Comment by xvxvx
9 days ago
- GPU prices rising
- RAM prices rising
- hard drive prices rising
Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services?
‘You don't need storage space, use our cloud subscription’
‘You don’t need processing power, stream your games through our subscription service.’
Game publishers have already publicly floated the idea of not selling their games but charging per hour. Imagine how that impact Call of Duty or GTA.
Physical media could easily be killed off. Does my iPhone need 1TB of storage or will they shrink that and force everything through iCloud?
How long before car ownership is replaced with autonomous vehicle car pools? Grocery stores closed to visitors, all shopping done online and delivered to your door by drone.
I don't know how everyone arrives at that conclusion when the cost of the subscription services is also going up (as evidenced by the very article we're talking about). People who are renting are feeling this immediately, whereas people who bought their computers can wait the price hikes out for a couple years before they really need an upgrade.
Subscriptions have a "boiling frog" phenomenon where a marginal price increase isn't noticable to most people. Our payment rails are so effective many people don't even read their credit card statements, they just have vampires draining their accounts monthly.
Starting with a low subscription price also has the effect of atrophying people's ability to self-serve. The alternative to a subscription is usually capital-intensive - if you want to cancel Netflix you need to have a DVD collection. If you want to cancel your thin client you have to build a PC. Most modern consumers live on a knife edge where $20/month isn't perceptible but $1000 is a major expense.
The classic VC-backed model is to subsidize the subscription until people become complacent, and then increase the price once they're dependent. People who self-host are nutjobs because the cloud alternative is "cheaper and better" until it stops being cheaper.
My bank has an option to send me a notification every time I'm charged for something. I've noticed several bills that were higher than they should have been "due to a technical error". I'm certain some companies rely on people not checking and randomly add "errors".
Notably there's no way (known to me) that you can have direct debits sent as requests that aren't automatically paid. I think that would put consumers on an equal footing with businesses though, which is obviously bad for the economy.
8 replies →
> The alternative to a subscription is usually capital-intensive - if you want to cancel Netflix you need to have a DVD collection.
I did Apple Music and Amazon Music. The experience of losing “my” streaming library twice totally turned me off these kinds of services. Instead I do Pandora, and just buy music when I (rarely) find something I totally love and want to listen to on repeat. The inability to build a library in the streaming service that I incorrectly think of as “mine” is a big feature, keeps my mental model aligned with reality.
4 replies →
> if you want to cancel Netflix you need to have a DVD collection
You don't need a whole DVD collection to cancel Netflix, even ignoring piracy. Go to a cheaper streaming service, pick a free/ad supported one, go grab media from the library, etc. Grab a Blu-Ray from the discount bin at the store once in a while, and your collection will grow.
9 replies →
You can only boil the frog until it dies. If there isn't a true dependency relationship then at some point the industry will die.
In the 2010's, when short on money, I noticed my cable+Internet package was above $200. I took a look at things and cut the TV service, keeping the Internet.
Movies and theaters thought they were untouchable until they weren't. Games can keep increasing their subscription fees until people just stop playing them. There was a world before video games, after all.
This is something I’ve been seeing for a while. As a teen that kept his 300 dollar paycheck in cash that money would last a very long time. Now I make a good 6 figures and was seeing my accounts spending way more than I should. It wasn’t big purchases it was 50 dollars here 200 hundred there. A subscription here and there. By the end of the month I would wrack 8k in spending.
Going line by line I learned how much I neglected these transactions being the source of my problem. Could I afford it? Yes. But saving and investing is a better vehicle for retirement early than these minor dopamine hits
Sure but modern cloud subscriptions have a lot of service layers you otherwise won't pay for so effectively you may be buying the hardware yearly that's a lot different than renting a media collection that would be assembled over a lifetime for the price of one new item a month.
> Subscriptions have a "boiling frog" phenomenon where a marginal price increase isn't noticable to most people.
This is so apt and well stated. It echos my sentiment, but I hadn't thought to use the boiling frog metaphor. My own organs are definitely feeling a bit toastier lately.
the best con of all is convincing ppl they need Hollywood in their lives to be happy
Difference is that if subscription goes up from $10 to $15, that doesn't seem to bad.
But if you want to purchase a new computer, and the price goes from $1000 to $1500, then that's a pretty big deal. (Though in reality, the price of said computer would probably go up even more, minimum double. RAM prices are already up 6-8 fold from summer)
Building a PC price is not double lol and RAM is nowhere near up 6-8x
https://www.bestbuy.com/product/crucial-pro-overclocking-32g...
