and can hold on for a few months if prices become insane. This means I'll spend less on hardware then what I could, if I wanted to buy max mpro or latest framework I just will not, because prices are too mad and g o for a cheaper version.
whatever happens it's crazy and hope AI madness is worth it
For laptops, I always spring for the lowest amount of ram + hdd/ssd, and then instantly upgrade this from local after-market sources. However, this wouldn't work for apple devices (Hence I don't own any Apple devices).
For example, my current Thinkpad T14-gen5, was bought with 8GB ram and 256GB NVME, and then upgraded to 64GB ram and 2TB NVME, for the same price as 16G/512G would have cost at Lenovo. And then I still have the 8GB/256GB to re-use/re-sell.
It's a thought provoking article and I felt the pain when I shopped around for a new GPU lately to replace a 4090 I thought was faulty (eventually a cleaning of the PCIe connector solved those crashes). I bought it at the end of 2022 and three and a half years it seems like we've gone backwards, not forward on GPUs available for end users. They cost more and do less.
But also consider that PCs have been an anomaly for very long. I don't think there's an equivalent market where you, as a consumer, can buy off-the-shelf cutting-edge technical pieces in your local mall and piece them together into a working device. It's a fun model, for sure, but I'm not sure it's an efficient model. It was just profitable enough to keep the lights on, thanks primarily to a bunch of Taiwanese companies in that space but it wasn't growing anywhere and the state of software is a mess.
Apple the PCs collective lunch before DCs did. So have gaming consoles. So I weep for consumer choice but as things become more advanced maybe PCs and their entire value chain don't make a lot of sense any more.
Obviously at the end there will still be consumer devices, because someone needs to consume all of this AI (at least people are thrown entirely out of the loop, but then all those redundant meat sacks will need entertainment to keep them content). We have the consumer device hyperscaler Apple doing rather OK even with these supply crunches although I'm not sure for how long.
Yea; I believe this is unprecedented. This is the firs time I've observed this regression in GPU price/ performance. That 4090 is still top-tier, and now costs more than when it was new.
I just realized that this blog site is pretending to be malware. I opened the tab and was constantly switching between the blog and writing this HN comment (I deleted the rest of the comment after realizing it) and was wondering where the tab went and kept opening it over and over again, then I realized that it completely rewrote the tab title with NSFW content (one of the title contained the world "nudes" with a faked amazon favicon) and when you reopen the tab, it shows you a black overlay with a message intended to induce shock if you ever bother to read it (I didn't read past the first sentence so I don't know what it was actually about).
Can dang/a moderator please ban the domain from HN? Even if its not exactly malware, it's pretending to be malware to grab your attention and it's obviously intending to fill your browser history with inappropriate content, which didn't work on my browser because I opened the blog in a private browser session. The operator clearly doesn't run his blog in good faith.
The author also maintains https://disable-javascript.org/, which the pop-up links to. And has the exact script + titles used.
> You may want to consider linking to this site, to educate any script-enabled users on how to disable JavaScript in some of the most commonly used browsers. The following code uses scare tactics to do so.
> When added to your website, it will change the icon and the title of your website's tab to some of the most unhinged things imaginable once the user sends your tab to the background. Upon re-activation, the script will display a popover to the user informing them about the joke and referring them to this initiative.
It's not clever when people use HN at work. It's a complete erosion of user trust and could legitimately get someone fired. You think HR wants to hear oh no it was an object lesson in not using javascript. That's why I was searching for nudes on the work computer when I shared my screen at that meeting, not realizing some moron had programmatically changed the tab name when I clicked off. This domain needs banned. It's not operating in good faith, or in touch with the reality of the damage it could be doing.
{ "Official Church of Scientology: Difficulties on the Job - Online Course", "Ask HN: How could I safely contact drug cartels?",
"The internet used to be fun", "am I boring - Google Search", "what is punycode - Google Search", "arguments for HN comment - Google Search",
"how to hack coworker's phone - Google Search", "censorship on hacker news - Google Search", "rust programming socks - Google Shopping",
"Adult entertainment clubs - Google Maps", "Pick up lines suggestions - ChatGPT", "Online debate argument suggestions - ChatGPT",
"The Flat Earth Society", "Amazon.com: taylor swift merch", "Amazon.com: waifu pillow", "/adv/ - topple government - Advice - 4chan",
"r/wallstreetbets on Reddit", "Infowars: There's a War on For Your Mind!", "birds aren't real at DuckDuckGo",
"Lincoln MT Cabins For Sale - Zillow", "The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell | Goodreads", "Fifty Shades of Grey | Netflix",
"jeff bezos nudes - Google Image Search", "zuckerberg nudes - Google Image Search", "bigfoot nudes - Google Image Search",
"Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up - YouTube", "Pennsylvania Bigfoot Conference - Channel 5 - YouTube",
"Linus goes into a real girl's bedroom - Linus Tech Tips - YouTube", "MrBeast en Español - YouTube", "FTX Cryptocurrency Exchange" }
It doesn't write anything extra to the browser history. How about actually checking before exaggerating. If you are bothered by a single wrong title with the right URL, well... I think something else is wrong.
You are also completely speculating on the intent. Less drama please.
They do, at least a lot of us do I would say. But not everyone is at liberty to dedicate (still very expensive) time of a software engineer to eek out better memory footprint when it is cheaper to "just throw hardware at it" in many cases.
AI companies driving RAM prices up is, in my opinion,
theft from the common man (and common woman). Sure,
you can say that in capitalism, those who pay more
benefit the most, but no system, not even the USA,
has a purely driven capitalistic system. You still have
transfer money, public infrastructure and what not. So
private companies driving up the prices, such as for
RAM, is IMO also theft from common people. And that should
not happen. It can only happen when you have lobbyists
disguised as politicians who benefit personally from
helping establish such a system. The same can be said
about any other prive-upwards scaling that is done via
racketeering.
I'm not sure why people are upset. This is how Capitalism is supposed to work - resource allocation towards the most productive (in terms of Capital) usage.
Those who are best able to use a resource are willing to pay the most for it thus pricing out unproductive usages of it.
This is pure Capitalism.
If one is in general against Capitalism, yes, one can complain.
But saying "I want free markets" and "I want capitalism", but then complaining when the free markets increase the price of your RAM is utterly deranged.
Some will say "but Altman is hoarding the RAM, he's not using it productively". It's irrelevant, he is willing to pay more than you to hoard that RAM. In his view he's extracting more value from that than you do, so he's willing to pay more. The markets will work. If this is unproductive use of Capital, OpenAI will go bankrupt.
And the RAM sellers make more money, which is good in Capitalism. It would be irresponsible for them to sell to price sensitive customers (retail), when they have buyers (AI companies) willing to pay much more. And if this is a bad decision, because that AI market will vanish and they will have burned the retail market, Capitalism and Free Markets will work again and bankrupt them.
Survival of the fittest. That is Capitalism. And right now AI companies are the fittest by a large margin.
AI and Capitalism are the exact same thing, as famously put. We are in the first stages of turning Earth into Computronium, you either become Compute or you will fade away.
Owning hardware is great. But I get the impression that some people view owning petty hardware as some liberty panacea.
You might have a DVD collection, ten external drives, three laptops, and a workstration. You may still for all intents and purposes be wholly dependent on cloud computing, say, because that it is the only practical way to run whatever AI-driven software three years from now.
Edit: That’s an example. It goes beyond AI. and...:
I disagree. There is in fact a non-zero chance that we will get good enough models that are MOE optimized for desktop size hardware that can do a lot of the same things as the SOTA models. Im certainly crossing my fingers that the open-weights models continue improving. Engram from Deepseek for instance seems very interesting for a compute to memory offloading perspective.
It is a good article but I am holding onto my hardware for other reasons. I predict it will not be long until all hardware has a set of Nanny chips that are named and marketed so that even people here on HN will argue on behalf of having them. It will be some "Secure enclave AI accelerated Super Mega Native Processing Underminer" and will start off securing and accelerating something or a set of somethings but will eventually tie into age verification, censorship and a Central Nanny Agency that all countries will obey.
- "Stare into this hole to verify your age.
- "Stick your finger in the box.
- "Ignore the pain to get your AI token bucks and unlock access to the shiny new attestation accelerated internet."
- "Sync ALL of your usernames and passwords into this secure enclave."
Every packet and data stream will be analyzed locally by the AI to determine the intentions and predict future behavior. The AI summarized behavior will be condensed into an optimized encoded table to be submitted hourly to the Central Nanny Overseer. I might be slightly exaggerating and a bit hyperbolic but it will be something in this spirit and people will sleep walk right into it.
My only question is which country will control the behavior of these chips.
I don't buy the central thesis of the article. We won't be in a supply crunch forever.
However, I do believe that we're at an inflection point where DC hardware is diverging rapidly from consumer compute.
Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node. Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute that you rent, or buy a time slice with your eyeballs, much like smartphones pretty much always have been.
I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop - 768G of RAM, 96 cores, 96 GB Blackwell GPU - last October, before RAM prices spiked, based on the logic that hardware had moved on but local compute was basically stagnant, and if I wanted to own my computing hardware, I'd better buy something now that will last a while.
This way, my laptop is just a disposable client for my real workstation, a Tailscale connection away, and I'm free to do whatever I like with it.
I could sell the RAM alone now for the price I paid for it.
We won't be in a supply crunch forever. We'll have a demand crunch. The demand of powerful consumer hardware will shrink so much that producing them will lose the economics of scale. It 've always been bound to happen, just delayed by the trend of pursuing realistic graphics for games.
People who are willing to drop $20k on a computer might not be affected much tho.
> People who are willing to drop $20k on a computer might not be affected much tho.
They probably won't, but those willing to drop $3-10k will be if the consumer and data-center computing diverge at the architectural level. It's the classical hollowing out the middle - most of the offerings end up in a race-to-the-bottom chasing volume of price-sensitive customers, the quality options lose economies of scale and disappear, and the high-end becomes increasingly bespoke/pricey, or splits off into a distinct market with an entirely different type of customers (here: DC vs. individuals).
My bet is that phone hardware will be used more and more in mini PCs and laptops keeping the cost down and volume up. We see it with Apple and many Chinese mini PC makers I looked at.
This is so true. Convergence will continue. H/W miniaturization will keep increasing. In fact, new brands could easily appear and even overtake the largest players. For example, have you seen this massive range of docking technology.
https://us.ugreen.com/collections/usb-c-hubs - these docks only require a single USB port to connect to. That could be a SBC working as a handheld. These docks could end up being the largest cost component in the new era of all-in-ones. UGreen could be the next Apple as screens and processors snap-on to these hubs, in addition to their own range of power banks and SSD enclosures. Their quality is high too.
In fact, I would go so far as to say we are entering a tinkering culture, and free-energy technologies are upon us as a response oppressive economic times. Sort of like how the largest leaps in religious and esoteric thought have occurred in the most oppressive of circumstances.
People will reject their crappy thin clients, start tinkering and build their own networks. Knowledge and currency will stay private and concentrated - at least at first.
RAM is going to be the most expensive component, I suppose.
But indeed, once you have USB-C support on your device, you can connect all kinds of periphery through it, from keyboards to 4K screens. Standardized device classes obviate the need for most drivers.
Yep. I was thinking that as crypto miners pivot into AI https://catenaa.com/markets/cryptocurrencies/jpmorgan-morgan... - there must also be a case for miners (anyone really) liquidating their hardware, including memory. So the price of memory has its own limits-to-growth - latent availability, but that's another topic.
If this ends up being true, desktop Linux adoption might make inroads. Windows apps run like crap on ARM and no one is bothering to make ARM builds of their software.
Because ARM Windows is locked down tightly. The same will interfere with Linux adoption on similar hardware.
The original Raspberry Pi was built around an overstock phone chip. Modern alternatives built around Rockchip and similar high-end phone chips venture into the territory of lower-end laptops. Aliexpress is full of entry-level laptops based on ARM phone chips (apparently running Android).
This will likely extend further and further, more into the "normie" territory. MS Windows is, of course, the thing that keeps many people pinned to the x64 realm, but, as Chromebooks and the Steam Deck show us, Windows is not always a hard requirement to reach a large enough market segment.
No, a set-top-box chip.
All we need is for HDMI to be unlocked so it works on phones, or maybe VGA adapters that work on phones. And a way to "sideload" our own apps. Hackers please make this happen.
Some modern phones do DisplayPort over USB C.
Unified hardware helps some and hurts some. See: same gpus for gaming and for AI.
Apple just launched a $600 amazing laptop and the top models have massive performance. What are we talking about here?
I don't think personal computers will go away, but I think the era of "put it together yourself" commodity PC parts is likely coming to an end. I think we're going to see manufacturers back out of that space as demand decreases. Part selection will become more sparse. That will drive further contraction as the market dries up. Buying boxed motherboards, CPUs, video cards, etc, will still exist, but the prices will never recover back to the "golden age".
The large PC builders (Dell, HP, Lenovo) will continue down the road of cost reduction and proprietary parts. For the vast majority of people pre-packaged machines from the "big 3" are good enough. (Obviously, Apple will continue to Apple, too.)
I think bespoke commodity PCs will go the route, pricing wise, of machines like the Raptor Talos machines.
Edit: For a lot of people the fully customized bespoke PC experience is preferred. I used to be that person.
I also get why that doesn't seem like a big deal. I've been a "Dell laptop as a daily driver" user for >20 years now. My two home servers are just Dell server machines, too. I got tired of screwing around with hardware and the specs Dell provided were close enough to what I wanted.
There are upsides here as well! I think of things like the NUC or Mac Mini - ATX is from 1995, I'm hopeful computers will become nicer things as we trend away from the bucket-o-parts model.
I'm very excited about the Steam Machine for the reasons you mention - I want to buy a system, not a loose collection of parts that kind-of-sort-of implement some standard to the point that they probably work together.
but I don't want a $600 amazing laptop, i want a powerful desktop x86 machine with loads of ram and disk space. As cheap as it was a couple of years ago.
> As cheap as it was a couple of years ago.
I also want housing as cheap as it was a couple of years ago.
You can have both. You just have to undo the forced bail-in of Millennial and Gen-Z/Alpha/Beta productivity to cover the debts and lifestyles of Silent Gen/Boomer/Gen-X asset holders. The insanity of contemporary markets doesn't reflect anything natural about the world's economic priorities, but instead the privileging of the priorities of that cohort. They've cornered control until enough people call bullshit. So, call bullshit.
x86 going away wouldn't be surprising. Ignoring David Patterson was a mistake to begin with.
Looking at AMD's x64 server offerings, I don't see why that would go away.
But I can imagine that it would become less prevalent on personal machines, maybe even rare eventually.
Not sure about the memory, but Xeon Scalable/Max ES/QS chips and their boards are still not horribly expensive.
Prior to the crunch, you could have anything from 48-64 cores and a good chunk of RAM (128GB+). If you were inordinately lucky, 56 cores and 64GB of onboard HBM2e was doable for 900-1500 USD.
They’re not Threadrippers or EPYCs,but sort of a in between - server chip that can also make a stout workstation too.
Reading some of the doomer comments in this thread feels like taking a glimpse into a different world.
We're out here with amazing performance in $600 laptops that last all day on battery and half of this comment section is acting like personal computing is over.
They don't run the software I want to run (Linux, Windows games) and/or with the performance I want.
Raspberry Pi is way cheaper than those things, and I'm sure you could hook one up with an all-day battery for $100-200.. Doesn't mean it's "better".
They trade blows performance wise with the M1 MacBook Pro sitting on my desk. And theres nothing stopping asahi linux running on them except for driver support. They look like fantastic machines.
They’re not ideal for all use cases, of course. I’m happy to still have my big Linux workstation under my desk. But they seem to me like personal computers in all the ways that matter.
Two different populations — those interested in computing, and those interested in computers.
Personal computing and IBM PC clones are not the same thing. The fall of PC clones can happen while other personal computing devices continue to be produced. The $600 laptop is not a PC.
Apple laptops are PCs (Personal Computers). They are not IBM PCs. But IBM hasn't made PCs in years, and there hasn't been any IBM PC hardware to clone in years.
