Chapotraphouse

would it be alright for a certain price point to be stuck in the level of tech circa 2020

I'm not worried about consumers being stuck with 16gb DDR4 RAM or GPUs with 6 or 8 gigs of VRAM. I'm worried about companies simply deciding they're done with the PC market altogether and no longer manufacturing new parts at all

Currently existing society is already unable to reproduce itself in pretty much every aspect of its functioning: demography, education, infrastructure etc.

Idk. I think what's more likely to happen is that when the bubble bursts, a lot of these over-leveraged, capital-intensive, hardware tech companies, are to be acquired for pennies on the dollar by private equity or some other locus of fictitious capital, with money they get from a gvmnt bailout that prioritizes finance over any other industry.

After that, the buyers will get to work doing what they've done with other industries: rip the companies to shreds, sell them for scrap, and leave the barest possible operation. At that point, the company has to make a choice: do I spend a lot of money and resources servicing the consumer industry, with all its uncertainty and high overhead, and higher (importantly, only for the long term) margins, or do I go enterprise-only, where revenue is higher, more stable, less overhead, although with lower margins?

Given the quarter-to-quarter cycles these people operate in, enterprise is going to look like the play for most of these companies, at least while they recover from having been ripped apart by vultures which will take years. Some people will step up to serve the consumer market, but they're not gonna have the economies of scale to offer the prices larger companies used to do, so stuff is going to remain expensive, or get more expensive.

Whatever choice they make though, private equity getting their cut is going to mean mass lay-offs, delayed or no maintenance of equipment, and inevitable loss of know-how and efficient production practices, as the people working there move on to other industries and can't wait 3-5 years for the 1 in 50 chance of going back into consumer semiconductors again, so it's going to be a while before affordable computer parts reappear, if they ever do.

Stripping RAM out of AI data centers will be the new ripping out the copper wiring. There will be plenty of that too.

There's really nothing wrong with old tech. Half of the world still runs on tape drives. Until very recently my laptop was still 4:3. I haven't upgraded my desktop PC in something like 6 years and it's still fine. I don't play cutting edge video games or do intensive video rendering, but I imagine most people aren't either and they could live without AAA games.

I hope we're salvating as porky does shit like this. Gaming is just grilling for so many people and building a PC is an aspiration for so many who have already been burned by crypto.

I think the only way to get to alot of them is using it as the hook for a co-ordinated boycott. As much as possible cut Microsoft, Google, Apple, Meta, nvidia, Adobe and anything else AI adjacent out of your life. That includes deepseek who are also likely eating alot of hardware. If a brand or studio use AI then cut them out. This should have been easy with BDS but we need to work with what we conditions have not what we want. Some of it is inescapable, especially Microsoft but the tech industry is so overleveraged that any decline in the attention economy is going to be a disaster. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity for economic warfare.

Are we communists seeking to replace this failed system or are we social democrats wincing at it's next crisis?

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.

Why on Earth would they make Linux illegal? Linux is a kernel for servers, mobile devices, and embedded systems. A small number of lunatics thought it would be funny to run it on a personal computer, but those people create bug reports and PRs that help with the big corporate projects, so it all works out. 5% of people with a PC use Linux on it, and 13% of people don't have a PC at all. Besides, operating systems don't matter nearly as much as they used to (and will continue to matter less) as everything migrates to the web, where you can easily charge subscriptions to everyone for services.

I think capitalists would rather wedge into Linux and enshittify it than outright make it illegal.

I get the feeling the moment Linux gets popular enough, some techbros are going to get their claws into it just like they do everything else. Valve making Linux popular through Steam Deck etc is good for now. But everything always goes the same way eventually once private companies get involved. Capitalists are experts at taking the hard work of passionate people and stripping the copper out of it for profit until it's just a shell.

The thing with the current shortage is that it's way more profitable to sell the chips used for RAM and SSDs to giant corporations building AI data centers than to bother with the consumer market at all. It's not a co-ordinated push to ban personal computing per se, just a side effect that happens to align with the push for cloud/subscription bullshit Microsoft and others have a huge hard-on for and will probably dovetail nicely also the West's even bigger hard-on for doing every single fucking authoritarian thing they have been accusing China of doing for the past 20 years