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It will never bounce back.
The "plan" is to effectively kill the market for personal PCs. PCs won't be gone, but with the bulk of the population buying phones, tablets, or thin clients, it becomes far more niche and kills its critical mass for platform development.
It sounds tinfoil hat-ish yeah, but... well, explain 2026 to your 2011 self.
I think you're 100% right. There just too much profit incentive on the table. With AI continuing to cash strap companies, the best way to cover some of that debt is by finding other revenue streams. Microsoft already has cost models in place for virtual machines, and dummy hardware specifically for accessing VMs in the cloud. Extrapolate that out as the more "affordable" option ($200 entry free for an HDMI dock with a WiFi card and 32MiB of onboard storage for credential storage) and it becomes very appealing to most people just on the convenience proposition. Then Microsoft data mines the info stored by users to sell for advertising, and suddenly Microsoft isn't in debt, it's profitable again.
Yup. Give it 50 years, and you'll be subject to prosecution for owning >x FLOPS. First they take the Internet, and then they take compute. The strategy is starting to become clear.
I'm having a hard time seeing this but time will tell.
not tinfoil hat, once everything is strictly on the cloud, you'll have no choice but to pay a monthly bill for everything.
And then eventually we will just have screens and operating system will just be streamed from the cloud.
I'm not that tin-foil-hat-ish. I think Apple will keep iPhones and Macbook Neos, and some scaled up versions for devs. Maybe Intel will morph their laptop platforms to lower power. Maybe Valve will press on with Steam Machines for a bit.
But I think the "Windows PC platform" as we know it will be stagnant.
You won't be able to just buy an RTX 7080 laptop, or build an ATX PC, because volume sales of those platforms will dry up. Without "Best Buy laptops" to fund them, why would Intel and AMD spend $billions on those chip designs for a few enthusiasts who can't afford them anyway, when younger generations don't even know how to use PCs?
Instead, they focus on servers, which shifts more people to thin clients and perpetuates the trend.
I could be wrong about that even.
The new Xbox CEO is making noise about PCs. Sony would be stupid not to do the same thing. The AI bubble could pop faster than I anticipate.
But still, its hard to see a future for PCs.
I'm surprised the drop is not a lot bigger... Who in their right mind would buy a PC right now unless they had absolutely no choice?
What'll get really bad is when the hardware OEMs become insolvent due to high prices killing consumer demand for their products, and then we are left with few to no options for PC parts.
If nothing else, this could spell the end of the modular ATX/ITX PC.
Most consumers don't research purchases a ton, much less have any idea what's going on in the hardware market. They wander around Best Buy or the first two pages of Amazon search, and buy.
And then you have businesses who are just gonna procure stuff they have to have anyway.
...I would have liked to see data more split by segment and form factor, though.
7% so far....
These prices staying high will eat into people replacing old machines as the years go on. There will be PC manufacturers closing up shop before this situation even thinks about getting better.
Perfect for when it'll be time for me to upgrade, as I got a new system in 2025.