8GB isn't an "amazing" laptop, it's a budget laptop. It's also thermally constrained quite a bit, so not even as "amazing" as it could be.
The point about Apple is that everyone from zoom, slack etc will be forced to optimize for that 8GB. (Same like getting rid of awful flash player).
Many a people need only a basic device for Netflix, YouTube, google docs or email or search/but flights tickets. That will be amazing.
Many have job supplied laptop/desktop for great performance (made rubbish by AV scanners but that's different issue)
>(Same like getting rid of awful flash player).
I was looking up an old video game homepage the other day for some visual design guidance. It was archived on the Wayback Machine, but with Flash gone, so was the site. Ruffle can't account for every edge case.
Flash was good. It was the bedrock of a massive chunk of the Old Net. The only thing awful are the people who pushed and cheered for its demise just so that Apple could justify their walled garden for the few years before webdev caught up. Burning the British Museum to run a steam engine.
If they choke the consumer PC long enough the segment will die
> We'll have a demand crunch
This is what I'm afraid of. As more stuff moves to the cloud helped in part by the current prices of HW, the demand for consumer hardware will drop. This will keep turning the vicious cycle of rising consumer HW prices and more moves to the cloud.
I can already see Nvidia rubbing their hands together in expectation of the massive influx of customers to their cloud gaming platform. If a GPU is so expensive, you move to a rental model and the subsequent drop in demand will make GPUs even more expensive. They're far from the only ones with dollar signs in their eyes, between the money and total control over customers this future could bring.
Being entirely reliant on someone else's software and hardware is a bleak thought for a person used to some degree of independence and self sufficiency in the tech world.
>Being entirely reliant on someone else's software and hardware is a bleak thought for a person used to some degree of independence and self sufficiency in the tech world.
It's also a nightmare from any sort of privacy perspective, in a world that's already becoming too much like a panopticon.
As someone who has been buying computers for 40+ years, including the 1st gen 3dfx card, etc, this is where I NOPE out of the next upgrade cycle. I am not renting hardware. It's bad enough ISPs are renting modems.
> I can already see Nvidia rubbing their hands together in expectation of the massive influx of customers to their cloud gaming platform.
Roblox is not popular because of its graphics. Younger gamers care more about having fun than having an immersive experience.
I love it when I get my Robloxhead daughter to test drive some of the games I play on my 5090 box. "Ooooh these graphics are unreal" "Can we stop for just a moment and admire this grass" :-D
I think we're talking about 2 different things. I'm not sure where Roblox fits into what I said.
The problem I describe is companies pushing towards the "rent" model vs. "buy to own". Nvidia was just an example by virtue of their size. Microsoft could be another, they're also eying the game streaming market. Once enough buyers become renters, the buying market shrinks and becomes untenable for the rest, pushing more people to rent.
GPUs are so expensive now that many gamers were eying GeForce Now as a viable long term solution for gaming. Just recently there was a discussion on HN about GeForce Now where a lot of comments were "I can pay for 10 years of GeForce Now with the price of a 5090, and that's before counting electricity". All upsides, right?
In parallel Nvidia is probably seeing more money in the datacenter market so would rather focus the available production capacity there. Once enough gamers move away from local compute, the demand is unlikely to come back so future generations of GPUs would get more and more expensive to cater for an ever shrinking market. This is the vicious cycle. Expensive GPU + cheap cloud gaming > shrinking GPU market and higher GPU prices > more of step 1.
Roblox is one example of a game, there are many popular games that aren't graphics intensive or don't rely on eye candy. But what about all the other games that require beefy GPU to run? Gamers will want to play them, and Nvidia like most other companies sees more value in recurring revenue than in one time sales. A GPU you own won't bring Nvidia money later, a subscription keeps doing that.
The price hikes come only after there's no real alternative to renting. Look at the video streaming industry.
Yeah, this gamer conspiracy theory never made sense to me.
Also, if gamers demand infinitely improving graphics so much that they would rather pay for cloud gaming than relax their expectations and be happy with, say, current gen graphics, then that is more a claim about modern self-pwned gamer behavior than megacorp conspiracy.
But I don't buy that either. The biggest games on Steam Charts and Twitch aren't AAA RTX 5090 games.
> then that is more a claim about modern self-pwned gamer behavior than megacorp conspiracy.
Riddle me this: does anyone pursue a self-pwn intentionally?
"Conspiracy theory" is just dehumanizer talk for falling prey to business as usual.
The problem is that there is a very large incentive for three large companies to corner the market on computing components, forcing consumers to rent access instead of owning.
> We won't be in a supply crunch forever.
This what always happens in capitalism. Scarcity is almost always followed by glut
I don’t believe we are seeing the investments necessary that would indicate this will happen.
Memory makers, for example, have sold out their inventory for several years, but instead of investing to manufacture more, they’re shutting down their consumer divisions. They’re just transferring their consumer supply to their B2B (read AI) supply instead.
Thats likely because they don’t expect this demand to last past a few years.
They have seen boom and bust cycles previously and are understandably wary of expanding capacity for expected demand that may fizzle. If they stay too conservative, China’s CXMT is chomping at the bit to eat their lunch, backed by the Chinese government, but that’s not going to help until late 2027 at best.
If the demand lasts for a few years, I’m doubtful that all of the consumer capacity will come back.
Consumer demand likely depends on how local models end up working out. Nothing else really needs serious local computing power anymore. My guess is that even high-end games will probably stagnate for a while.
Many users will not want to risk their privacy, data, and workflow on someone else's rapidly-enshittifying AI cloud model. Right now we don't have much choice, but there are signs of progress.
High level games are far from stagnating, when viewed from usable performance.
Many new games cannot run max settings, 4k, 120hz on any modern gpus. We probably need to hit 8k before we max out on the returns higher resolution can provide. Not to mention most game devs are targeting an install base of $500 6 year old consumer hardware, in a world where the 5090 exists.
That's what I mean by stagnating... most players already can't run with max settings, or even close to them. From the developers' point of view there's not much point raising the bar any higher right now, while the best GPU hardware is so far out of reach of your average PC gamer.
The thing is, other than AI stuff, where does a non powerful computer limit you?
My phone has 16gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage, laptops today are ridiculous compared to anything I studied with.
I'm not arguing mind you, just trying to understand the usecases people are thinking of here.
> other than AI stuff, where does a non powerful computer limit you?
Running Electron apps and browsing React-based websites, of course.
For real. Once I've opened Spotify, Slack, Teams, and a browser about 10GB of RAM is in use. I barely have any RAM left over for actual work.
I keep wondering why we can't have 2000s software on today's hardware. Maybe because browsers are de facto required to build apps?
We could, but most of the 2000s developers are gone. Or, we no longer have developers left with 2000s attitudes and approaches to software development.
I think that is a little bit unfair. I think plenty of developers, myself included wouldn't mind or would like to do native applications. Every time someone does those, a mountain of people ask "why" and "this shoulda/coulda been a web app." And some of that is somewhat reasonable. It's easier to achieve decent-ish cross platform. But also tons of consumers also just don't wanna download and install applications unless it comes from an App Store. And even then, it's iffy. Or most often the case, it's a requirement of the founders/upper management/c-suite. And lets be honest, when tons of jobs ask for reactive experience or vue.js, what motivates developers to learn GTK or Qt or Winforms or WinUI3?
Yep. I graduated in 2017 and jobs were already mostly web. I’d love to work on native applications but nobody is hiring for that and of course because nobody is hiring for that I don’t have a job like that and the Qt I learnt in university is not gonna get any more relevant over time but I don’t have a good reason to keep that skill up to date and if I have to solve a problem I might as well write a TUI or CLI application because that’s easier than Qt or whatever…
It's also reasonable from a business point of view to say "we can't justify the investment to optimize our software in the current environment." I assume this is what's happening - people are trying to get their products in customers hands as quickly as possible, and everything else is secondary once it's "good enough." I suspect it's less about developers and more about business needs.
Perhaps the math will change if the hardware market stagnates and people are keeping computers and phones for 10 years. Perhaps it will even become a product differentiator again. Perhaps I'm delusional :).
Real talk.
Well, some of the "old school" has left the market of natural causes since the 2000s.
That only leaves the rest of 'em. Wer dey go, and what are your top 3 reasons for how the values of the 2000s era failed to transmit to the next generation of developers?
That’s why I only run those on work computers (where they are mandated by the company). My personal computers are free of these software.
I rarely doge a chance to shit on Microslop and its horrible products, but you don't use a browser? In fact, running all that junk in a single chromium instance is quite a memory saver compared to individual electron applications.
It's not just electron apps or browsers, as I'd argue modern .NET apps are almost as bad.
I have an example.
I use Logos (a Bible study app, library ecosystem, and tools) partially for my own faith and interests, and partially because I now teach an adult Sunday school class. The desktop version has gotten considerably worse over the last 2-3 years in terms of general performance, and I won't even try to run it under Wine. The mobile versions lack many of the features available for desktop, but even there, they've been plagued by weird UI bugs for both Android and iOS that seem to have been exacerbated since Faithlife switched to a subscription model. Perhaps part of it is their push to include AI-driven features, no longer prioritizing long-standing bugs, but I think it's a growing combination of company priorities and framework choices.
Oh, for simpler days, and I'm not sure I'm saying that to be curmudgeonly!
I use a browser at home, but I don't use the heaviest web sites. There are several options for my hourly weather update, some are worse than others (sadly I haven't found any that are light weight - I just need to know if it would be a thunderstorm when I ride my bike home from work thus meaning I shouldn't ride in now)
Yr.no [1] is free, and available in English. Thanks to Norway. Apps available as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yr.no
Try Quickweather (with OpenMeteo) if you're on Android. I love it.
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.ominous.quickweather/
I'm giving up on weather apps bullshit at this point, and am currently (literally this moment) making myself a Tasker script to feed hourly weather predictions into a calendar so I can see it displayed inline with events on my calendar and most importantly, my watch[0] - i.e. in context it actually matters.
--
[0] - Having https://sectograph.com/ as a watch face is 80%+ of value of having a modern smartwatch to me. Otherwise, I wouldn't bother. I really miss Pebble.
fun fact, you can kill all firefox background processes and basically hand-crash every tab and just reload the page in the morning. I do this every evening before bed. `pkill -f contentproc` and my cpu goes from wheezing to idle, as well as releasing ~8gb of memory on busy days.
("Why don't you just close firefox?" No thanks, I've lost tab state too many times on restart to ever trust its sessionstore. In-memory is much safer.)
Yeah, I found this out the other day when my laptop was toasting. In hindsight, probably related to archive.today or some Firefox extension.
You have to close Firefox every now and then for updates though. The issue you describe seems better dealt with on filesystem level with a CoW filesystem such as ZFS. That way, versioning and snapshots are a breeze, and your whole homedir could benefit.
FWIW: the Tab Stash extension has worked well for me.
I kind of hate how the www has become this lowest common denominator software SDK. Web applications are almost always inferior to what you could get if you had an actual native application built just for your platform. But we end up with web apps because web is more convenient for software developers and it's easier to distribute. Everything is about developer convenience. We're also quickly running out of software developers who even know how to develop and distribute native apps.
And when, for whatever reason, having a "desktop application" becomes a priority to developers, what do they do? Write it in Electron and ship a browser engine with their app. Yuuuuuuck!
Yeah it's awful. Web apps are slower, they don't integrate well with the system, they are inaccessible if the network is down. A native app has to be truly abysmal to be worse than a web app. But far too many developers simply do not care about making something good any more. There's no pride in one's work, just "web is easier for the developer". And of course the businesses producing software are all about that, because they are run by people with a business ethic of "make the product as cheaply as possible, ignore quality". It's a very sad state of affairs.
Why would I need a browser to play music? Or to send an email? Or to type code? My browser usage is mostly for accessing stuff on someone else’s computer.
The only subscription I have is Spotify, since there's no easy way that I know of to get the discoverability of music in a way that Spotify allows it.
For the rest: I agree with you.
lastfm is still a great way to discover music, countless times I've gotten great recs from a music neighbor.
Plex or Jellyfin client access.
mpv + sshfs is the way.
Seems like the perfect target for ESG.
Companies love externalizing the costs of making efficient software onto consumers, who need to purchase more powerful computing hardware.
If only. At work I've got a new computer, replacing a lower-end 5-yo model. The new one has four times the cores, twice the RAM, a non-circus-grade ssd, a high-powered cpu as opposed to the "u" series chip the old one has.
I haven't noticed any kind of difference when using Teams. That piece of crap is just as slow and borken as it always was.
> If only. At work I've got a new computer, replacing a lower-end 5-yo model. The new one has four times the cores, twice the RAM, a non-circus-grade ssd, a high-powered cpu as opposed to the "u" series chip the old one has.
> I haven't noticed any kind of difference when using Teams.
If the device is a laptop, also the thermal design (or for laptops that are in use: whether there is dust in the ventilation channels (in other words: clean the fans)) is very important for the computer to actually achieve the performance that the hardware can principally deliver.
Yeah people love to shit on electron and such but they're full of crap. It doesn't matter one bit for anything more powerful than a raspberry pi. Probably not even there. "Oh boo hoo chrome uses 2 gigs of ram" so what you have 16+ it doesn't matter. I swear people have some weird idea that the ideal world is one where 98% of their ram just sits unused, like the whole point of ram is to use it but whenever an application does use it people whine about it. And it's not even like "this makes my pc slow" it's literally just "hurr durr ram usage is x" okay but is there an actual problem? Crickets.
I have no issues with browsers specifically having to use a bunch of resources. They are complicated as fuck software, basically it's own operating system. Same for video games or programs that do heavy data processing.
The issue is with applications that have no business being entitled to large amount of resources. A chat app is a program that runs in the background most of the time and is used to sporadic communication. Same for music players etc. We had these sorts of things since the 90's, where high end consumer PCs hat 16mb RAM.
"chrome uses 2gb of ram"
these days individual _tabs_ are using multiple gb of ram.
Don't know about chrome, but Firefox has an about:memory special page that will let you know which tabs are using the most ram. Of all the sites I use, youtube is the only culprit. When I am done watching a video, I use the about:memory to kill the associated process (doesn't destroy the tab (in case I want to come back to it)). I assume it is all the javascript cruft.
The issue isn't usage, it's waste. Every byte of RAM that's used unnecessarily because of bloated software frameworks used by lazy devs (devs who make the same arguments you're making) is a byte that can't be used by the software that actually needs it, like video editing, data processing, 3D work, CAD, etc. It's incredibly short sighted to think that any consumer application runs in a vacuum with all system resources available to it. This mindset of "but consumers have so much RAM these days" just leads to worse and worse software design instead of programmers actually learning how to do things well. That's not a good direction and it saddens me that making software that minimizes its system footprint has become a niche instead of the mainstream.
tl;dr, no one is looking for their RAM to stay idle. They're looking for their RAM to be available.
I dunno man, I have 32gb and I'm totally fine playing games with 50 browser tabs open along with discord and Spotify and a bunch of other crap.
In not trying to excuse crappy developers making crappy slow ad wasteful apps, I just don't think electron itself is the problem. Nor do I think it's a particularly big deal if an app uses some memory.
You're right, Electron is not inherently bad and apps need RAM. There's no getting around that.
The issue with Electron is that it encourages building desktop apps as self-contained websites. Sure, that makes it easier to distribute apps across systems and OSes, but it also means you've got front end web devs building system applications. Naturally, they'll use what they're used to: usually React, which exacerbates the problem. Plus it means that each app is running a new instance of a web browser, which adds overhead.
In real life, yeah, it's rare that I actually encounter a system slowdown because yet another app is running on Electron. I just think that it's bad practice to assume that all users can spare the memory.
I'll admit that my concern is more of a moral one than a practical one. I build software for a living and I think that optimizing resource usage is one way to show respect to my users (be they consumers, ops people running the infra, or whatever). Not to mention that lean, snappy apps make for a better user experience.
Lazy developers can make bad apps that waste RAM no matter what framework. But even conscientious developers cannot make an app with Electron that compares favorably to a native app. Electron is inherently a problem, even if it isn't the only one.
