I'd rather use a weak single board computer for all my computing needs than rely on some corporate-controlled remote server. As much as these corporations would love for us to only have a dumb terminal, the minimal computer of today has a lot of power.
the minimal computer of today has a lot of power.
Usually enough to watch any sort of video content in HD and play thousands upon thousands of games with zero issue. Just the PS2 library alone is several years worth of content and you can play them all with a good emulator (PCSX2) and a computer from the last 15 years... I'm hoping there's a silver lining in the price hikes, like seeing a renaissance of video game development, with actually optimized games that focus on gameplay and don't take 100gb per map, or maybe people start going back and playing the OG SW: Battlefront II online again.
3.5 hours!!!! Love ya Steve, but I ain't got time for all that
"Son, why are you collecting all those old PCs?" This is why, I'm not going to use a fucking Windows Portal or a xAI TerminalX (or whatever the elongated muskrat will name it) to use whatever OS they allow, while surveilling me 24/7 for my own safety.
Computing is the means of production. Go figure
I don't want to not be able to have consumer computer parts, although part of me is ready to be done with computers again all together.
In any case, I was just at a Tool collective today to get some tools for a project, and it seems like every time I turn around the solution, or at least mitigation, to this modern world is CO-OP's. If I can't have consumer computers and have to use shared resources, I would definitely prefer to do it as a non profit collective with a management board beholden to the members, not a corporate entity.
Ironically, the "own nothing and be happy" line comes from an essay envisioning a future of co-ops.
Love how detailed Gamer's Nexus is, but 3.5 hours is waaaaay too much. What's the TLDR?
I'm only half way through but the TLDW so far is that the consumer DIY market is in collapse. Component suppliers are in bad financial shape, and many will probably not survive the down-turn.
Does make you wonder what we will be left with. Probably not all components gone. But likely less choice.
Could get a pi, they seem to be popular enough to not go away any time soon.
Did you see the Pi price increases though? Ouch. A mini-PC is likely better value now.
Part 2: https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/more-memory-driven-price-rises/
Mini PC prices are also going up. But yeah they are also an interesting choice to look at.
I'll game on a pi zero before I subscribe to run them on a data center.
He repeats information constantly. Any time I watched one of his videos I couldn't stop thinking how it could be cut to a third of the length without losing anything important. For my attention span it's unwatchable.
It's a compilation of a handful of previous videos all out under one broad topic. If there's one you care about there's a more dedicated specific video about tariffs, AI, memory, factories, etc.
i’m half way in
watch it
Or watch The Fellowship of the Ring Extended Edition in the same amount of time.
do both
That is why I have 2 monitors
You can have my PC when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
and also
Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.
cyberpunk cowabunga it is then
Thank god I bought those two 32 TB drives last November for 750 Euro each. With the feeling of getting ripped off.
Now one of those drives is at 1100 Euros, and every day prices go further up. I made the right call, this will last me a couple of years.
But this is all fucked up.
Used to be in Tech you got more for the same or the same for less. Fuck hyperscalers.
American (maybe more broadly Western) Computer Consumer Products companies are indeed getting fucked.
The thing is, that doesn't mean that the Future is one were Consumers are forced to not have PCs and have all their computing needs served from Big Companies' Servers.
I think, going from evidenc of the former to expecting the latter is a jump too far to take since it's only looking at one side of the equation in one part of the World.
It's perfectly possible that it's the Chinese companies that end up gaining from this, similarly to how in the EV space the result of Western auto companies not offering what most consumers actually wanted (which wasn't a Tesla, since those are too expensive for most people) was that the Chinese created and expanded that industry are now handily outcompetting those Western companies in their home markets.
Chinese parts and Mini-PC (an area where there are still a lot of products well bellow $500) manufacturers are still happilly selling their products to buyers from all over the World on platforms like AliExpress and, as we've recently discovered, Chinese memory makers (actual makers using actual chip fabs, not memory module assemblers) are expanding their production and selling more and more product to consumer market module assemblers in China and Taiwan, filling in the void created by the big memory makers focusing on supplying the AI datacenter boom.
