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Hold on to Your Hardware

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Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#461

Post by tavavex »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #9

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.

The thesis wouldn't be "completely derailed", just slightly delayed. The reasons why the powers above are pushing for that dystopian model aren't contingent on AI. If it all went away, we'd have a surge of hardware availability and a drop in prices, followed by the same trends - a slow transition to 'cheaper' remote computing wearing down the more expensive custom PC market, higher prices further reducing demand and creating a spiral until people who want personal computing are a niche market segment that becomes almost extinct. The result is still the same. Everyone will be using thin clients or computers that are more like smartphones or Chromebooks than modern PCs, with most services provided through the tightly-regulated internet via subscription services. It just would take us more time to get there.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#462

Post by QuiEgo »

tavavex wrote: post #458
QuiEgo wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What are the upsides? You only listed a few things that you like, but not why they should take over all parts of the PC market. The only factor I can think of is size, but those small all-in-one computers are already widely available now without the need to hollow out the custom PC market. There's nothing wrong with ATX or having interchangeable components. An established standard means that small companies can start…

The above post is making a case that the market will implode. I think there's a chance that's really gonna happen. I'm trying to find a silver lining. If the parts market survives that'd be awesome, but there's a real chance this is the beginning of the end.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#463

Post by tavavex »

mememememememo wrote: post #67
pjc50 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The ability to unlock the bootloader on most vendors has already degraded from "Do whatever you want!" to "Here, jump through these hoops here, give us all your data and wait a long time" to "What? No of course you can't do that!". Google can remove that functionality from Pixels at their first whim. I don't think this avenue will remain open for long. Smartphone hardware is powerful, but it's completely subservient to software that can't be removed or replaced.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#464

Post by tavavex »

QuiEgo wrote: post #462
tavavex wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the upsides? You only listed a few things that you like, but not why they should take over all parts of the PC market. The only factor I can think of is size, but those small all-in-one computers are already widely available now without the need to hollow out the custom PC market. There's nothing wrong with ATX or having interchangeable components. An established standard means that small companies can start…

The above post is making a case that the market will implode. I think there's a chance that's really gonna happen. I'm trying to find a silver lining. If the parts market survives that'd be awesome, but there's a real chance this is the beginning of the end.

That I agree with. I'm just also making the point that the silver lining had always existed, since similar fully-integrated products go back decades. The end seems inevitable to me now, and there's no good to be found there. We already had everything. Now is when that starts to be taken away.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#465

Post by beloch »

The global memory shortage is something that will probably end, perhaps even soon. e.g. Google announced Turboquant[1] today. If as described, it would significantly reduce thirst for more RAM at data-centres. Even if it doesn't pan out, data centres aren't being built at the same rate as they're being financed due to the practical, but unavoidable, problem of finding enough power. Demand for memory may actually have a very real bottom that we hit soon.

However, there is another reason to look after and hang onto to certain types of products long-term.

Tariffs.

If the trade barriers that the Trump administration has put up remain long-term, it fundamentally changes what can be built. High volume items (like RAM) are the least likely to be affected. Low-volume, high performance items are what are threatened. Say you're building a very specialized, very low demand item that's simply-the-best. You're probably going to source the best components and materials from several countries, build it in one place, and then ship it globally. You amortize the cost of tooling, etc. across the entire global market.

If a few countries throw up trade barriers, as the U.S. has done, your material costs go up and your access to markets decreases. People on the other side of those trade barriers may suddenly not be able to afford your products. Supply gets more expensive and demand drops. What was marginally profitable in the old world order becomes uneconomic in the new order. Such items aren't going to be magically on-shored to the U.S.. They're just not going to be made anymore.

If you own something that's niche and barely profitable to make, that's what you should look after and take care of, because more of it might not be made for a while if trade barriers don't come back down.

----------

[1]https://research.google/blog/turboquant-redefining-ai-effici...

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#466

Post by tavavex »

mmackh wrote: post #81

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 n…

Microcontrollers are great. But a lot of people who use them were bridged over by an interest in PCs, hardware or building something that interacts with something they already use. If free computing goes away, how long until the interest in microcontrollers slumps far enough for them to turn from fun, cheap commodities into expensive, proprietary, industrial devices?

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#467

Post by CamperBob2 »

antisthenes wrote: post #289
lo_zamoyski wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.…

Being right at the wrong time is often worse than just being outright wrong. This is one of those cases.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#468

Post by QuiEgo »

tavavex wrote: post #464
QuiEgo wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The above post is making a case that the market will implode. I think there's a chance that's really gonna happen. I'm trying to find a silver lining. If the parts market survives that'd be awesome, but there's a real chance this is the beginning of the end.

That I agree with. I'm just also making the point that the silver lining had always existed, since similar fully-integrated products go back decades. The end seems inevitable to me now, and there's no good to be found there. We already had everything. Now is when that starts to be taken away.

I'm thinking of this like car radios. Most cars used to have this standard called DIN to put the radio in. Most cars today don't have DIN mounts anymore. We've gotten way nicer, bigger touch screens in our infotainment now since cars are not locked into one form factor. On the other hand, it sucks in some ways because vendor lock in. I hope we at least get a tradeoff like that - that there will be something in return for it.

There are systems like the NUC but if I want a super-high-end 5090 and top-end CPU, all of the options to cool them feel like... well, something kluged together from whatever parts I can find, not something that's designed as a total system. Maybe we'll get some interesting designs out of this.

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#469

Post by didgetmaster »

barrkel wrote: post #15

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…

I upgraded my desktop last year (motherboard, cpu, RAM) and I felt like I wanted 64GB of DDR5 but figured I might need 128GB in a year or so. Normally, I would have bought the 64GB and waited to get the extra RAM later. Price usually dropped over time.

Boy, am I glad I decided to get the whole 128GB before RAM prices spiked!

Re: Hold on to Your Hardware

#470

Post by pdimitar »

doom2 wrote: post #98
bluejay2387 wrote: post #61

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…

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.

One local store drops prices to clear stock and/or gain mindshare. Within a week, everybody else does.

Happened before, will happen again.

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