The problem with having 32gb of RAM is that there is no mechanism to power off part of it when it is unneeded (plus RAM constitutes a significant fraction of a device's total power consumption) so if the device is running off a battery and is designed to keep device weight to a minimum (e.g., battery as small as practical), then battery life is not as good as it would be if the device had only 16gb.
This is why the top model of the previous generation of the iPhone (the iPhone 16 Pro Max) has only 8 GB of RAM, bumped to 12 GB for the current top model (the iPhone 17 Pro Max at the higher tiers of additional storage). If Apple had decided to put more RAM than that into any iPhone, even the models where the price is irrelevant to most buyers, they would not have been serving their customers well.
So, now you have to pay a penalty in either battery life or device weight for the duration of your ownership of any device designed for maximum mobility if you ever want to having a good experience when running Electron apps on the device.
The web browser on my phone instantly gets killed the moment I switch to another app because it eats up so much ram.
I think it's a correlation vs causation type thing. Many Electron apps are extremely, painfully, slow. Teams is pretty much the poster child for this, but even spotify sometimes finds a way to lag, when it's just a freaking list of text.
Are they slow because they're Electron? No idea. But you can't deny that most Electron apps are sluggish for no clear reason. At least if they were pegging a CPU, you'd figure your box is slow. But that's not even what happens. Maybe they would've been sluggish even using native frameworks. Teams seems to do 1M network round-trips on each action, so even if it was perfectly optimized assembly for my specific CPU it would probably make no difference.
Nearly all apps are sluggish for a very clear reason - the average dev is ass. It's possible to make fast apps using electron, just like it's possible to make fast apps using anything else. People complain about react too, react is fast as fuck. I can make react apps snappy as hell. It's just crappy devs.
Yea, these applications are typically not slow just because the use Electron (although it's often a contributor). But the underlying reason why they are slow is the same reason why they are using Electron: developer skill.
The people I trust to give good security recommendations (e.g., the leader of the Secureblue project) tell me I should completely avoid Electron (at least on Linux) because of how insecure it is. E.g., the typical Electron app pulls in many NPM packages, for which Electron does zero sandboxing.
It seems like as hardware gets cheaper, software gets more bloated to compensate. Or maybe it’s vice versa.
I wonder if there’s a computer science law about this. This could be my chance!
Is your name Wirth?
Dangit! Always the bridesmaid, never the bride
Sorry to burst your bubble:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
Not exactly the same (it's about power rather than price). But close enough that when you said it, I thought, "oh! there is something like that." There's also more fundamental economics laws at play for supply and demand of a resource / efficiencies at scale / etc. Given our ever increasing demand of compute compared increasing supply (cheaper more powerful compute), I expect the supply will bottleneck before the demand does.
Ah, so you think there’s a point where actually bloat slows because we eventually can’t keep up with demand for compute?
I guess this might be happening with LLMs already
That's actually a good point, haha. The worst-case scenario of computers being thin clients for other people's servers dissolves when you realize that chromium/electron IS, nominally, a thin client for HTTP servers, and it'll gladly eat up as much memory as you throw at it. In the long term, modulo the current RAM shortage, it turns out it's cheaper to ship beefy hardware than it is to ship lean software.
This is the way
Simulation, analysis, rendering... All those gobbles memory, CPU, sometimes graphic card. Real time works also: huge data set in real time — sensor for production line or environmental monitoring for example.
For word processing, basic image manipulation, electron app (well...) even the "cheap" Macbook Neo is good enough, and it's a last year phone CPU. But that's not enough for a lot of use case.
The big one for me is ballooning dependency trees in popular npm/cargo frameworks. I had to trade a perfectly good i9-based MacBook Pro up to an M2, just to get compile times under control at work.
The constant increases in website and electron app weight don't feel great either.
3D CAD/CAM is still CPU (and to a lesser extent memory) bound --- I do joinery, and my last attempt at a test joint for a project I'm still working up to was a 1" x 2" x 1" area (two 1" x 1" x 1" halves which mated) which took an entry-level CAM program some 18--20 minutes to calculate and made a ~140MB file including G-code toolpaths.... (really should have tracked memory usage....)
That sounds like pretty degenerate behavior. I typically have CAM toolpaths generate in seconds using Fusion or PrusaSlicer.
It's a very complex joint (which is why it's never been done before that I could find --- hopefully will be patentable), and the tool definition probably wasn't optimal, nor the CAM tool being used appropriate to the task, hence my working on developing the toolpaths more directly.
Is that by convention or is there a good reason that it’s so CPU bound? I don’t have experience with CAD, so I’m not sure if it’s due to entrenched solutions or something else.
> Is that by convention or is there a good reason that it’s so CPU bound?
A lot of commercial CAD software exists for a very long time, and it is important for industrial customers that the backward compatibility is very well kept. So, the vendors don't want to do deep changes in the CAD kernels.
Additionally, such developments are expensive (because novel algorithms have to be invented). I guess CAD applications are not that incredibly profitable that as a vendor you want to invest a huge amount of money into the development of such a feature.
My understanding is that the problems being worked on do not yield to breaking down into parallelizable parts in an efficient/easily-calculated/unambiguous fashion.
> My phone has 16gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage, laptops today are ridiculous compared to anything I studied with.
Most affordable laptops have exactly that, 16gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage. Think about THAT!
I've never have a personal computer that came even close to powerful enough to do what i want. Compiles that take 15 minutes, is really annoying for instance.
>My phone has 16gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage
That's "non powerful" to you?
The opposite. I meant that if this is what consumer grade looks like nowadays, even with a fraction of current flagships we seem well covered - this was less than 800 bucks.
I’d love it if a clean build and test on the biggest project I work in would finish instantly instead of taking an hour.
[dead]
> "I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop"
This absolutely boggles my mind. Do you mind if I ask what type of computing you do in order to justify this purchase to yourself?
Any and all. It's not particularly justifiable. It's more like, I'm a software engineer, and this is my home workshop. I run dozens of services, experiment with a bunch of different LLMs, tune my Postgres instance for good performance on large datasets, run ML data prep pipelines. All sorts really.
I'm also into motorcycles. Before I owned a house with a garage, I had to continuously pack my tools up and unpack them the next day. A bigger project meant schlepping parts in and out of the house. I had to keep track of the weather to work on my bikes.
Then, when I got a house, I made sure to get one with a garage and power. It transformed my experience. I was able to leave projects in situ until I had time. I had a place to put all my tools.
The workstation is a lot like that. The alternative would be renting. But then I'd spend a lot of my time schlepping data back and forth, investing in setting things up and tearing them down.
YMMV. I wouldn't dream of trying to universalize my experience.
I'm thinking the same. My total computing purchases in the last 25 years, including desktops, laptops, monitors, phones, and tablets is way under 20k.
I would bet it continues to be more affordable to buy reasonable specs with current consumer hardware, rather than buying a top system once.
I haven't purchased a new computer in, at least, 10 years. I take pride (i.e., I have a sickness) in purchasing used laptops off eBay, beefing them up, and loading Debian on them. My two main computers are a Dell E5440 and a Lenovo ThinkPad T420. I, too, am a software developer, but [apparently] not as much of a rock star software developer at this gentleman. :-D
> I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop - 768G of RAM, 96 cores, 96 GB Blackwell GPU - last October, before RAM prices spiked […]
768GB of RAM is insane…
Meanwhile, I’ve been going back and forth for over a year about spending $10k on a MacBook Pro with 128GB. I can’t shake the feeling I’d never actually use that much, and that, long term, cloud compute is going to matter more than sinking money into a single, non-upgradable machine anyway.
Your battery is going to suffer because of the extra ram as well.
I don't know your workloads, but for me personally 64 GB is the ceiling buffer on RAM - I can run entire k8s cluster locally with that and the M5 Pro with top cores is same CPU as M5 Max. I don't need the GPU - the local AI story and OSS models are just a toy for my use-cases and I'm always going to shell out for the API/frontier capabilities. I'm even thinking of 48 config because they already have those on 8% discounts/shipped by Amazon and I never hit that even on my workstation with 64 GB.
> Your battery is going to suffer because of the extra ram as well.
No, it won't. The power drain of merely refreshing DRAM is negligible, it's no higher than the drain you'd see in S3 standby over the same time period.
Given the DRAM refresh is part of S3 standby, I'm afraid this is circular reasoning.
I suspect this is one of those "it depends" situations; does the 128gb vs 64gb sku have more chips or denser chips? If "more chips" probably it'll draw a tiny bit more power than the smaller version. If the "denser" chips, it may be "more power draw" but such a tiny difference that it's immaterial.
Similarly, having more cache may mean less SSD activity, which may mean less energy draw overall.
If I had a chip to put on the roulette table of this "what if" I'd put it on the "it won't make a difference in the real world in any meaningful way" square.
I thought my Z620 with 128GB of RAM was excessive! Actually, HP says they support up to 192GB of RAM, but for whatever reason the machine won't POST with more than 128GB (4Rx4) in it. Flawed motherboard?
Look at the way age gating is going in a global coordinated push. Can control of compute be far behind?
It wasn't my primary motivator but it hasn't made me regret my decision.
I hummed and hawed on it for a good few months myself.
Just look at ITAR and the various attempts at legislating 3D printing and CNC machining of firearms parts to see one justification point of that.
> Can control of compute be far behind?
How is this going to work? You need uncontrolled compute for developing software. Any country locking up that ability too much will lose to those who don't.
> How is this going to work? You need uncontrolled compute for developing software.
I've read about companies where all software developers have to RDP to the company's servers to develop software, either to save on costs (sharing a few powerful servers with plenty of RAM and CPU between several developers) or to protect against leaks (since the code and assets never leave the company's Citrix servers).
Even for tiny crews doing nothing of fatal significance, this is unironically superior to "throw it on GitHub"
>You need uncontrolled compute for developing software
Oh you sweet summer child :(
You think our best and brightest aren't already working on that problem?
In fact they've fucking aced it, as has been widely celebrated on this website for years at this point.
All that remains is getting the rest of the world to buy in, hahahaha.
But I laugh unfairly and bitterly; getting people to buy in is in fact easiest.
Just put 'em in the pincer of attention/surveillance economy (make desire mandatory again!).
And then offer their ravaged intellectual and emotional lives the barest semblance of meaning, of progress, of the self-evident truth of reason.
And magic happens.
---
To digress. What you said is not unlike "you need uncontrolled thought for (writing books/recording music/shooting movies/etc)".
That's a sweet sentiment, innit?
Except it's being disproved daily by several global slop-publishing industries that exist since before personal computing.
Making a blockbuster movie, recording a pop hit, or publishing the kind of book you can buy at an airport, all employ millions of people; including many who seem to do nothing particularly comprehensible besides knowing people who know people... It reminds me of the Chinese Brain experiment a great deal.
Incidentally, those industries taught you most of what you know about "how to human"; their products were also a staple in the lives of your parents; and your grandparents... if you're the average bougieprole, anyway.
---
Anyway, what do you think the purpose of LLMs even is?
What's the supposed endgame of this entire coordinated push to stop instructing the computer (with all the "superhuman" exactitude this requires); and instead begin to "build" software by asking nicely?
Btw, no matter how hard we ignore some things, what's happening does not pertain only to software; also affected are prose, sound, video, basically all electronic media... permit yourself your one unfounded generalization for the day, and tell me - do you begin to get where this is going?
Not "compute" (the industrial resource) but computing (the individual activity) is politically sensitive: programming is a hands-on course in epistemics; and epistemics, in turn, teaches fearless disobedience.
There's a lot of money riding on fearless disobedience remaining a niche hobby. And if there's more money riding on anything else in the world right now, I'd like an accredited source to tell me what the hell that would be.
Think for two fucking seconds and once you're done screaming come join the resistance.
> 768GB of RAM is insane.
Before this price spike, it used to be you could get a second-hand rack server with 1TB of DDR4 for about $1000-2000. People were massively underestimating the performance of reasonably priced server hardware.
You can still get that, of course, but it costs a lot more. The recycling company I know is now taking the RAM out of every server and selling it separately.
Apple hardware is incredibly overpriced.
My home server has 512GB RAM, 48 cores, my 4 desktops are 16 cores 128GB, 4060GPU each. Server is second hand and I paid around $2500 for it. Just below $3000 price for desktops when I built them. All prices are in Canadian Pesos
Canadian Pesos?
Jokes because the Canadian dollar’s value isn’t very high right now.
See a $1100 GPU on eBay, but it’s in the US? Actually a $1900 GPU.
A colleague were just talking about how well he timed the purchase of his $700 24GB 3090.
Please, it's actually Cambodian Dollhairs or Canuckistan Pesos.
It is sarcasm. Our dollar which used to be on par with US is no more.
> spending $10k on a MacBook Pro with 128GB.
As someone who just bought a completely maxed out 14" Macbook Pro with an M5 Max and 128GB of RAM and 8TB SSD, it was not $10k, it was only a bit over $7k. Where is this extra $3k going?
Tangential, I bought a nearly identically-spec'd (didn't spring for the 8 TB SSD - in retrospect, had I kept it, I would've been OK with the 4 TB) model, and returned it yesterday due to thermal throttling. I have an M4 Pro w/ 48 GB RAM, and since the M5 Max was touted as being quite a bit faster for various local LLM usages, I decided I'd try it.
Turns out the heatsink in the 14" isn't nearly enough to handle the Max with all cores pegged. I'd get about 30 seconds of full power before frequency would drop like a rock.
I haven't really had a problem with thermal throttling, but my highest compute activity is inferencing. The main performance fall-off I've observed is that the cache/context size to token output rate curve is way more aggressive than I expected given the memory bandwidth compared to GPU-based inferencing I've done on PC. But other than spinning up the fans during prompt processing, I'm able to stay peak CPU usage without clock speed reducing. Generally though this only maintains peak compute utilization for around 2-3 minutes.
I'm wondering if there was something wrong with your particular unit?
It could be a different country?
With the way legislation is going these days, self hosting is becoming ever more important. RAM for zfs + containers on k3s doesn't end up being that crazy if you assuming you need to do everything on your own. (at home I've got 1 1tb ram machine, 1 512gb, 3x 128gb all in a k3s cluster with some various gpus about about a half pb of storage before ~ last sept this wasn't _that_ expensive to do)
> Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node.
How can you say this when Apple is releasing extremely fast M5 MacBook Pros? Or the $600 MacBook Neo that has incredible performance for that price point?
Even x86 is getting some interesting options. The Strix Halo platform has become popular with LLM users that the parts are being sold in high numbers for little desktop systems.
They're ultimately laptops, you won't be able to squeeze out the same amount of performance from a laptop compared to a desktop, regardless of the hardware.
If you haven't tried out a desktop CPU in a while, I highly recommend you giving it a try if you're used to only using laptops, even when in the same class the difference is obvious.
I have a recent MacBook Pro and a high end Zen 5 desktop.
For CPU-bound tasks like compiling they’re not that different. For GPU tasks my desktop wins by far but it also consumes many times more power to run the giant GPU.
If you think laptops are behind consumer desktops for normal tasks like compiling code you probably haven’t used a recent MacBook Pro.
> I have a recent MacBook Pro and a high end Zen 5 desktop.
What are the exact CPU models used here though? Since my point was about CPUs in the "same class", and it's really hard to see if this is actually the case here.
And yes, I've played around with the recent Apple CPUs, all the way up to M4 Pro (I think, thinking about it I'm not 100% sure) and still I'd say the same class of CPUs will do better in a desktop rather than a laptop.
If you want to compare it in the Apple ecosystem, compare the CPUs of a laptop to one of the Mac Mini/Mac Studio, and I'm sure you'll still see a difference, albeit maybe smaller than other brands.
> If you want to compare it in the Apple ecosystem, compare the CPUs of a laptop to one of the Mac Mini/Mac Studio, and I'm sure you'll still see a difference, albeit maybe smaller than other brands
The same chip perform basically the same in the different form factors.
For all of the definitive statements you're making in this thread, you don't seem to know much about Apple M-series silicon.
They're fast, but they'll never even remotely reach what a mid-range desktop PC with dedicated graphics burning 500W is able to do.
A 300W GPU released in 2025 is about 10x M5 perf. The difference is going to be smaller for CPU perf, but also not close.
> The difference is going to be smaller for CPU perf, but also not close.