(PS: That said, the China side seems to be covered in the video)
Further, there are other natural reactions in other areas which go against a dystopian future of No More Personal in Personal Computing - for example, software makers, most notably game makers, when they're scoping their products to the computing power that the expect will be available in 5 years, aren't going to be targetting hardware significativelly more powerful than what is common now (because if they did otherwise their stuff wouldn't sell), which means that naturally (though with some delay) the demand for more computing power and storage in personal devices is adjusting to the reduced availability of new devices with more storage and computing power, so rather that demand rather than going to go up it's probably going to stagnate, meaning that the future is most likely one of people running old computers for longer and just repairing what breaks with parts from that generation (one where DDR4 memory is more popular than DDR5) that one where everybody (both consumers and software makers) meekly accepts that the only option is computation running on servers (something which, by the way, game makers have already tried with things like Stadia, which failed miserably).
In summary, yeah the consumer personal computing hardware industry in the West is hurting, but just that is nowhere enough to support this idea that in the Future, Worldwide there will be no more Personal Computers.
(PPS: My expectation of the likely future is probably closest in that video with that of the guy from Corsair).
I already commented on the video that i currently own a PC and when it breaks i'll find another hobby rather than give money to those greedy AI skinsuits.
I'll just replace it with comparable performance parts. What used to cost £500 now costs more like £200 if you are happy with a similar level of performance. Look at the steam deck, and that includes the price of a battery, touchscreen and controller inputs!
I wonder how far we are from onboard graphics being comparable to my now 8 year old GPU...
Edit - just looked it up, Radeon 780M is from last gen Ryzen CPUs, not sure when/if G series processors are coming for 9000s CPUs or not. Looks like it might be comparable to a 1050Ti, so they are getting there and that isn't exactly bad performance.
You should watch the video, because your comment misunderstands it completely. The point is that in the future there will be no new consumergrade PC components on the market at all, because only a couple of huge corps will survive and they will achieve total monopoly of the market.
It is not a question of price or anything like that, they will simply stop producing it in favour of datacenters, where you can lease computerpower (through AI agents).
Phone sales are massive aren't they? You can buy computers with the same components that some phones use. Currently not overly popular but that might be where we end up.
I'm convinced that modular PCs are ... at least a flavor of the future.
MiniPC with higher spec laptop or mobile cpu, soldered on to a mobo that has sodimm slots.
Oculink port, external gpu dock with psu.
CPU gets too old? Keep your ssd and sys ram, get a new mini pc, put the ssd and ram into it.
GPU gets too old? Get a new one, new PSU if you need it.
Yeah, you get a slight ding to extreme performance scenarios, but at least at the moment, this seems to be the more cost effective route to get something like a 'ultra graphics at 1440p' capable system.
Also, once you get the GPU dock, you probably don't really need to get a new one... unless like an entirely new PCIe standard comes out, or something like that.
But, you can currently get a bare bones one thats around the cost of all the fans and cpu heatsinks and what not that you'd need for a traditional 'battlestation'.
Also also, when not gaming or doing something graphically or LLM or whatever kind of demanding, you can just boot up the MiniPC alone and have a lower power bill.
If you want more long term storage, set up a NAS, or maybe just some usb external spinny spinny HDDs.
This kind of thing is already a fairly rapidly growing niche in China, if you hop on AliExpress and just look at how many different kinds of things are offered and roughly fit into this kind of setup scenario.
AOOSTAR, Minisforum, others, etc.
PCs are already modular and have been for decades. My CPU has a heat sink larger than a MiniPC.
That said I have been tempted by a MiniPC for a low power device, and with how good graphics can be on some CPUs you could do some fairly decent gaming on them too. But that is probably more than I would want to spend on one yet.
Currently game on an RTX2070, no plan on upgrading for more performance any time soon as it is plenty. I wonder how many generations we are from CPU graphics being comparable?
Not sure how they manage for the higher end CPUs that are going to put out quite a bit more heat.
Where are they going to get their technical talent from then
Ugh I can't fucking stand this dude, love the work he is doing, and he is spot on with his assertions, accusations, and documentation! He is clearly 100% correct.
But absolutely cannot bear physically watching/listening to him for longer than 8 minutes...
Meh. His tone and delivery can be a little annoying sometimes but I let it fly because of the amazing work he's doing towards opening gamers' eyes.
The irony of posting that video on YouTube. If you actually think it's a problem, FFS self-host your video, my friends. Or cross-post it and make the YouTube link the second one.
ChatGPT summarize this video.
Absolutely! I have the summary you requested below:
You'll own nothing and be happy.
Is there anything else I can help you with? Perhaps you'd like to rent some water on Nestle+? (Charges apply)
For PC gaming news and discussion. PCGamingWiki
Rules: