• 23 days

    The artificial scarcity of components due to the ai craziness is all a plot to make people give up on local computing and use only phones and cloud services for everything /s (I’m afraid that I may not need that /s at all…)

    • 23 days

      No need for the /s. That’s exactly what it is. It’s a money grab and a bid for more control and surveillance we cannot dodge.

  • 23 days

    Ram prices. Those of us who saw it coming, apparently a number between 7% and 15%, bought a bridge PC before the price gouging started.

    • 23 days

      And now SSD and hard drive prices. Keep your tech going, it’s going to be a long few years, if ever, before affordability returns. They (cloud and AI tech-holes) want local compute and storage to be unaffordable so we use their crap. F-ck that, I’m gonna scavenge whatever I can to keep self-hosting to the bitter end.

      • 23 days

        i’ve salvaged enough older ddr3/ddr4 stuff and sata ssd to hopefully last until i see some newer stuff go through here destined for the recycle heap. but what i am short on is spinny hdd for more ‘‘archive’’ storage, i’m down to my last couple smaller hdd

  • 23 days

    For the VAST majority of people, a computer is just a tool and as long as they can send some email and surf the web, they don’t really care about them. Most 8 year old computers are generally cast enough to handle these tasks so they’re just not updating. A lot of those who care , did so with the EOL announcement of Win10 so there are other factors at play as well as insane costs.

    • cloudless.@kbin.earthdeleted by creator
      23 days

      Got couple of hand me downs from work at the end of the lease cycle - 7th gen i7 HP mini desktop and 8th gen i7 EliteBook x360, for nominal price (so they could show them as “sold” in the books). I did run Win 11 on the laptop for a while (since it is officially supported), then converted both to Linux (Debian Stable, laptop with KDE, desktop with XFCE since it is a “home server”). With Linux, they run faster and cooler than they ever did on Win10/11. I don’t think I will be looking into any upgrades or hardware refresh for at least 5 years, if not longer.

  • 22 days

    Anyone surprised by that? Components have become unaffordable, and so have PCs.