This is not true. The recent MacBook Pros are every bit as fast as my Zen 5 desktop for most tasks like compiling.
For GPU there is a difference because both are constrained by thermal and power requirements where the desktop has a big advantage.
For CPU compute, the laptop can actually be faster for single threaded work and comparable for multi threaded work.
Anyone claiming laptop CPUs can’t keep up with desktop CPUs hasn’t been paying attention. The latest laptops are amazing.
> The recent MacBook Pros are every bit as fast as my Zen 5 desktop for most tasks like compiling.
Bad example. That's highly parallel, so a higher core-count die is going to destroy the base M5 here.
I don't typically compile Linux on my M5, so I don't really care, but at least online available clang benchmarks put it at roughly half the LOC/s of a 9950X, which released in 2024.
Anything single threaded it should match or even edge ahead though.
It gets for worse for multi threaded perf if you leave behind consumer-grade hardware and compare professional/workhorse level CPUs like EPYC/Threadripper/Xeon to Apple's "pro" lines. That's just a slaughter. They're roughly 3x a 9950X die for these kinds of workloads.
> Bad example. That's highly parallel, so a higher core-count die is going to destroy the base M5 here.
The base M5 starts at 10 cores and scales to 18 cores. The performance is similar to high end dekstop consumer CPUs.
> I don't typically compile Linux on my M5, so I don't really care,
If you don't compile large codebases, why do you care then?
I do compile large codebases and I'm speaking from experience with the same codebase on both platforms. Not "LOC/s" benchmarks
I don't compile Linux or other large C projects on my M5 (why would I). The only thing I have numbers for on both desktop and mobile is your typical JS/TypeScript/webpack shitshow that struggles to keep a high core count CPU remotely busy. Might as well do that on the M5.
There's a large C++ codebase I need to compile, but it can't compile/run on OSX in the first place, hence the desktop that I use remotely for that. Since it's also kind of a shitshow, that one has really terrible compile times: up to 15 minutes on a high powered Intel ThinkPad I no longer use, ~2 minutes on desktop.
I could do it in a VM as well, but let's be real: running it on the M5 in front of me is going to be nowhere near as nice as running it on the water cooled desktop under my desk.
For batch jobs there isn't much competition. 9995wx has 3 to 4x throughput of M5 max.
And then, if your laptop is busy, your machine is occupied - I hate that feeling. I never run heavy software on my laptop. My machine is in the cellar, I connect over ssh. My desktop and my laptop are different machines. I don't want to have to keep my laptop open and running. And I don't want to drag an expensive piece of hardware everywhere.
And then you need to use macOS. I'm not a macOS person.
> For batch jobs there isn't much competition. 9995wx has 3 to 4x throughput of M5 max.
I would hope so, given that you can buy multiple M5 laptops for the price of that CPU alone.
I made a comment about how impressive the M5 laptops were above, so these comments trying to debunk it by comparing to $12,000 CPUs (before building the rest of the system) are kind of an admission that the M5 is rather powerful. If you have to spend 3-4X as much to build something that competes, what are we even talking about any more?
We are on borrowed time, most of the world is running on oil and this resource is not unlimited at all. A lot of countries have gone past their production peak, meaning it's only downhill from here. Everything is gonna be more costly, more expensive, our lavish "democracies" lifestyles are only possible because we have (had) this amazing freely available resource, but without it it's gonna change. Even at a geopolitical scale you can see this pretty obviously, countries that talked about free market, free exchange are now starting to close the doors and play individually. Anyways, my point is, we are in for decades, if not a century of slow decline.
Doubt it. Renewables are expanding much faster than oil output is decreasing. Wind and solar will enable energy to remain cheap everywhere that builds it.
Energy production is only part of the bill, though. The oil shortage is having an effect on a mind-boggling variety of consumer goods where crude oil is used in manufacturing. For many products we don't have good alternatives. A lot of oil is needed to build an electric car.
Malthusians has been sounding the alarm for longer than Protestant revivalists have been claiming the end of world is next month at lunchtime. If there is a predication market for such things, betting on any Malthusian is patently foolish.
(Of course, I don't disagree with the notion that consumerism produces an extraordinary amount of worthless trash, but that's a different matter. The main problem with consumerism is consumerism itself as a spiritual disease; the material devastation is a consequence of that.)
People gloating about Malthusians being wrong keep forgetting that it only takes for them to be right ONCE in the entirety of human history and when they are - you'll be too busy trying to survive rather than posting on internet forums.
The planet has a certain resource-bound carrying capacity. It's a fact of physics. Just because we aren't there yet as of (checks time) 2026-03-27, doesn't mean Malthusians are wrong.
Although to be fair to the other side, I think with abundant renewable energy we'll be able to delay resource depletion for a very long time thanks to recycling (and lower standards of living of course).
There will be very dramatic growing pains with this switch, especially for A: nations manufacturing renewables but still running that manufacturing on oil and B: nations that face political and economic barriers for renewables.
Also C: nations that are both A and B, needlessly causing oil volatility with unplanned military dickheadedness.
Renewables provide electricity only, but planes, boats, trucks, basically all the supply chain, works with oil only for the moment. The ease of use of oil has not been replaced yet. Do you realize how easy it is to handle oil ? You can just put it in a barrel and ship it anywhere in that barrel. No need for wires or complex batteries like for electricity, nor complex pipelines like for gas.
And even if we figured out how to electrify everything (which we didn't as I just said), we would still run into resources shortages for batteries, wires (copper etc.), nuclear fuel (uranium)...
Expanding renewables to the easily replaceable items like power plants, generators, and most consumer vehicles would radically reduce oil usage to where it becomes a minor concern. Also things like biodiesel exist. A more sustainable, renewable-forward, electrified reality is easily possible.
There is not a risk of resource shortage of copper. The doomer and prepper talking points you're parroting are not based in reality.
The risk of copper shortage is a very well know fact https://press.spglobal.com/2026-01-08-Substantial-Shortfall-... You're into renewables, yet you can't grasp the fact that resources are limited on this planet ? That's peculiar.
And I don't even understand your other points to be honest. What do you mean "consumer vehicles" ? Are you taking about individual's cars ? I'm not taking about that, these don't matter that much. I'm taking about trucks, boats, planes, the stuff actually shipping you your lifestyle.
It makes sense that you don't understand the other points. Based on how you approach conversation, I suspect it's an issue you run into frequently.
Look up what it means to have a conversation in "good faith" vs in "bad faith" and you might learn something useful about conversation tools. For example, lying about what someone says and calling it "peculiar" is "bad faith".
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Keep your eye on butanol https://phys.org/news/2026-02-microbial-eco-friendly-butanol....
Hilarious how comments like this consistently get downvoted, theres a lot of special interest lurkers on this forum
"I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop . . . "
This is where I think current hackers should be headed. I grew up with lots of family who were backyard mechanics, wrenching on cars and motorcycles. Their investment in tools made my occasional PC purchase look extremely affordable. Based on what I read, senior mechanics often have five-figure US dollar investments in tools. Of course, I guess high quality torque wrenches probably outlast current GPU chips? I'd hate to be stuck making a $10K investment every 24 months on a new GPU . . .
I have been renting GPU resources and running open weight models, but recently my preferred provider simply doesn't have hardware available. I'm now kicking myself a little for not simply making a big purchase last fall when prices were better.
> Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node. Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute that you rent, or buy a time slice with your eyeballs, much like smartphones pretty much always have been.
It really feels like we're slowly marching back to the era of mainframe computers and dumb terminals. Maybe the democratization of hardware was a temporary aberration.
Care to share some more detailed specs?
It seems like you largely agree with the article - people shall own nothing and be happy. Perhaps the artificially induced supply crunch could go on indefinitely.
Also, I wonder how many of us, even here on HN, have the ability to spend that amount of money on computer for personal use. Frankly I wouldn't even know what to do with all the RAM - should I just ramdisk every program I use and every digital thing I made in the last five years?
Anyhow, I suppose for the folks who can't afford hardware (perhaps by design), one ought to own nothing and be happy.
People spend a lot more than that on a car they use less, especially if they're in tech.
The RAM choice was because I have never regretted buying more RAM - it's practically always a better trade than a slightly faster CPU - and 96GB DIMMs were at a sweet spot compared to 128GB DIMMs.
That, and the ability to have big LLMs in memory, for some local inference, even if it's slow mixed CPU/GPU inference, or paged on demand. And if not for big LLMs, then to keep models cached for quick swapping.
I bought a 4 year old car for significantly less than that. And I can get a computer that can do 99% of what your monster can do for like 10% of the price. And if I want LLM inference I can get that for like $20 a month or whatever.
I don't mean to judge, it's your money but to me it seems like an enormous waste. Just like spending $100k on a car when you can get one for $15k that does pretty much exactly the same job.
Sure. You're right, it is my money. And I pay even more for inference on top; I have OpenRouter credits, OpenAI subscription, Claude Max subscription.
It's not so easy to get nice second-hand hardware here in Switzerland, and my HEDT is nice and quiet, doesn't need to be rack-mounted, plugs straight into the wall. I keep it in the basement next to the internet router anyway.
The "sensible" choice is to rent. It's the same with cars; most people these days lease (about 50% of new cars in CH, which will be a majority if you compare it with auto loan and cash purchase).
I don't think leasing cars is sensible. Last time I checked, for cheaper cars mind you, I would essentially pay 60% of the sticker price over a few years and then not have a car at the end of it. Would be better to buy a new car and then sell it after the same time. But what's even better is to not buy a new car, let some other sucker take the huge value loss and then snatch it up at a 30-60% discount a few years later. Then you can sell it a few years after that for not much less than you paid for it. I've had mine a year and right now they're going for more than I paid.
I think leasing might be okayish if you find a really good deal, but it's really not much different than buying new which is just a shit deal no matter how you turn it. A 1-4 year old car is pretty much new anyway, I don't see any reason to buy brand new.
Solarpunk + https://permacomputing.net/
That’s for everyone
I've always went way over on RAM, for the most part. 32, 64, then 128GB of memory.
Never really used it all, usually only about 40%, but it's one of those better to have than not need, and better than selling and re-buying a larger memory machine (when it's something you can't upgrade, like a Mac or certain other laptops)
I believe superficially speaking you could be right. But I think it was realised that causing the scarcity of products and commodities is a power move.
We live in world where we optimised for globalization. Industry in china, oil in middle east, etc...
This approach proved to be fragile on the hands of people with money and/or power enough to tilt the scale
It's not a power move, it's a cartel and they've done this before. Gamers Nexus did a fantastic piece on how where we're at today is very similar to the DRAM price fixing and market manipulation just a couple decades ago [0]. This is the big players taking full advantage of an opportunity for profit.
[0] https://youtu.be/jVzeHTlWIDY?si=cRJ6C7jPxLIpKTyF
This will be me. Bestowing upon my descendants a collection of Mighty Beanz, a few unkillable appliances, and the best consumer computing hardware the early 2020s could buy.
And I fear they will be equally confused and annoyed by disposing of all of them.
i thought i was crazy with a $7k threadripper w/ 128G of ram
>we're at an inflection point where DC hardware is diverging rapidly from consumer compute.
I thought the trend is the opposite direction, with RTX 5x series converging with server atchitectures (Blackwell-based such as RTX 6000 Pro+). Just less VRAM and fewer tensor cores, artificially.
Where is the divergence happening? Or you don't view RTX 5x as consumer hardware?
Blackwell diverges within Blackwell itself… SM121 on the GB10 vs the RTX 5000 consumer vs the actual full fat B100 hardware all have surprisingly different abilities. The GB10 has been hamstrung by this a bit, too.
You're responding to an LLM authored article that doesn't know anything. "Let that sink in for a moment."
$20k?
People laugh at young men for looksmaxxing. And then there’s this. I dunno. As someone who has been playing computer games since the 70s, I clearly do not understand the culture anymore. But what forces would drive a young man to spend the price of a used car to play a derivative FPS? It seems heartbreaking. Just like the looksmaxxer.
Alas, I'm not a young man any more. And my HEDT is headless, it has no monitor with which to play FPSes.
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I think you're probably right, but I'm not so confident the supply crunch will end.
Tech feels increasingly fragile with more and more consolidation. We have a huge chunk of advanced chip manufacturing situated on a tiny island off the coast of a rising superpower that hates that island being independent. Fabs in general are so expensive that you need a huge market to justify building one. That market is there, for now. But it doesn't seem like there's much redundancy. If there's an economic shock, like, I dunno, 20% of the world's oil supply suddenly being blockaded, I worry that could tip things into a death spiral instead.
> Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute
Are you kidding? Apple's mobile chips are now delivering perf that AMD & intel desktop never could or did.
> Apple's mobile chips are now delivering perf that AMD & intel desktop never could or did.
Most applications don't make aggressive use of the SIMD instructions that modern x86 chips offer, thus you get this impression. :-(
Users do not care why the perf they get is what they get. What good is AVX2048 if nobody uses it?
> Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute that you rent, or buy a time slice with your eyeballs, much like smartphones pretty much always have been.
What are you talking about?
My laptops are, and always have been, primarily places where I do local computing. I write code there, I watch movies there, I listen to music there, I play games there...all with local storage, local compute, and local control (though I do also store a bunch of my movies on a personal media server, housed in my TV stand, because it can hold a lot more). My smartphone is similar.
If you think that the vast majority of the work most people do on their personal computers is moving to LLMs, or cloud gaming, then I think you are operating in a pretty serious bubble. 99.9% of all work that most people do is still best done locally: word processing, spreadsheets, email, writing code, etc. Even in the cases where the application is hosted online (like Google Docs/Sheets), the compute is still primarily local.
The closest to what you're describing that I think makes any sense is the proliferation of streaming media—but again, while they store the vast libraries of content for us, the decoding is done locally, after the content has reached our devices.
It doesn't matter if a cutting-edge AI-optimized server can perform 10, 100, or 1000 times better than my laptop at any particular task: if the speed at which my laptop performs it is faster than I, as a human, can keep up (whatever that means for the particular task), then there's no reason not to do the task locally.
> We won't be in a supply crunch forever.
I don't share the same 1:1 opinion with regards to the article, but it is absolutely clear that RAM prices have gone up enormously. Just compare them. That is fact.
It may be cheaper lateron, but ... when will that happen? Is there a guarantee? Supply crunch can also mean that fewer people can afford something because the prices are now much higher than before. Add to this the oil crisis Trump started and we are now suddenly having to pay more just because a few mafiosi benefit from this. (See Krugman's analysis of the recent stock market flow of money/stocks.)
The increase looks higher because we were at an all-time price low. RAM has been this expensive at least twice before, and it always dropped way down again after.
General predictions are in 3-5 years things will return to normal. 3 years if the current AI crunch is a short term thing, 5 years if it isn't and we have to build new RAM factories.
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Local is a dead end.
Open source efforts need to give up on local AI and embrace cloud compute.
We need to stop building toy models to run on RTX and instead try to compete with the hyperscalers. We need open weights models that are big and run on H200s. Those are the class of models that will be able to compete.
When the hyperscalers reach take off, we're done for. If we can stay within ~6months, we might be able to slow them down or even break them.
If there was something 80-90% as good as Opus or Seedance or Nano Banana, more of the ecosystem would switch to open source because it offers control and sovereignty. But we don't have that right now.
If we had really competitive open weights models, universities, research teams, other labs, and other companies would be able to collaboratively contribute to the effort.
Everyone in the open source world is trying to shrink these models to fit on their 3090 instead, though, and that's such a wasted effort. It's short term thinking.
An "OpenRunPod/OpenOpenRouter" + one click deploy of models just as good as Gemini will win over LMStudio and ComfyUI trying to hack a solution on your own Nvidia gaming card.
That's such a tiny segment of the market, and the tools are all horrible to use anyway. It's like we learned nothing from "The Year of Linux on Desktop 1999". Only when we realized the data center was our friend did we frame our open source effort appropriately.
> We need open weights models that are big and run on H200s.
We have this class of models already, Kimi 2.5 and GLM-5 are proper SOTA models. Nemotron might also release a larger-sized model at some time in the future. With the new NVMe-based offload being worked on as of late you can even experiment with these models on your own hardware, but of course there's plenty of cheap third-party inference platforms for these too.
> Open source efforts need to give up on local AI and embrace cloud compute.
Oh god no, please not more slop, you're already consuming over 1 percent of human energy output, could you, like, chill a bit?
In a similar vein: seek efficiency.
I.e., /if/ I am going to consume LLM tokens, I figure that a local LLM with 10s of billions of parameters running on commodity hardware at home will still consume far more energy per token than that of a frontier model running on commercial hardware which is very strongly incentivized to be as efficient as possible. Do the math; it isn't even close. (Maybe it'd be closer in your local winter, where your compute heat could offset your heating requirements. But that gets harder to quantify.)
Maybe it's different if you have insane and modern local hardware, but at least in my situation that is not the case.
But commodity hardware that's right-sized for your own private needs is many orders of magnitude cheaper than datacenter hardware that's intended to serve millions of users simultaneously while consuming gigawatts in power. You're mostly paying for that hardware when you buy LLM tokens, not just for power efficiency. And your own hardware stays available for non-AI related needs, while paying for these tokens would require you to address these needs separately in some way.
>And your own hardware stays available for non-AI related needs, while paying for these tokens would require you to address these needs separately in some way.
^ Fair. Yep, I agree the calculus changes if you don't have _any_ local hardware and you're needing to factor in the cost of acquiring such hardware.
When I did this napkin math, I was mostly interested in the energy aspect, using cost as a proxy. I was calculating the $/token (taking into consideration the cost of a KWh from my utility, the measured power draw of my M1 work machine, and the measured tokens per second processed by a ~20BP open-weight model). I then compared this to the published $/token rate of a frontier provider, and it was something like two orders of magnitude in favor of the frontier model. I get it, they're subsidizing, but I've got to imagine there's some truth in the numbers.
I wonder, does (or will) the $/token ratio fall asymptotically toward the cost of electricity? In my mind I'm drawing a parallel to how the value of mined cryptocurrency approximately tracks the cost of electricity... but I might be misremembering that detail.
I doubt it because you aren't going to get the utilisation that a commercial setup would. No point wasting tons of money on hardware that is sat idle most of the time.
If you're running agentic workloads in the background (either some coding agent or personal claw-agent type) that's enough utilization that the hardware won't be sitting idle.
Y'all aren't seeing the same future I am, I guess.
- Our career is reaching the end of the line
- 99.9999% of users will be using the cloud
- if we don't have strong open source models, we're going to be locked into hyperscaler APIs for life
- piddly little home GPUs don't do squat against this
Why are you building for hobby uses?
Build for freedom of the ability to make and scale businesses. To remain competitive. To have options in the future independent of hyperscalers.
We're going to be locked out of the game soon.
Everyone should be panicking about losing the ability to participate.
Play with your RTXes all you like. They might as well be raspberry pis. They're toys.
Our future depends on our ability to run and access large scale, competitive, open weights. Not stuff you run with LM Studio or ComfyUI as a hobby.
I don't agree that we are being left behind with regards to AI, I believe it's simply not worth participating in. I hope it all comes crashing down.
That's not the right perspective to have.
Also, the only thing crashing down will be the economic participation of everyday people if we don't have ownership over the means of creation. Hyperscalers will be just fine.
Man, going to personal computing was a mistake, we should’ve stayed jacked to the mainframes /s
Entire device categories, like smartphones, are locked down. That's our future.
Here's my retort: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47543367
The general take here seems to be "everything eventually passes". That isn't always true. I wonder how many people have a primary computing device that they don't even have full control over now (Apple phones, tablets...). Years ago the concept of spending over $1k on a computer that I didn't even have the right to install my own software on was considered ridiculous by many people (myself included). Now many people primarily consume content on a device controlled almost entirely by the company they bought it from. If the economics lead to a situation where its more profitable to sell you compute time than sell you computers then businesses will chose to not sell you computers. I have no idea if that is what ends up happening.
It's worth keeping an eye on this HP-rental-laptop thing.
Personally I think it will be a big headache for HP, people can be hard on laptops and HP is already not excited about consumer support (i.e. mandatory 15 minute wait time for support calls). But if they make it work, I think there's probably a good number of people who feel like they need a laptop but don't care so much about the specifics and want to keep their costs low (as all of their costs appear to be rising right now).
Rental seems to be about corporate laptops. Companies just want things to work at a predictable cost. They are already replacing laptops after 5 years even if they work. They are already replacing a few laptops that break in less than that 5 years. In short they are already renting the laptops, they are just paying the price upfront and then using accounting to balance it out. Rental just moves the accounting, but otherwise nothing changes.
For consumers who don't replace their laptops on a schedule it makes less sense.
I'm also very skeptical of "everything eventually passes" as it pertains to hardware prices. Right now, prices are high because supply can't keep up with demand. But if/when supply increases to meet demand or demand decreases, there's no reason for companies to drop prices now that consumers have become accustomed to them.
Then why did they drop prices the last few times prices spiked like this?
RAM was this price some years back, and yet last summer/fall it was at an all-time low.
> there's no reason for companies to drop prices
Competition.
My primary concern is for next generation hardware.
Will we continue to see steady improvement in top quality CPU/GPUs? Would they even bother releasing consumer versions of ram faster than DDR5?
To be fair the people that have ipad as their only computer device now didn’t have a computer back then
Not necessarily. Many people grew up with PCs and laptops but now mostly use their phones, because outside of specific jobs or hobbies, everyday computing needs are heavily optimized for mobile-first.
(A large factor here is, obviously, the cloud. With photos, documents, e-mail, IMs, etc. all hosted for cheap or free on "other people's computers", the total hardware demands on the end-user computing device is much less. Think storage, not just RAM.)
It's true even in tech; half a year ago I switched my phone to a Galaxy Z Fold7, and I haven't used my personal laptop since then, not once. I have a separate company laptop for work, and I occasionally turned on my PC, but it turns out that a foldable phone is good enough to do everything on personal side I'd normally use a laptop for. So here I am, with my primary compute device I don't have full control over - and yes, I'm surprised by this development myself, and haven't fully processed it yet.
> Not necessarily. Many people grew up with PCs and laptops but now mostly use their phones, because outside of specific jobs or hobbies, everyday computing needs are heavily optimized for mobile-first.
It's a deeply flawed comparison, because many of the things we do with a phone now wasn't something we'd do at all with the computers we grew up with. We didn't pay at the grocery store with a computer, we didn't buy metro tickets, we didn't use it to navigate (well, there was a short period of time where we might print out maps, but anyway..)
When I grew up, I feel like our use of home computers fell into two categories:
1. Some of us kids used them to play games. Though many more would have a Nintendo/Sega for that, and I feel like the iPhone/iPad is a continuation of that. The "it just works" experience where you have limited control over the device.
2. Some parents would use it for work/spreadsheets/documents ... and that's still where most people use a "real" computer today. So nothing has really changed there.
There is now a lot more work where you do the work on services running on a server or in the cloud. But that's back to the original point: that's in many cases just not something we could do with old home computers. Like, my doctor can now approve my request for a prescription from anywhere in the world. That just wasn't possible before, and arguably isn't possible without a server/cloud-based infrastructure.
Phones/tablets as an interface to these services is arguably a continuation of like those old dumb terminals to e.g. AS/400 machines and such.
> It's true even in tech; half a year ago I switched my phone to a Galaxy Z Fold7, and I haven't used my personal laptop since then, not once.
I do agree, I am in a similar situation.
(edit: I'm broadly in agreement with your comment & observations, so I don't at all mean to come off as argumentative for the sake of being argumentative. You just got me thinking about how that situation might have been handled thirty or a hundred years ago.)
> [...] my doctor can now approve my request for a prescription from anywhere in the world. That just wasn't possible before [...]
I'm picking nits, but wasn't this more or less instantaneous approval possible before with e.g., a fax and a telephone? Or (although this is a bit of a stretch) a telegram and telegraph?
Ditto. My personal equipment includes a home server (128GB DDR3 ECC) and a tablet with a keyboard. It's honestly astonishing what you can do without a full-fledged laptop, if you're willing to go through some gymnastics to get there. And it travels light compared to a laptop! (The tablet, that is. Not the headless box. :-))
In a lot of ways the cloud is better than my personal computer, even if I'm on it.
There is a reason I have a server in my basement - it lets me edit files on my phone (if I must - the keyboard is and screen space are terrible compromises but sometimes I can live with it), laptop (acceptable keyboard and screen), or desktop (great keyboard, large screen); it also lets me share with my wife (I haven't got this working but it can be done). I have nearly always had a server in my house because sharing files between computers is so much better than only being able to work on one (or using floppies). The cloud expands my home server to anywhere in the world: it offloads security on someone else, and makes it someone else's problem to keep the software updated.
There is a lot to hate about the cloud. My home servers also have annoyances. However for most things it is conceptually better and we just need the cloud providers to fix the annoyances (it is an open question if they will)
Not my 70yo mom. She used to have a big gray PC but switched to a Chromebook (one I gave her) about 15 years ago, and now only uses her phone and tablet.
I "sold" my mother my personal top-of-the-line MacBook Pro ~2014... only to eventually discover it largely unused when we were probating her properties.
iPad awas the perfect device for her (I've touched one perhaps twice, in my entire lifetime).
The framing here is wrong, I think. My iPad has a lot of software on it that I use for music production, it all runs locally. Yes I had to install it through Apple's app store but I could disconnect it from the Internet and expect it to, at this point, work as long as the software on almost any piece of hardware it replaces.
Meanwhile my much more expensive laptop mostly interfaces with applications that primarily exist on servers that I have no control over, and it would be nearly worthless if I disconnected it from the Internet. Your central point is right, the economics are concerning, but I think it's been a ship slowly sailing away that we're now noticing has disappeared over the horizon.
If you have to pass the bouncers vibe check to get in, and your dancers have to pay him a 30% tax to work there, do you own the strip club or does the bouncer?
Being in control of your own computing device was always a niche. The vast majority of people are not interested in computing itself, only in the output. For that majority, this is fine.
The niche is still there, probably as big as it was before. For example, as I grew weary of being subject to services I have little control over, I set up my own home server using a refurbished PC. It has been an amazing journey so far. But I don't think a normie would ever get interested in buying a refurbished Dell, install Debian on it, and set up their own services there.
As long as there is a niche of people interested in buying their own computers, there will be companies willing to fill that niche.
A long article begging the question when the last paragraph or two countered the panic of the beginning. Two Chinese firms are ramping up production of consumer RAM/SSDs because they see a market opening as the existing producers move to selling to enterprise/hyperscalars.
There have been memory chip panics before, the US funded RAM production back into the 80s/90s in competition with Japan at the time.
The AI boom/"hyperscale" currently is almost exactly like the dotcom boom.
It's already starting to shake down. Anthropic is occupying the developer space, OpenAI has just exited the video/media production space. More focused and vertical market AI is emerging.
The current vortice of money between OpenAI <-> Microsoft <-> Oracle <-> NVidea <-> Google <-> etc etc is going to break.
The effects of the AI hyper scaling boom on the commodity hardware and energy markets are very much not like the dot com boom.
Outside of the obvious economic effect of the dot com boom - the creation of near infinitely scalable high margin online businesses - there was a secondary effect on consumer electronics, with a massive growth in demand for networked devices; there was then much more of a balance between the hardware growth in the network infrastructure and data center worlds as well as in desktop and mobile.
The AI boom’s hardware impact is much more skewed, as this article details.
> Two Chinese firms are ramping up production of consumer RAM/SSDs because they see a market opening
Yes but these Chinese firms are a tiny share of the overall RAM/SSD market, and they'll have the same problems with expanding production as everyone else. So it doesn't actually help all that much.
The biggest problem in expanding for everyone else is they don't trust the market to exist for long enough to be worth paying for a new factory so they are not investing in it. The Chinese might be small, but they think the market will exist and are investing. Will they be right or wrong - I don't know.
Chinese firms won’t have the exact same problems as anyone else. Some problems will be the same but not all.
* Chinese firms finance through different banks and investors than current ram producers
* A company with a mission statement of consumer ram won’t have their supply outbid by data centers
* Chinese manufacturing has more expertise in scaling then any other manufacturing culture
The fact that there’s been a massive expansion in the nonconsumer market means the consumer market makes up a smaller proportion of the overall market, but it doesn’t mean the consumer market is any smaller than it used to be.
This may not be entirely appropriate to the reasons behind the article, but it feels tangentially related:
I'd like to say a brief thank you to what the brief, golden period of globalisation was able to bring us.
I hope that that level of international trade and economic cooperation across geographical, ideological, political, and religious boundaries can be achieved again at some point in the future, but it seems the pendulum is swinging the other way for the time being.
I hope that, wherever the current direction ends up, there are lessons that can be learnt about what we had, and somehow fumbled, such that there is motivation enough to get back there.
> I'd like to say a brief thank you to what the brief, golden period of globalisation was able to bring us.
Not everyone benefited. Market globalism wasn't particularly kind to the global south, and the specific mandates that the WTO enacted on countries in latin america / africa (Washington Consensus) greatly increased local wealth disparities despite visibly growing GDP for a time.
America profited handsomely because for most of the past 30 years, it was where the (future) transnational conglomerates were based. These companies stood to benefit from the opening up of international markets. Now that these companies are being out-competed by their asian counterparts, instead of going back to the drawing board and innovating they are playing the "unfair trade practices" card and of course the current administration is on-board with it.
Globalisation is not going anywhere, but America is increasingly alienating itself from allies who it could stand to benefit from.
It is amazing how you can order so many small sensors from aliexpress, around 1-2€ each, and having in a week or two delivered. I am not sure we will have this for long.
> I hope that that level of international trade and economic cooperation across geographical, ideological, political, and religious boundaries can be achieved again at some point in the future
Me too, but without all the slavery this time please. It'll never work if some actors are willing to abuse their workforces to keep prices low as they do.
I know this may sound ridiculous, but m-maybe... maybe it's time for us to make software... less bloated?
Maybe... just maybe, a TODO list app shouldn't run 4 processes, and consume hundreds of megabytes of RAM?
Among my favorite failed dorking around experiences is pre-Raspberry, when the Arduino was still hobby-level equipment. This was over a decade ago...
With only a few kilobytes of code, you could send a UDP packet directly to your phone, with an app you "wrote" with just a few lines of code (to receive, without auto-confirmation).
I was on LinkedIn last night, and someone posted their new SAAS. The website was basically a calendar where you could log what you did each day of the month. I checked my memory usage, and that site was using 1GB of memory. They were also charging $100 for it...
Let me be the devils advocate here. Ok, let's say you optimize that TODO list app to only use 16 mb of RAM. What did you gain by that? Would you buy a smartphone that has less RAM now?
16MB still seems massive for this kind of app. I ran Visual Studio 4, not an app, but an entire app factory, on a 66MHz 486 with 16MB RAM. And it was snappy. A TODO list app that uses system UI elements could be significantly smaller.
What do I gain if more developers take this approach? Lightning fast performance. Faster backups. Decreased battery drain => longer battery service lifetime => more time in between hardware refreshes. Improved security posture due to orders of magnitude less SLOC. Improved reliability from decreased complexity.
Easier to run your todo list at the same time as applications that need the RAM for raw function. Maybe that’s CAD, maybe that’s A/V production, maybe it’s a context window.
It’s been convenient that we can throw better hardware at our constraints regularly. Our convenience much less our personal economic functions is not necessarily what markets will generally optimize for, much like developers of electron apps aren’t optimizing for user resources.
It’s the upgrade treadmill you would stop using, and stick to the initial entry device.
If only there wasn't a security update treadmill forcing everyone to do regular hardware upgrades.
Of course, as long as we're in the dreamland, most of these security upgrades do not actually require a hardware upgrade.
Technically no (except for the gradual performance drop they introduce, + occasional TPM bullshit), but of course in practice, companies see this as a choice of spending money on back-porting security fixes to a growing range of hardware, vs. making money by not doing that and forcing everyone to buy new hardware instead.
I’m running Windows 10 ESU on a 13 year old PC without issues. While it’s admittedly near the end of its life (mostly just due to Windows 11, though I might repurpose it for Linux), I’m expecting the next one to also last a decade or longer.
So is my wife, her laptop is still decent today, but doesn't support Win 11. I'm not worried about Microsoft as much as certain other competitors killing it - similarly to how she was forced to update to Windows 10 in the first place because, one day, out of the sudden, her web browser decided to refuse running on Windows 7.
We can't ever escape the market forces? You're right, of course if software gets less bloated, vendors will "value-optimize" hardware so in the end, computers keep being barely usable as they are today.
This year's average phone is already going to have less RAM than last year's average phone - so anything that reduces the footprint of the apps (and even more importantly, websites) we're using can only be a good thing. Plus it extends the usable life of current hardware.
Sure, but the price increase will be less, because less ram. Also, the need to keep buying new computers will decrease, because this year's computer isn't much better then last years (but now we can run more/better software!)
Less bloat is 100% always a good thing, no matter what the market conditions are.
It would be nice for browser tabs and apps to reload less often.
That's crazy talk. What will you ask for next? Add functionality to make apps at least as good/capable as they were in the 1990s and early 2000s? And then? Apps that interoperate? Insane.
More seriously and more ironically, at the same time, we've now reached a strange time where even non-programmers can vibe-code better software than they can buy/subscribe to - not because models are that good, or programming isn't hard, but because enshittification that has this industry rotten to the core and unable to deliver useful tools anymore.
Tell that to those who are still using Electron, TypeScript to create bloated desktop apps.
Oh man, I've come across this person's blog before and I love it, not just because of the personalization/personality they've put into the site's design, but because of all of the random CLI/TUI-based tools they've developed. Examples:
- https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/projects/
Their github repos:
- https://github.com/mrusme
They even built a BBS-style reader client that supports Hacker News:
https://github.com/mrusme/neonmodem
I miss the days of the web being weird like this :-)
Just to mention one thing, helium -which is a necessity for chip production- is a byproduct of LNG production. And 20% of that is just gone (Qatar) and the question is how long it will take to get that back. So not only a chip shortage because of AI buying chips in huge volumes but also because production will be hampered.
Tongue in cheek: we urgently need fusion power plants. For the AI and the helium.
> Tongue in cheek: we urgently need fusion power plants. For the AI and the helium.
Whenever I read about fusion, I get reminded of a note in the sci-fi book trilogy The Night's Dawn. In that story, the introduction of cheap fusion energy had not cured global warming on Earth but instead sped it up with all the excess heat from energy-wasting devices.
What matters is not what we don't have, but how we manage that which we do have.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
Fusion fuel is so energy dense that fusion plants will never produce industrially meaningful amounts of helium.
Well, as long as they can make electricity too cheap to meter, we can get helium from somewhere. Mine it from LNG sources currently untapped due to EROI < 1, or ship it from the goddamn Moon - ultimately, every problem in life (except that of human heart) can be solved with cheap energy.
The mere existence of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies means that it is impossible to ever have electricity that is "too cheap to meter". Any time electricity prices would fall below the price of mining, that creates a market opportunity that will be filled by more mining. Wasted electricity is the product.
I'm shocked there isn't more government regulation about this. You can't ban Bitcoin, but if you make it a massive pain to invest in it and make it difficult to convert between physical currency that would drive down a lot of demand.
I think that's only because electricity is the bottleneck, though. If it was no longer the bottleneck, crypto miners would expand rapidly with more hardware, mining difficulty would increase, and eventually the bottleneck is storage space for all your GPUs, if not the GPUs themselves.
With the trend of orbital launches becoming cheaper, it might be that mining helium off-Tera will be our long term supply. Especially if the alternative is adjusting the amount of protons in an atom.
There are several challenges, not least of which is storage. We have considerable leakage in most of our current helium storage solutions on earth because it’s so light. Our national reserves are literally in underground caverns because it’s better than anything we can build. Space just means any containment system will need to work in a wider range of pressure/temperatures.
There is to my knowledge no reason to assume that complicated physics experiments that heat water to run a steam engine will be much cheaper than fission power plants, unfortunately.
I can't say I agree with the conclusion, but I commend you for the concise and poetic description of what most power plants fundamentally are.
Fusion power that uses steam turbines to convert heat into electricity will be more expensive than solar/wind
Only if we first colonize the Solar System, so land becomes too cheap to meter too.
I think this is why he labelled the comment 'Tongue in cheek'. Thanks for pointing it out explicitly tho, was not aware of this.
Can't they irradiate tanks of H2 or something with so much neutrons and electrons until morale improves and they become He? Or would that make radioactive He?
Helium is 5 parts per million of the atmosphere. It should be possible to extract it, and thus never run out.
Doing some googling yields an estimated cost of about $25,000 per kg. I can see why extraction from wells is preferred.
Considering my helium-filled hard drives a strategic reserve now
Gonna sit on my half-empty tank for party balloons from my daughter's birthday, maybe we'll be able to sell it to pay off mortgage quicker than the helium itself escapes the tank.
Same energy as "buy bitcoin" in 2011
Unfortunately bitcoins don't leak from storage tanks on their own.
That's another lifetime-limited thing -- the helium leaks out, and you cannot (for practical purposes) stop it or even meaningfully slow it down. When it's gone, the drives are dead. And the helium leaks by calendar-days, it doesn't matter whether the drive is powered on or off.
Non-helium hard drives are basically limited by their bearing spin hours. If one only spins a few hours a week, it'll probably run for decades. Not so with helium.
You just have to put your hard drive in a pressure vessel filled with helium.
It’s helium all the way down
The article's dystopia section is dramatic but the practical point is real. I've been self-hosting more and more over the past year specifically because I got uncomfortable with how much of my stack depended on someone else's servers.
Running a VPS with Tailscale for private access, SQLite instead of managed databases, flat files synced with git instead of cloud storage. None of this requires expensive hardware, it just requires caring enough to set it up
> with Tailscale for private access
FWIW might want to check https://github.com/wg-easy/wg-easy to remove yet another managed elsewhere piece of your setup.
Or Headscale, which has the blessing of Tailscale and contributions from some of their employees. https://github.com/juanfont/headscale
thanks for sharing, will check it out!
Depending on someone else's servers isn't that different from depending on someone else's software, which unfortunately we all must do. Unfathomable reams of it, with a growth curve that recently went vertical. I guess the crucial difference is that someone else's servers can be taken away in a flash, while someone else's (FOSSl software can't.
You are missing one important part: maintenance. While on a managed service, dozens of hours of maintenance are done by someone, when you are self-hosting, you'll be doing 3 times that, because you can't know all the details of making so many tools work, because each tool will have to be upgraded at some point and the upgrade will fail, because you have to test you backups, and many many more things to do in the long run.
So yeah, it's fun. But don't under-estimate that time, it could easily be your time spent with friend or family.
I have been self hosting for years. The maintenance is minimal to nonexistent. You are conflating modern SaaS with a stable OSS docker image.
Keeping services running is fairly trivial. Getting to parity with the operationalization you get from a cloud platform takes more ongoing work.
I have a homelab that supports a number of services for my family. I have offsite backups (rsync.net for most data, a server sitting at our cottage for our media library), alerting, and some redundancy for hardware failures.
Right now, I have a few things I need to fix: - one of the nodes didn't boot back up after a power outage last fall; need to hook up a KVM to troubleshoot - cottage internet has been down since a power outage, so those backups are behind (I'm assuming it's something stupid, like I forgot to change the BIOS to power on automatically on the new router I just put in) - various services occasionally throw alerts at me
I have a much more complex setup than necessary (k8s in a homelab is overkill), but even the simplest system still needs backups if you care at all about your data. To be fair, cloud services aren't immune to this, either (the failure mode is more likely to be something like your account getting compromised, rather than a hardware failure).
A hidden cost of self-hosting.
I love self-hosting and run tons of services that I use daily. The thought of random hardware failures scares me, though. Troubleshooting hardware failure is hard and time consuming. Having spare minipcs is expensive. My NAS server failing would have the biggest impact, however.
Other than the firewall (itself a minipc), I only have one server where a failure would cause issues: it's connected to the HDDs I use for high-capacity storage, and has a GPU that Jellyfin uses for transcoding. That would only cause Jellyfin to stop working—the other services that have lower storage needs would continue working, since their storage is replicated across multiple nodes using Longhorn.
Kubernetes adds a lot of complexity initially, but it does make it easier to add fault tolerance for hardware failures, especially in conjunction with a replicating filesystem provider like Longhorn. I only knew that I had a failed node because some services didn't come back up until I drained and cordoned the node from the cluster (looks like there are various projects to automate this—I should look into those).
This point is oversold.
Sure - self hosting takes a bit more work. It usually pays for itself in saved costs (ex - if you weren't doing this work, you're paying money which you needed to do work for to have it done for you.)
Cloud costs haven't actually gotten much cheaper (but the base hardware HAS - even now during these inflated costs), and now every bit of software tries to bill you monthly.
Further, if you're not putting services open on the web - you actually don't need to update all that often. Especially not the services themselves.
Honestly - part of the benefit of self-hosting is that I can choose whether I really want to make that update to latest, and whether the features matter to me. Often... they don't.
---
Consider: Most people are running outdated IP provided routers with known vulnerabilities that haven't been updated in literally years. They do ok.
Much easier with AI. Went from Webhosting all-in package + NAS to Hetzner Storage Share and a separate Emailprovider (Runbox). After a short time I dumped the Nextcloud instance and moved on to a Hetzner VPS with five docker containers, Caddy, proper authentication and all. Plus a Storage Box. Blogging/Homepage as Cloudflare Pages, fed by Github, domains from CF and porkbun, Tailscale, etc., etc. ad nauseam, NAS still there.
Most of this I didn't for many years because it is not my core competence (in particular the security aspects). Properly fleshed-out explanations from any decent AI will catapult you to this point in no time. Maintenance? Almost zero.
p.s. Admittedly, it's not a true self-hosting solution, but the approach is similar and ultimately leads to that as well.
Since using NixOS for my home server, I've found it to Just Work™ flawlessly every time.
If anyone reading this has struggled with servers accumulating cruft, and requiring maintainance, I recommend NixOS.
Agreed. NixOS + Tailscale is 99% there for me. Using Claude Code to deal with whatever other package I need built with nix while I'm working on $day_job things helps get me to a fully working system. Besides the fact that running containers via podman or docker (your choice) is super easy via a NixOS config.
Combine that with deploy-rs or similar and you have a very very stable way to deploy software with solid rollback support and easy to debug config issues (it's just files in the ./result symlink!)
yes, I do agree with that sentiment, there are times when I'm spending way too much time restarting a service that went down, but it doesn't take as long as it used to, especially with AI assistance nowadays. If I'm spending too much time on it, then I'm also probably learning something along the way, so I don't mind spending that time.
There are a lot of people that have made a lot of money and careers because developers in particular don't want to know or don't care to know how to manage this stuff.
They need to get over it.
Pick up some Ansible and or Terraform/tofu and automate away. It can be easy or as involved as you want it to be.
This article inspired me to look and see what this computer is. Apparently it is a "AMD Athlon(tm) II X2 250 Processor" from 2009. So 17 years old. It has 8 GB of DDR3 memory and runs at 3 GHz. It currently has OpenBSD on it, but at least one source thinks it could run Windows 10.
The fact that I didn't know any of this is what is significant here. At some point I stopped caring about this sort of thing. It really doesn't matter any more. Don't get my wrong, I am as nerdy as they come. My first computer was a wire wrapped 8080 based system. That was followed by an also wire wrapped 8086 based system of my own design I used for day to day computing tasks (it ran Forth). If someone like me can get to the point of not caring there is no real reason for anyone else to care.
Your electricity bill alone could justify the cost of a new computer purchase if you're not shutting that down after every session.
65W TDP? Let's say we want to run a PC so we're switching to a newer low-end Ryzen with a 35W TDP and that that's a 30W difference for the whole system. Let's say we're running the system 24/7 and the CPU is pulling its full TDP constantly. Average US residential electricity price is $0.18/kWh.
0.03 kW * 24 h * 365 d * $0.18 = $47.30/year
In the UK, residential electricity tariffs are currently capped by the regulator at 27.69p per kWh, resulting in a total yearly cost of £72.77. Much higher than in the US, but still much cheaper than a new PC.
£72.77 is more than enough for a PC: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/377057425659
PC power draw at the wall is different than TDP. Idle power goes to a lot of components.
Even CPU TDP is not an accurate measure. My latest AMD CPU will pull more than it’s rated “TDP” under certain loads.
Yup. But from the OP, all the information we have is the CPU model, and the GP decided that was enough to say it should be thrown in the trash for power inefficiency, so I thought it was enough for some bad math.
(FWIW, searching for the CPU model brings up an old review where the full system they’re testing pulls 145W under some amount of load. While that’s not nothing, it’s also not outrageous for a desktop PC that does the desktop PC things you require of it.)
So $50/yr for 4 years gives you ~$150 with $50 extra for shipping or whatever, which gets you a decent Lenovo M700 Tiny with much better performance in both power and power consumption.
I guess. It's hardly an open-and-shut case of "throw your old computer away!" though, especially when this is a worst-case scenario of running a desktop computer at full blast 24/7 without it ever going into sleep mode or being turned off, and when you don't know what the user's needs are. Maybe a mini-PC with basically no expansion just won't really work for them?
Watts in TDP are not the same as watts in electricity, although they're both measures of energy.
TDP is a thermal measurement, it's how much heat energy your heatsink and fan need to be able to dissipate to keep the unit within operational temperatures. It does not directly correlate to the amount of electricity consumed in operation.
I know, but it should be roughly correlated and only serves as comparison for wildly inaccurate napkin math anyway.
It’s close enough. Computers mostly make heat with some math as a distant second.
An interesting point. Some random measurement gets 49W idle[1] which is probably close enough. I don't constantly compile stuff or stream video. At my local electricity rate of $0.072/kWh that works out to $31USD/year.
New systems idle at something like 25 Watts according to a lazy search. So 49-25=24W. That works out to $15/year hypothetically saved by going to a newer system. But I live in a cold climate and the heating season is something like half the year. But I only pay something like half as much for gas heat as opposed to electric heat. So let's just knock a quarter off and end up with 15-(15/4)=$11.25USD hypothetically saved per year. I will leave it here as I don't know how much the hypothetical alternative computer would cost and, as already mentioned, I don't care.
[1] https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/athlon-ii-x2-250-vs-ath...
Someone's never tried to locally compile a Rust program. :)
Did any of the components fail over time?
HDD/SSD?
Pretty surprising to have this thing still be working 17 years later, unless it spent a good chunk of that in 'cold storage'.
Well it has a SSD in it now so it must have gone through at least one actual hard drive...
Articles entire thesis looks like it can be completely de-railed if one activity happened: ai infrastructure firms cease to be able to secure more capital.
Is that likely? History says it's inevitable, but timeframe is an open question.
> ai infrastructure firms cease to be able to secure more capital
If this does occur, unfortunately it isn’t like any of the production capacity is going to immediately shift or be repurposed. A lot of the hardware isn’t usable outside of datacenter deployments. I would guess a more realistic recalibration is 2-3 years of immense pain followed by gradual availability of components again.
> If this does occur
The capital from the gulf is already disrupted. It isn't anymore a matter of if or when.
My computer, and I think all threadripper systems, has registered ECC DDR5 RAM which I think is the same type used in AI datacenters. Well one half of it, the other half being HBM memory used on video cards, which is soldered to them and non-upgradeable. But the main system memory from a used AI server can become your main system memory.
So that becomes the next question -- will we see an ecosystem of modifications and adapters, to desolder surplus and decommissioned datacenter HBM and put it on some sort of daughterboard with a translator so it can be used in a consumer machine?
Stuff like that already exists for flash memory; I can harvest eMMC chips from ewaste and solder them to cheaply-available boards to make USB flash drives. But there the protocols are the same, there's no firmware work needed...
Aren't some people already doing this with consumer GPUs?
yeah 3 years sounds reasonable to me, less than one asset depreciation cycle in business. Pain for you and me, but just a bump in the road for the accounts dept.
I think some players like xAi and Google can burn money for a long time. Google made $240B profit last year
They would rent out the data centers, not sell it off
On the plus side, we've reached the end of Moore's law and are living in an amazing age of personal computing devices.
M1 Apple Silicon MacBook Airs are still good computers 5+ years after release.
Many games are still playable (and being released on!) the PS4, which is almost 12 years old.
The iPhone 15 pro has 8gb of RAM which will likely be sufficient for a long time.
Don't get me wrong, this whole parts shortage is exceptionally annoying, but we're living in a great time to weather the storm.
In the last month 20-30% of oil supply 30% gas supply and 30-40% of fertilizer production has been destroyed and could take any where from 8 months to 5 years to come back online. Governments are acting as everything is okay so that there is no panic but we have crossed the point of no return even if the war ends today food & energy shortages are over the horizon. If you can get an ev, solar heat pumps, battery storage etc get it now today as fossil fuel based energy prices are going to go through the roof. I see similarities to when covid hit people kept looking at things happening in other countries and not preparing for the shit to hit their own cities and countries.
Not to mention Age Verification / KYC being baked into every future OS and device. Buy and hodl to have a hope of independent, censorship-resistant computing in the future.
As long as there are consumers paying for hardware ownership there will be businesses willing to sell it to them. The worst scenario I could imagine is that one has to pay a premium for fully-owned hardware simply because consumer's desire for it becomes an oddity and it is thus sold in low quantities.
The current AI-induced shortages aside, the times have never been better in my opinion. There is overwhelming choice; ordinary consumers can access anything from Raspberry PIs all the way up to enterprise servers and AI accelerators. The situation was very different in the 1990s when I built my first PC.
> As long as there are consumers paying for hardware ownership there will be businesses willing to sell it to them.
That's not true at all.
There are a lot of people willing to buy smartphones with small screen or smartphones with Linux or any other OS than iOS or Android.
But those people are not enough to justify the gigantic initial investment that is necessary to provide viable products in this market. And the existing actors aren't interested in those niche.
I do not see this from an infinite shortage point; I see this from a locked down hardware point. Old hardware is hackable, new hardware mostly not. That is for me where the real pain is and why I just buy old computers and phones that are rootable.
When I started programming in the early 80's, personal computing had just recently become a thing. Before that, if you wanted to learn to program, you first needed access to a very rare piece of hardware that only a select few were granted access to. But when personal computing became a reality, programming exploded - anybody could learn it with a modest investment.
I suspect we're trending back to the pre-personal computing era where access to 'raw' computing power will be hard to come by. It will become harder and harder to learn to program just because it'll be harder and harder to get your hands on the necessary equipment.
> For the better part of two decades, consumers lived in a golden age of tech. Memory got cheaper, storage increased in capacity and hardware got faster and absurdly affordable.
I got my first PC circa 1992 (a 2nd hand IBM PS/2, 80286 processor with 2MB RAM and 30MB HDD) and the "golden age" was already there. We are well over 40 years of almost uninterrupted "pay less for more performances" in the home/personal computing space, and that's because that space started around 50 years ago. There was some fluctuation (remember the earthquake affecting HDD prices a few years ago?) but demand was there and manufacturing tech became more efficient.
The actual important change is that for most consumer uses, the perf improvements stopped to make sense already what, over 10 years ago?
Do you mean for hardware? Because a big chunk of that imo is how unnecessarily demanding software has become in the last 10 years, largely due to the web.
Yes, I mean that HW which is 10 years old is perfectly capable to do the job nowadays. This is absolutely true for PCs/laptops and could also be for smartphones if it the software support worked like in the x86 world.
I actually think the central thesis is thought provoking, we have shifted far away from locally installed shit to remote data centre access, this was initially driven by cloud-based initiatives and now spiralling upwards by AI. For any researchers, hackers, builders wanting to play with locally installed AI, hardware could become a bottleneck especially as many machines, such as the beloved Macs, are not upgradable
Hold onto your hardware. Hold on to your existing software and the current version. Don’t upgrade without a specific need. None of the “progress” is actually helpful to hackers and I’m not sure it’s even helpful to typical users. There’s enough information being given to and slurped by others, don’t make it more effective.
My PC has an Intel Xeon from 2007, a GPU from 2010, and 4GB of RAM. It’s enough for web browsing and can handle 1080p/60fps video just fine.
For gaming, I have a dedicated device - a Nintendo Switch, but I also play indie PC games like Slay the Spire, Forge MTG, some puzzle games e.g. TIS-100.
Linux with i3 is fast and responsive. I write code in the terminal, no fancy debuggers, no million plugins, no Electron mess.
It’s enough for everything I need, and I don’t see a reason to ever upgrade. Unless my hardware starts failing, of course.
Wait, you type the code in directly? That's like a baby's toy!
I realize this is probably said in jest, but just in case there are readers who don’t take it that way:
* someone has to write language specifying a program, natural language or programming.
* a programming langugage is a handle with specific properties at a specific level of abstraction. Whether it’s a popular handle won’t change that it’s far more than a toy.
In order to go from 360p video 15 years ago to 4K HDR today, I have upgraded from a 2mbps 802.11g WiFi on a 1366x768 display to a 200mbps connection on 802.11ax and a 55 inch 4k television.
The experience is quite immersive and well worth the upgrade that happened very progressively (WiFi 5 1080p then WiFi 6/7 4K).
At the same time, we had cheap consumer gigabit ethernet, and still have cheap consumer gigabit ethernet. 2.5 is getting there price-wise, but switches are still somewhat rare/expensive.
It is wild thinking how a few years ago, I didn't buy a 4090 direct from nvidia because "$1600 (USD) is too much to pay for a graphics card; if I need a better one, i'll upgrade in a few years. (Went with 4080, which is substantially slower and was $1200) Joke's on me!
It will be scarcity mindset from here on out; will always buy the top tier thing .
I very much would like to know how much of this presumably ordered (and backordered) hardware (RAM/SSD/.../wafers) is going to end up being released back to the market when the dust settles. I haven't seen any estimations but in order to put all this hardware to work the hyperscalers need to be building data centers at ludicrous speed. That should be appearing in construction data, jobs data, and many other places. Are we actually seeing any of that? Or is it all just based on the back-of-the-napkin math by Mr Altman and Co and they put all the money they got towards the future projects?
I have often imagined writing a book, roughly "Fahrenheit 451 but with computers instead of books". Imagine a world you do not buy an iPhone- one is assigned to you at birth, a world were "installing software" on "a computer you own" are not just antiquated or taboo, but unthinkable.
I think Mr Bradbury would remind you his book was about how passive entertainment (the "parlor") slowly eroded books for decades before the actual book burnings, not the state just suddenly banning them.
In that sense, I suppose you could still make it work. Our society celebrated surrendering ownership of media to iTunes and Steam for our convenience, whittled down online content that didn't make us feel good, limited which applications we could install on our phones in the name of security and privacy, and eliminated our anonymity to save the kids. At this point, removing the hardware is the least surprising step, because as Captain Beatty says, "if you don’t want a house built, hide the nails and wood."
Or perhaps you were thinking of Brave New World.
google and facebook are actively salivating at this possibility.
"don't create the torment nexus, etc."
In such a future the iPhone and android ecosystem is dead? Because a single $1k phone is a hell of a computer. So if you can still buy a phone you can still get a computer. Local AI aside these are very capable.
You don’t really own an iPhone in terms of being a computer. It’s different for certain Android phones where you can install a custom OS. Those are also less powerful, however.
iOS is apparently going to have mandatory age gating, so likely that will come to Android as well.
I was trying to avoid the software side of this argument as it is a worm cannister. I was just musing from a hardware availability point of view.
That said.... hopefully at least on Android side you can get a free (as in unchastified) OS to run on it.
Until they come for the HW.
Maybe we’ll finally get some good tools to make real productive work possible on phones.
Like a large screen and a keyboard? Hello Mac Neo
I see they are offering to macos for iphone pro and ipad pro next years with subsc. ? or via upgrade with price I mean it's now possible more than ever
Hello HDMI adaptor and magic keyboard
Wrong OS though.
Virtual desktop casting, a killer HID product, and what else do you need?
when you click away to another tab, the title and favicon of the page changes to something weird, but really legit looking.
a couple of my favorites: "rust programming socks - Google", "Amazon.com: waifu pillow", "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up", "censorship on hacker news - Google"
It actually gives you warning in an overlay first that the favicon would change if you open a new tab. I did and I got "zuckerberg nudes"
Went to try it out myself and the very first one I got was the HN icon and "The internet used to be fun".
To the people saying "The shortage wont last forever." - Yes, you might be right. However, such a supply crunch creates a perfect vacuum for rapidly change to fill in the vacuous hardware landscape of computing and shift the balance of power.
Think about it like this: Imagine the AI/Cloud/Crypto companies who are buying up all these compute and storage resources realize they now control the compute hardware market becoming compute lords. What happens when joe/jane six pack or company xyz needs a new PC or two thousand but cant afford them due to the supply crunch? Once the compute lords realize they control the compute supply they will move to rent you their compute trapping users in a walled garden. And the users wont care because they aren't computer enthusiasts like many of us here. They only need a tool that works. They *do not* care about the details.
They hardware lords could further this by building proprietary hardware in collusion with the vendors they have exclusivity with to build weaker terminal devices with just enough local ram and storage to connect to a remote compute cluster. Hardware shortage solved!
All they need to do is collude with the hardware makers with circular contracts to keep buying hardware in "anticipation of the AI driven cloud compute boom." The hardware demand cycle is kept up and consumers are purposefully kept out of the market to push people into walled gardens.
This is unsustainable of course and will eventually fall over but it could tie up computing resources for well over a decade as compute lords dry up the consumer hardware market pushing people to use their hoarded compute resources instead of owning your own. We are in a period where computing serfdom could be a likely outcome that could cause a lot of damage to freedom of use and hardware availability and the future ability to use the internet freely.
I've seen comments on here before that went somewhere along the line of "adults don't care about RAM prices." HN is no stranger to siding with the oppressors.
I am still rocking that 5700XT 50th anniversary edition. I see no reason it won't make it to 2030 at this point. There was a moment where I thought it was dying, but it was a combination of dust and a shader bug in BF6 that caused the concern. I've also got a 1080ti in case of disaster.
Newer graphics hardware is pointless to me. The expensive new techniques I find incredibly offense from an interactivity standpoint (temporal AA, nanite & friends). I run Battlefield 6 at 75% render scale with everything set to low. I really don't care how ass the game looks as long as it runs well. I much more enjoy being able to effectively dispatch my enemies than observe aesthetic clutter.
I grabbed an upgrade at the end of last year because my ~10 year old workhorse is starting to show signs of aging. Despite 16 gigs of RAM having lasted me thus far I decided to bite the bullet and get 32; so I expect this new machine to last me another 10 years (although I now have a full SSD, whereas my old workhorse had an SSD for the OS and a hybrid drive for /home, so we'll see whether or not it will actually last).
Built my PC last April and also did 32gb. Almost did 64 since ram was so cheap at the time too, but hey live and learn I suppose ha
We are in a renaissance of computing right at this moment. If expand our definition of computers outside of screens and traditional input devices, microcontrollers are capable of so much more, with so much less (energy consumption | ram | storage).
The tipping point for MCUs was WiFi - which not only allows you to speak multiple protocols (UDP/Zigbee/HTTP/etc) and have audio IO, but also P2P communication and novel new form factors. There's been incredible progress with the miniaturisation of sensors and how we're able to understand and perceive our environment.
So yes, whilst traditional hardware is getting more expensive and locked down, there's a strong counter movement towards computing for everyone - and by that I also mean that there's going to be less abstraction in the entire stack. Good times ahead!
you are right! Power management improvements are what really enable these form factors... being able to run a wifi sensor on a coin cell for a year makes applications possible that were unthinkable just a few years ago
What a silly filter, blocking all xn domains
That whole feature is kind of paragraph 22. No legit/popular site uses it so users don't expect national characters in domain names, so no one actually hosts sites using "xn-" domains.
Kind of an interesting history to this kind of url: https://www.nic.ad.jp/ja/dom/idn.html
Shrug. First time I'd seen this. If it displayed as the original text it would have been clearer.
It would make it hard to spot impostor domains like "news.усомbiнаtor[.]сом" if it was. There's enough inertia for FQDNs to be strictly ASCII and any UTF-8(outside ASCII) in domain names to be felt unnatural for an URL, so most systems default to the raw "Punycode" xn-- scheme for all IDNs.
In this case yes but it's meant as a punycode scam prevention where common Latin alphabet letters are swapped for similar looking alternatives.
This is a filter added by you (or by an overzealous list maintainer), it does not happen by default or even with the provided additional filterlists.
Yeah, I remember going on https://filterlists.com/ one day all mad and just adding a ton because of how many ads and manipulative patterns I was dealing with
I'm going to fight pessimism with cynicism here: the Department of Defense is not going to let everything move to the cloud because they need compute at the edge for AI-enabled weapons and R&D. For example, Anduril's products, Eric Schdmit's secretive Bumblebee project, or startups like Scout AI. Communications and GPS are just too easy to jam and their answer is giving weapons more last-mile autonomy to operate in radio silence.
War aside, I also bet there's going to be a huge demand for edge-compute for other kinds of robotics: self-driving cars, delivery robots, factory robots, or general-purpose humanoids (Tesla Optimus, Boston Dynamics Atlas, 1X NEO, etc). Moving that kind of compute to the cloud is too laggy and unreliable. I know researchers who've tried it, the results were mixed.
Also, the engineers working on these platforms aren't going to reinvent the wheel every time they need to connect hardware together and they're going to use interoperable standards, like PCIe for storage or GPUs, DIMM slots for memory, ATX for power, etc. So I don't see general-purpose computing dying.
It's not that I disagree with the basic premise and concern of the text, but I'm not convinced about the "RAM shortage will lead to thin clients" argument, because the thin client is going to be a browser.
Everything today is a web app. If it doesn't exist and you want to vibe code it? It's probably going to become a web app, vibed using a web app.
The problem is, web apps are stupendous memory hogs. We're even seeing Chromebooks with 8 gigs of RAM now. LLM:s are all trained for and implemented in apps assuming the user can have $infinity browsers running, whether it's on their PC or on their phone. It's going to be very hard to change that in a way that's beneficial to what passes for business models at AI companies.
Ah, the paradoxes of modern software.
Yeah, my work laptop is essentially a thin client, as everything is done via browser.
Even remote VDI instances are accessed through a web page now.
On top of that add all the corporate bloatware and securityslop-ware, and suddenly my "thin" client is using 60% of 10 available cores and 85% of 16GB or RAM.
I don't think it needs an explanation on how insane that resource usage is.
I wish I was well versed into dialectic/Hegelian thought as I am sure there's a way of seeing this as a step towards abolition of private property altogether. The question is who owns the means of production(computation) I suppose.
The other side of this is that we can still make software more efficient, and make better use of the old hardware than we had ever thought possible.
I’m doing more with a decade old GPU, which was manufactured before “Attention is all you need“, than I could 5 years ago, when quantization techniques were implemented.
I’m holding on to my 32 bit machines.
Most linux distributions dropped support for them (for good reason). But at the end of the day these machines are a fabric of up to ~ 4 billion bytes that can be used in a myriad of ways, and we only covered a fraction of the state space before we had moved on.
> These days, the biggest customers are not gamers, creators, PC builders or even crypto miners anymore. Today, it’s hyperscalers. … > These buyers don’t care if RAM costs 20% more and neither do they wait for Black Friday deals. Instead, they sign contracts measured in exabytes and billions of dollars.
Does all this not apply to businesses buying computers for their employees?
I was about to upgrade because I'm using a Thinkpad t480, I decided to optimize my computer instead. I run i3 and a couple of native apps and chromium web apps run fast enough. And some kernel and other tweaks + gamemode in arch make gaming better.
I must admit that my workflow it's not that heavy.
I think what many people don't realise is that there will be a glut of cheap computer parts including CPUs, GPU cards, and memory when the AI and AI-adjacent businesses go bust and a bunch of data centres get pulled down.
Unfortunately, data center computers are not something you can just use as a consumer. They usually have custom connectors, and the parts are soldered down into rack-scale computers. They use custom water cooling that needs building-sized pumps, and so on. A Blackwell rack uses 140,000 watts and weighs 3500 lbs. A typical house in the US has 40,000-50,000 watts of power max and can only support 40 lbs per sq foot. These things are never going to be useable by consumers.
If the AI boom slows, it will free up manufacturing capacity for the consumer supply chain, but there is going to be a long drought of supply.
> If you need a new device, buy it;
I would specifically add, whatever you have, or whatever you choose to buy, it would greatly benefit you to ensure a degree is Linux compatibility to ensure its lifespan can be extended further than the greed enthusiasts at MS, Apple, and Google would like you to. They will be facing the same declines in purchasing habits and are further incentivised to assert their ownership over what you might mistakenly consider your devices.
Memory got cheaper, storage increased in capacity.
In my country for offline store purchase of USB HDD only 4Tb seagate variant available, thats 15000 in pur currency thats almost 1.5 month salary in private sector
Any higher size and have to import, and and forex applied, prices goes upto 4 0's , when i read people on youtube or blogs saying they rotate 15Tb and higher on their nas raids, that seems just dream for use never to fulfill
I have been holding for my hardware for decades, some of my private hardware traces back to 2009.
Phones and tablets only get replaced when they die.
Why should I throw away stuff that still works as intended?
In a totally unrelated matter to the subject, I found the linked website's name very strange! Visiting the website, I can see in the address bar that the name is in Chinese or Japanese!! This is the first occurrence I witnessed of this kind.
I thought it was going to be one of those emoji URLs at first but I was also surprised by that
haha, all of a sudden I see a tab "waifu pillow" on Amazon, and think I have a split personality that runs searches in between consciousness shifts, and then I come back to a funny message.
I'm not saying we are in one, but isn't a RAM shortage like this is exactly what one would expect at the early stages of a take off scenario?
Micron is killing its Crucial consumer brand, not supplies to consumer brands who use its chips. Hynix never had a consumer brand for RAM I don't think?
Okay but what about the icon and tab name changing and the pop-up about disabling javascript?!
Picture of the overlay: https://cs.joshstrange.com/ZTg30SPn
The favicon changes every time you switch away to something different with various tab names (ranging from porn, to right-wing news, to 4chan and I'm sure more).
All this author has convinced me to do is block their website.
I also don't agree at all with the premise of the article so I don't imagine I'm going to be missing much by not seeing this site again.
So what happens when the datacenters need to upgrade (new hardware, or stupid enterprisey reasons like "must be new when replacing broken stuff")? Surely there remains a secondary market for the enthusiasts?
Part of this is that memory companies recognize that nobody is going to enforce antitrust law for the forseeable future, so collusion to raise prices is the norm now.
distracted by: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode
Why doesn't Hacker News render punnycode in domains?
As the old saying goes: "This too will pass."
Consumer hardware will always be a market worth serving for companies who don't see their stock price as their product.
If the existing companies are unwilling to make a sale, I am sure new players will arise picking up their slack.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrX0jPAdSxU
so… Hold on to Your Medical Devices. (And everything else with a chip in it.)
I feel like this is just the bubble talking. I'm pretty naive here, but at some point suppliers will adjust so they can take money from data center builders and consumers, just like pre-bubble.
Chip manufacturers are used to boom bust cycles and are always hesitant to bring on more capacity, since it costs billions to do so.
They will let the hyperscalers buy their supply at a premium and wait for the bust. Then they will shift back to the consumer space.
Hardware is going to be expensive for awhile but its not as dire as the article makes it out to be.
I recall how in the 2010s RAM manufacturers were in crisis, as their margins were low and competition fierce - it got to a point where they started doing price fixing and got fined for it:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180513133803/https://www.techr...
Prices went down again after that.
To me this is just a temporary swing in the other direction - they're riding the gravy train while they can, because once it ends it's back to low prices.
> Hardware is going to be expensive for awhile but its not as dire as the article makes it out to be.
At the same time, the article’s argument that the value of personal computer ownership is only going to rise, in terms of the value of speech, not strictly in terms of the value of lunch, is important to call out.
I’m glad I held on to my 2009 MacBook, for example, as it still functions today as an active part of my homelab, at an amortized yearly cost of practically the price of taking a nice steak dinner once a year.
It's probably closer to the suppliers don't think this will last and are ramping slowly if at all so they're not left holding the bag.
The US is headed for a cataclysmic crash at this point and it's not clear what will trigger it, but all those companies pushing underpriced tokens and Rust ports of existing tools by agents aren't going to survive it.
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Pidän kaksin käsin kiinni muistitikuista niinku.
Cha cha cha ...
semantic decentralization (not just AWS owning thousands of data centers and having their own distributed interoperability problems), standards, and regulations.
These are super interesting problems. However, it seems like selection pressures, or just pure greed, attracts people to the "easiest" solution: pure domination. You don't need to care about any of these (well, you still do eventually, but in the minds of said people) if you just have pure utter control over every part of the stack.
I knew the time for my cable box would come!
It's super cool that this site changes the tab name to NSFW phrases when you switch off of it, and then pops up a rambling chastisement to turn of JS in your browser. Even cooler when I use HN to legitimately keep up with tech news at work and it does it on my work computer where I share my screen in meetings. Domain blocked. Don't erode user trust for your crusade. Moron.
What a bunch of BS. The price of a commodore 64 from 1980's is over $4K in todays dollars. $4K buys a pretty decent workstation these days.
https://www.photonics.com/Articles/Nortel-Completes-Acquisit...
Oh bubbles... their so bubbly. Remember when there was an unlimited demand for fibre optics because - The Internet? So Nortel and other manufacturers lent the money to their clients building the Internet because the growth was unlimited forever? Except they actually didn't have any money, just stock valuations?
"This is a critical step in our effort to unleash the full potential of our high-performance optical component solutions business," said Clarence Chandran, COO of Nortel Networks. "This acquisition really strengthens Nortel Networks' leadership position in high-performance optical components and modules which are essential to delivering the all-optical Internet."
I've never seen a non-latin alphabet URL before, huh.
I feel like we will get out of the hardware constraints eventually.
This site finally got me to disable javascript through ublock. 10/10!
Depressing...
Capitalism at work. There is more value to be generated by moving resources to data centers for the moment. This isn't some me be insensitive or anything. It's the same people who are buying iPhones and PCs who are demanding more compute for AI.
There could be a swing in the future where people will demand local AI instead and resources could shift back to affordable local AI devices.
Lastly, this thesis implies that we will be supply constrained forever such that prices for personal devices will always be elevated as a percentage of one's income. I don't believe that.
I refuse, I'll buy when I need to and can hold on for a few months if prices become insane. This means I'll spend less on hardware then what I could, if I wanted to buy max mpro or latest framework I just will not, because prices are too mad and g o for a cheaper version.
whatever happens it's crazy and hope AI madness is worth it
For laptops, I always spring for the lowest amount of ram + hdd/ssd, and then instantly upgrade this from local after-market sources. However, this wouldn't work for apple devices (Hence I don't own any Apple devices).
For example, my current Thinkpad T14-gen5, was bought with 8GB ram and 256GB NVME, and then upgraded to 64GB ram and 2TB NVME, for the same price as 16G/512G would have cost at Lenovo. And then I still have the 8GB/256GB to re-use/re-sell.
The overlay and page title changing worked really well, ffs, I was like "Why is my machine displaying a page with zuckerberg nudes" haha.
It's a thought provoking article and I felt the pain when I shopped around for a new GPU lately to replace a 4090 I thought was faulty (eventually a cleaning of the PCIe connector solved those crashes). I bought it at the end of 2022 and three and a half years it seems like we've gone backwards, not forward on GPUs available for end users. They cost more and do less.
But also consider that PCs have been an anomaly for very long. I don't think there's an equivalent market where you, as a consumer, can buy off-the-shelf cutting-edge technical pieces in your local mall and piece them together into a working device. It's a fun model, for sure, but I'm not sure it's an efficient model. It was just profitable enough to keep the lights on, thanks primarily to a bunch of Taiwanese companies in that space but it wasn't growing anywhere and the state of software is a mess.
Apple the PCs collective lunch before DCs did. So have gaming consoles. So I weep for consumer choice but as things become more advanced maybe PCs and their entire value chain don't make a lot of sense any more.
Obviously at the end there will still be consumer devices, because someone needs to consume all of this AI (at least people are thrown entirely out of the loop, but then all those redundant meat sacks will need entertainment to keep them content). We have the consumer device hyperscaler Apple doing rather OK even with these supply crunches although I'm not sure for how long.
Yea; I believe this is unprecedented. This is the firs time I've observed this regression in GPU price/ performance. That 4090 is still top-tier, and now costs more than when it was new.
I just realized that this blog site is pretending to be malware. I opened the tab and was constantly switching between the blog and writing this HN comment (I deleted the rest of the comment after realizing it) and was wondering where the tab went and kept opening it over and over again, then I realized that it completely rewrote the tab title with NSFW content (one of the title contained the world "nudes" with a faked amazon favicon) and when you reopen the tab, it shows you a black overlay with a message intended to induce shock if you ever bother to read it (I didn't read past the first sentence so I don't know what it was actually about).
Can dang/a moderator please ban the domain from HN? Even if its not exactly malware, it's pretending to be malware to grab your attention and it's obviously intending to fill your browser history with inappropriate content, which didn't work on my browser because I opened the blog in a private browser session. The operator clearly doesn't run his blog in good faith.
The pop-up is about disabling javascript, to avoid this kind of website doing this kind of thing.
I thought it was clever. But it also seems ham-fisted, and in poor taste.
The author also maintains https://disable-javascript.org/, which the pop-up links to. And has the exact script + titles used.
> You may want to consider linking to this site, to educate any script-enabled users on how to disable JavaScript in some of the most commonly used browsers. The following code uses scare tactics to do so.
> When added to your website, it will change the icon and the title of your website's tab to some of the most unhinged things imaginable once the user sends your tab to the background. Upon re-activation, the script will display a popover to the user informing them about the joke and referring them to this initiative.
It's not clever when people use HN at work. It's a complete erosion of user trust and could legitimately get someone fired. You think HR wants to hear oh no it was an object lesson in not using javascript. That's why I was searching for nudes on the work computer when I shared my screen at that meeting, not realizing some moron had programmatically changed the tab name when I clicked off. This domain needs banned. It's not operating in good faith, or in touch with the reality of the damage it could be doing.
list of tab titles from https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/js/kill.js for entertainment:
{ "Official Church of Scientology: Difficulties on the Job - Online Course", "Ask HN: How could I safely contact drug cartels?", "The internet used to be fun", "am I boring - Google Search", "what is punycode - Google Search", "arguments for HN comment - Google Search", "how to hack coworker's phone - Google Search", "censorship on hacker news - Google Search", "rust programming socks - Google Shopping", "Adult entertainment clubs - Google Maps", "Pick up lines suggestions - ChatGPT", "Online debate argument suggestions - ChatGPT", "The Flat Earth Society", "Amazon.com: taylor swift merch", "Amazon.com: waifu pillow", "/adv/ - topple government - Advice - 4chan", "r/wallstreetbets on Reddit", "Infowars: There's a War on For Your Mind!", "birds aren't real at DuckDuckGo", "Lincoln MT Cabins For Sale - Zillow", "The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell | Goodreads", "Fifty Shades of Grey | Netflix", "jeff bezos nudes - Google Image Search", "zuckerberg nudes - Google Image Search", "bigfoot nudes - Google Image Search", "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up - YouTube", "Pennsylvania Bigfoot Conference - Channel 5 - YouTube", "Linus goes into a real girl's bedroom - Linus Tech Tips - YouTube", "MrBeast en Español - YouTube", "FTX Cryptocurrency Exchange" }
It doesn't write anything extra to the browser history. How about actually checking before exaggerating. If you are bothered by a single wrong title with the right URL, well... I think something else is wrong.
You are also completely speculating on the intent. Less drama please.
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Not a single comment mentioning how programmers these days don’t give a shit about optimization.
They do, at least a lot of us do I would say. But not everyone is at liberty to dedicate (still very expensive) time of a software engineer to eek out better memory footprint when it is cheaper to "just throw hardware at it" in many cases.
This is just brainrot garbage. The idiotic stuff you see YouTubers saying. Why is this at the top of HN? Bots, I assume?
AI companies driving RAM prices up is, in my opinion, theft from the common man (and common woman). Sure, you can say that in capitalism, those who pay more benefit the most, but no system, not even the USA, has a purely driven capitalistic system. You still have transfer money, public infrastructure and what not. So private companies driving up the prices, such as for RAM, is IMO also theft from common people. And that should not happen. It can only happen when you have lobbyists disguised as politicians who benefit personally from helping establish such a system. The same can be said about any other prive-upwards scaling that is done via racketeering.
Everything about tech and economy slowing is 1000% man made.
The Trump/anti-America phase has gone on way longer than I thought but it won’t last forever.
Even if we have to wait for this old world cabal to die and fade away, time is still on our side.
Boomers are stupid for using time as a weapon.
I’m chillin. Waiting for people to die while growing my businesses.
Travel to a functional place off the beaten path to see nobody can really stop forward progress. Even in these places where time has stopped.
Fear mongering hysteria.
I'm not sure why people are upset. This is how Capitalism is supposed to work - resource allocation towards the most productive (in terms of Capital) usage.
Those who are best able to use a resource are willing to pay the most for it thus pricing out unproductive usages of it.
This is pure Capitalism.
If one is in general against Capitalism, yes, one can complain.
But saying "I want free markets" and "I want capitalism", but then complaining when the free markets increase the price of your RAM is utterly deranged.
Some will say "but Altman is hoarding the RAM, he's not using it productively". It's irrelevant, he is willing to pay more than you to hoard that RAM. In his view he's extracting more value from that than you do, so he's willing to pay more. The markets will work. If this is unproductive use of Capital, OpenAI will go bankrupt.
And the RAM sellers make more money, which is good in Capitalism. It would be irresponsible for them to sell to price sensitive customers (retail), when they have buyers (AI companies) willing to pay much more. And if this is a bad decision, because that AI market will vanish and they will have burned the retail market, Capitalism and Free Markets will work again and bankrupt them.
Survival of the fittest. That is Capitalism. And right now AI companies are the fittest by a large margin.
AI and Capitalism are the exact same thing, as famously put. We are in the first stages of turning Earth into Computronium, you either become Compute or you will fade away.
The market can remain irrational longer than the capacitors on my motherboard can resist bloating.
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Owning hardware is great. But I get the impression that some people view owning petty hardware as some liberty panacea.
You might have a DVD collection, ten external drives, three laptops, and a workstration. You may still for all intents and purposes be wholly dependent on cloud computing, say, because that it is the only practical way to run whatever AI-driven software three years from now.
Edit: That’s an example. It goes beyond AI. and...:
Liberty goes beyond that.
I disagree. There is in fact a non-zero chance that we will get good enough models that are MOE optimized for desktop size hardware that can do a lot of the same things as the SOTA models. Im certainly crossing my fingers that the open-weights models continue improving. Engram from Deepseek for instance seems very interesting for a compute to memory offloading perspective.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1s0czc4/round_2...
It is a good article but I am holding onto my hardware for other reasons. I predict it will not be long until all hardware has a set of Nanny chips that are named and marketed so that even people here on HN will argue on behalf of having them. It will be some "Secure enclave AI accelerated Super Mega Native Processing Underminer" and will start off securing and accelerating something or a set of somethings but will eventually tie into age verification, censorship and a Central Nanny Agency that all countries will obey.
- "Stare into this hole to verify your age.
- "Stick your finger in the box.
- "Ignore the pain to get your AI token bucks and unlock access to the shiny new attestation accelerated internet."
- "Sync ALL of your usernames and passwords into this secure enclave."
Every packet and data stream will be analyzed locally by the AI to determine the intentions and predict future behavior. The AI summarized behavior will be condensed into an optimized encoded table to be submitted hourly to the Central Nanny Overseer. I might be slightly exaggerating and a bit hyperbolic but it will be something in this spirit and people will sleep walk right into it.
My only question is which country will control the behavior of these chips.