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
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| Wanna install Linux? Go ahead! What are you going to install it on though, your grandpa's old Pentium?
Sure. Oh you thought that I NEEDED a fancy GUI solution and couldn't survive with just a shell. Fuck, I'll connect into to the UART connection of a twenty year old DVD player to root it and get a shell on that if I need to. It already runs Linux.
| 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
Yeah, I guess it'll be hard now to get the latest 4K rip of Disney-Marvel-Spy Kids slop. But that also extends to consumer devices that require storage for legitimate streaming too. I'd suspect some creative ideas will come about once Hollywood starts taking a REAL hit.
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