That 32GB for $274 was not $34-$45 in the summer. RAM is up like 3x, but RAM is one of the cheaper parts of the PC.
RAM that was $100 in summer is like $300 now when I look. So that's an extra $200 maybe $300, on say a $1500 build.
GPUs are not up, they are still at MSRP:
https://www.bestbuy.com/product/asus-prime-nvidia-geforce-rt...
SSDs are up marginally, maybe $50 more lets say for a 2TB.
So from summer you are looking at like a $250-350 increase on say a $1500 PC
11 replies →
Difference is subscriptions need to support IT staff, data centers, and profit margins. A computer under your desk at home has none of those support costs and it gets price competition from used parts which subscriptions don't have.
Cloud (storage, compute, whatever) has so far consistently been more expensive than local compute over even short timeframes (storage especially, I can buy a portable 2TB drive for the equivalent of one year of the entry level 2TB dropbox plan). These shortage spikes don't seem likely to change that? Especially since the ones feeling the most pressure to pay these inflated prices are the cloud providers that are causing the demand spike in the first place. Just like with previous demand spikes, as a consumer you have alternatives such as used or waiting it out. And in the meantime you can laugh at all your geforce now buddies who just got slapped with usage restrictions and overage fees.
9 replies →
> ...that doesn't seem too bad.
Yep, "seem". But the reality is more like 3 different subscriptions going up by $5/month, and the new computer is a once-in-4-years purchase:
$5/month * 3 subscriptions * 48 months = $720.00
And no bets on those subscriptions being up to $20 or so by the end of year 4.
But if you finance the computer (not hard to get 0% financing on consumer electronics), the price goes from $41 a month to $62 a month. It’s the same difference.
10 replies →
> wait the price hikes out for a couple years
Or much longer. The computers I use most on a daily basis are over 10 years old, and still perfectly adequate for what I do. Put a non-bloated OS on them and many older computers are more than powerful enough.
And Linux being good for gaming now (thanks Valve!) makes this option more attractive than ever.
And the inability to run rootkits is a bonus, not a drawback.
Netflix says hello lol
Every increasing prices
Password sharing forbidden
Etc etc
And still making more and more money.
People are willing to take a beating if they are entertained and pay a lot more
There must be a breaking point. We’ve reached ours last year, when price went up again and my grandfathered plan wasn’t accepted anymore. So I talked to the missus and we cancelled our Netflix.
It had been my account for, what, a decade? A decade of not owning anything because it was affordable and convenient. Then shows started disappearing, prices went up, we could no longer use the account at her place (when we lived separately), etc. And, sadly, I’m done with them.
I think most people will eventually reach a breaking point. My sister also cancelled, which I always assumed would never happen.
> I don't know how everyone arrives at that conclusion when the cost of the subscription services is also going up
Of course they will go up, that's the whole idea. The big providers stock on hardware, front-run the hardware market, starve it for products while causing the prices to rise sharply and at that point their services are cheaper because they are selling you the hardware they bought at low prices, the one they bought in bulk, under cheap long term contracts and, in many cases, kept dark for some time.
Result - at the time of high hardware prices in retail, the cloud prices are lower, the latter increase later to make more profits, and the game can continue with the cloud providers always one step ahead of retail in a game of hoarding and scalping.
Most recently, scalping was big during the GPU shortages caused by crypto-mining. Scalpers would buy GPUs in bulk then sell them back to the starved market for a hefty margin.
Cloud providers buying up hardware at scale is basically the same, the only difference is they sell you back the services provided by the hardware, not the actual gear.
People rent things they can’t afford to own.
That's one common reason for renting, not the only one.
I've rented trailers and various tools before too, not because I couldn't afford to buy them, but because I knew I wouldn't need them after the fact and wouldn't know what to do with them after.
You could never afford a hyperscaler size data center. You could always just buy a server and stick it into Colo. it’s just not totally the same thing
3 replies →
Is this true? I'm trying to think of a solid example and I'm drawing blanks.
Apartments aren't really comparable to houses. They're relatively small units which are part of a larger building. The better comparison would be to condominiums, but good luck even finding a reasonably priced condo in most parts of the US. I'd guess supply is low because there's a housing shortage and it's more profitable to rent out a unit as an apartment than to sell it as a condo.
It seems to me that most people rent because 1) they only need the thing temporarily or 2) there are no reasonable alternatives for sale.
3 replies →
or just not ready for commitment (try first, buy later, etc...)
Exactly, if you can’t afford the high upfront cost that you can stretch out over a longer period of time, you’re stuck paying more over the long term as the subscriptions get more expensive.
