Looking at what's happening with RAM pricing and Crucial being shuttered, the doomer in me thinks they could just pull the same thing with every other PC component. It's not like some plucky band of upstarts can start 3D printing organic free-range FOSS processors, hard drives and motherboards in their garage- all of this shit comes out of a couple of giant plants in Asia. If porky strangles the supply, that's it. In the end all the average joe schmoe will be left with are cloud-based terminals that rely entirely on subscription services and that require strong identification to even use (and that will monitor and log every single fucking thing you do while drowning you in ads)
Wanna install Linux? Go ahead! What are you going to install it on though, your grandpa's old Pentium? 
Wanna ditch subscription services and sail the seas? Oops, it looks like hard drives cost 5,000 dollars and are only sold to enterprise customers. I guess you're not storing that media anywhere
Our automated content scanning systems found a spicy pro-palestine meme in one of your chats. Your accounts have been terminated and the appropriate authorities have been contacted
Nah, enterprise PCs will always be a thing and corps pushing for PC refreshes means those enterprise PCs that have spend the past 3 years running Outlook, Powerpoint, and Teams will find its way to consumers once the 3 year warranty expires.
That’s like the little guys they have attached to tv’s right? (Honest question lmao) I got a Lenovo one for cheap that’s been doing great for a few years now. Next project up is building a little ras pi and seeing if I can’t force myself into tech literacy
I've tried this option before. You get board, PSU failures and video card failures too often, especially with PCs being kept powered on 24x7. These aren't the same standard boards and PSUs used in self-builds and get stupid expensive to replace.