Because the World Economic Forum, where our political and corporate leaders meet and groom each other, point-blank advertised "you will own nothing and be happy."
We’ve been raised to believe “experiences make you happy, not things.”
Everything as a service is the modern marketing ideal.
For Christmas I got an alarm clock that basically doesn’t function without a $50/year subscription. For an alarm clock (Hatch.co).
Consumers need to get better at understanding TCO when buying things. Or maybe the government should be slapping those “annual cost” stickers like they do on washing machines to understand how much electricity they use.
A 50$/year alarm clock?!
Is it time to post the philip k dick Ubik quote again?!
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Yes.
I remember starting this book back in college and rolling my eyes at this scene for being so campy and tacky that I just dropped the book.
I came back to it just a few weeks ago out of disbelief that that is where we've arrived today.
Paying a subscription for an alarm clock. I've heard this one before! [1][2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knocker-up [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-35840393
I almost fell into this trap when buying a 'smart ring' for my spouse this year. Oura wanted $349 for the silver (!) and a subscription fee on top of that.
RingConn was cheaper, the build quality seems great, and there's no subscription fee. That made the decision a no-brainer.
I’m working on an app as part of my unemployment trajectory. It was going to be a one-time purchase thing, but almost everyone on the business advisory team thinks it’s a bad idea. I’m running out of excuses/arguments as to why I think the app should not be subscription-based, seems like bad business to do so.
I would never buy this product but it seems pretty clear on the website the sub is highly integrated and most likely required.
TIL. Business model: Juicero for alarms. Great paired with your EightSleep brand cloud-enabled bed.
I set up one of these yesterday, and it was an infuriating experience.
That's a terrible gift! Did the g(r)ifter know it needed such a subscription?
An immense amount of abuse is being done to "consumers" because most people don't have a mental model for how expensive subscriptions are and end up counting them as nearly free, because they are not even tomorrow's problem, but next month's problem. Entire industries run on that principle, like the burgeoning buy now pay later space (which promise no interest but I promise you they're not making money on a whole bunch of "0% interest" loans so you do the math). Meanwhile companies love the recurring revenue. It's a perfect storm of corporate greed meeting a consumer blindspot.
Even if they "knew" they may well have not been accounting for it properly. I've been annualizing all my subscription fees for a long time now and dealing with the resulting number, but that's still an unpopular approach. Subscription fees are bleeding more people than ever dry.
3 replies →
Good thing you can fund it with your HSA or FSA in partnership with Truemed! \s
> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services?
The supply chains for high-end chips are brittle enough that it's a very real possibility we end up with a severe supply crunch such that neither clouds nor individual users can access new chips at anything approaching reasonable prices.
TSMC owns 60% of the foundry market. So if China decides to invade Taiwan, that would likely mean ~60% of CPU and GPU manufacturing capacity permanently destroyed at once. That would be "iPhones are no longer for sale this year, and PCs now cost $5000 if you're lucky enough to get ahold of one" kind of territory.
> TSMC owns 60% of the foundry market. So if China decides to invade Taiwan, that would likely mean ~60% of CPU and GPU manufacturing capacity permanently destroyed at once.
While it would certainly be devastating, do note that TSMC has fabs in places that aren't Taiwan. So their entire production wouldn't immediately go offline, and presumably China would still want to keep selling those products and would have an interest in avoiding destroying those factories.
If China suddenly decides it doesn't want to export electronics, though, then we're all super fucked. After all, what percentage of those TSMC chips flow through China to get mounted onto PCBs or need major supporting components from one of the "Foxconn Cities" in China?
> presumably China would still want to keep selling those products and would have an interest in avoiding destroying those factories
There are rumours from seemingly credible sources that Taiwan has the TSMC factories (at least the ones located in Taiwan) rigged with explosives that they intend to trigger in case of invasion by China (as a disincentive against China invading). So China may well not have any say in the matter.
16 replies →
> presumably China would still want to keep selling those products and would have an interest in avoiding destroying those factories
It has been hinted by people who might know something that Taiwan has rigged their factories to explode if China invades to ensure China can't get a hold of those factories. I'm not sure if it is true, but it wouldn't be hard to do (the hard part is ensuring the explosives don't go off for other reasons)
4 replies →
These supply chains have very non-linear responses. Relatively small fluctuations in demand can have enormous effects on prices and leadtimes.
It's a one-way journey, unless we can adapt quickly enough to a drastic reduction in the general availability of compute power. IMO, our reliance on bloated tech is an existential risk, and reverting to some reasonable baseline needs addressing as urgently as any other current crisis.
I have been waiting for quite some time for some sort of reckoning with our glut for compute resources, but for years I had optimistically assumed this would be due to physical constraints rather than artificial socioeconomic ones. Now is the most advantageous time to be a retrocomputing enthusiast as the definition of "retrocomputing" may seek to expand to engulf the whole category of home computing.
Destroyed? It's far more likely that China will find a diplomatic solution to prevent sabotage of the foundries. Supply capacity will collapse for the US, but only because it will blanket ban imports of TSMC-made products, i.e. a self-imposed supply shock.
I sometimes wonder if this is the real reason for the AI bubble. Major cloud providers are trying to front-load their computing purchases in case geopolitical trouble makes it impossible to get computers. At cloud scale, that's billions of dollars in new investment. So they kick off a new computing paradigm, hype it up, and now their cost of capital for this new investment is significantly lower because they can sell it as getting a piece of future revenues. Basically just a way to make shareholders pay for geopolitical hedging.
This has been theorized as Technofeudalism: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technofeudalism
> Game publishers have already publicly floated the idea of not selling their games but charging per hour. Imagine how that impact Call of Duty or GTA.
MMORPGs have had monthly subscription fees for a long time.
For a lot of games if they charged by the hour would probably see less revenue...people buy tons of games and then barely ever play them.
You assume there's only one type of player. Some players fall into a category I lovingly call Madden Guy. These people will play some other games, but they will play one game *a lot*. Call of Duty, Arc Raiders, Destiny, Battlefield, Fortnite, these are the type of games who attract these kind of players. If a game has 600 purchasable items, a seasonal battlepass-type thing, multiple female rappers skins, and a publisher-financed pro scene, it's probably one of those games.
Those games 100% already have game modes you pay by the hour. They will have special modes you access with currency and you need to keep paying to keep playing. Those modes are usually special, with increased and unique drops.
>home computers are replaced by thin clients
Ah, but that's the genius of this circuit around the tech cycle. You need a "thick client" to access those subscription services, as running the (web) interface requires shameful amounts of RAM and CPU resources.
I think in the mid-term, many of these AI companies are going to run out of cash.
Users are more and more going to be able to run models locally so it's a race to nowhere (all you need to have a very good model, is to have a Mac with 128 GB of memory, but at 16 GB you already have something usable but not so nice)
The big winners are going to be the memory makers
Not if the browser rendering is done in the cloud. All you're looking at is a screen on a server somewhere, not actually the one on your phone.
RDP is the future? Makes sense. It's been a while since money was poured into networking.
1 reply →
That was Opera Mini's schtick. What's old is new again!
Nobody wants to run browsers in the cloud. Too expensive. We really are getting the worst of all worlds with this, where we have to do all the expensive computations and all our subscriptions do is flip a flag in some database somewhere so that we're allowed to run a few milliseconds/month of computation on their servers while we're providing vast CPU resources to the rendering, and if the company is even half clever, WASM execution that actually costs money.
Exceptions for services that actually cost some non-trivial money per consumer, but there's a lot of crap like an alarm clock or your smart watch's subscription for fitness tracking or other completely trivial bullshit charging $10/month out there.
Maybe it will incentivize the introduction of more reasonable browser technology. /s
It’s possible. Either way, many people literally sleep in a monthly subscription model — rent.
That makes more sense though. Since one can't easily take a home with them (it's fixed to the ground), renting a dwelling provides flexibility and liquidity for life changing events.
You might be interested to learn a huge percentage of people pay rent to sleep in a trailer park, where the houses very much have wheels.
1 reply →
It's very cultural though, in eastern Europe you often have 80/90% of people living in a home they own.
You still have to pay for utilities and taxes: No way to escape that unless you live in the wilderness.
> No way to escape that unless you live in the wilderness.
The wilderness is all owned. Trespassers will be prosecuted.
“Rent” needs to better defined at this point.
At least some portion of utilities and tax charges pay for ongoing maintenance and investment to provide expected quality of life. Similar to how rent for a home eventually pays for a new roof or other repairs.
The profit margin component of rent is probably what most are referring to in this discussion, but presumably tax and (government owned) utilities don’t have that.
2 replies →
Because buying a house is even more unaffordable.
[flagged]
You have that option, it's called buying a house and getting a mortgage. You just rent from the bank for 30 years first. But you're not thinking x=30 with any responsibility other than writing a check, I bet. If I had to guess, I'd say you want x<10 and you still don't want to pay for maintenance, or property taxes, or have the value reassessed as soon as you take occupancy, or be forced to stay there if you decide to leave. You want all the benefit with none of the cost or risk. It's fine to want that but let's not pretend "rent should be illegal" is a serious or reasonable policy proposal.
There's a reason why a mortgage with very little down payment is a lot more than comparable rent.
15 replies →
I don't disagree, but I would argue that the same thing can be said from any kind of "investor" who then capture most of the value produced just because it turned out they had the money that others had not (most of the time just because they were born in the right family)
What does this say about tenants though? You expect someone to buy a home that you can’t afford, rent it to you until you can. Meanwhile, maintain it while you rent it, pay the property taxes and insurance as well, basically have a tiny cash flow off my investment-all to just be forced to sell it to you in the end when my only hope of getting ahead on this was some long term appreciation or the build up of equity. Spoiler, equity doesn’t usually build up very fast. Better chance of appreciation building up, but even that is a pretty big risk because you’re trying to time the market.
I was a landlord for a bit and what I’ve found is that tenants that have probably never actually owned a property have no ideas about what it cost to own a property and what the landlord is actually making off your rent. Sure even if you pay a few thousand in rent, it may be the landlord only has a couple hundred of cash flow. Then, one repair on the home can easily wipe out a year or more of that. One bad tenants can wipe out a decade of it.
I recall my worst tenants ever. Weren’t even that bad all things considered but the were dirty people. The house was filthy when they moved out. The walls and floors were coated in a grease like film. I had a no smoking policy in the lease but it was obvious they smoked and used the floor as an ashtray. There was a handful of other things that were just broken. Anyways it was a 4 bedroom house that was 2500 sf. I got a few quotes to paint and fix the list of little stuff. The cheapest quote I got was $15k but there was also a $20k and a $30k quote. I decided not to go after these people for the damages but I told them the long list of repairs and because of the condition and cost of repairing it all I would not return their deposit which was only about $2500. Anyway they completely lost it calling me a slumlord and how there’s no way they could have generated that much damage and reported me to the state and wanted to sue me but I don’t think they found a lawyer to take the case. They thought I was marking up all the repairs costs and scamming them. I just sent them all 3 quotes and told them I chose the lowest and wasn’t asking them to pay the excess (I knew it would just be a bad debt). But they went through every line item and said they knew what it cost to paint a house and it was overpriced. This is where the problem is. They’ve never owned a property, never hired a contractor or handyman so they actually have no idea what these things cost. And in my city, construction is booming and everything housing related does seem expensive but it is what it is. There’s no cheaper way to do it besides DIY. But my labor isn’t free either and I’d charge more for my time than the contractors do so that’s not really a solution either.
5 replies →
[flagged]
3 replies →
Valve changed its Steam Store's ToS, so officially it means Steam users no longer own the content they purchased in it, they merely bought a subscription to rent it for a while, until the game publisher decides to revoke the online content at any time they choose.
TakeTwo Interactive (2K Games, the makers of popular games series Borderlands) changed its ToS to allow it to spy on and capture anything on the user's machine, including browser behaviors (websites visited, bookmarks saved, etc.), payment information (credit card details, etc.), programs installed & usage, etc.
Gaming industry has moved on to become evil, by default. Most AAA games these days cannot even be played without an internet connection. And most AAA games demand intrusive DRMs, and same games demand the dangerous kernel-level DRMs like Denuvo which cannot be monitored by major antimalware.
Its a market signal; we’re going to see a massive boom in investment (mostly from China, but still) in capacity expansion. Eventually the prices will stabilize.
At this process node, China (PRC) doesn't have significant capacity, it's all in China (ROC) or as we know it: Taiwan.
China native DRAM production is similarly behind, but catching up: https://telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/devices/cx...
China just needs to produce 3080s/3090 cards (which they are capable of doing given enough investment) and they can supply the gaming market for 95% of its needs
The problem I've seen described by some is that the industry is resistant to expand capacity right now, because a partial pop of the AI bubble is expected aaany time now for months, but it keeps not happening. But if it does happen and they have too much capacity, the whole GPU and RAM industry would not be able to recoup that investment and would collapse.
Western (+allied) firms should 100% be worried but they are in a difficult spot: risk losing out on market share or risk overcapacity. The Chinese have the full might of Federal/State Governments behind them which may allow them to survive overcapacity, not so for the western firms.
1 reply →
People confuse themselves with the bubble-metaphor. If an AI bubble exists and pops (we need not discuss either) the already existing and on-the-way-demand will not just disappear. Millions of todays users will not just decide that they don't want to use claude code or chatgpt anymore.
Instead, an increasing number of people are going to want AI stuff from here on out, forever, because it's proven to be good enough in the eyes of hundreds of millions and that will create continuous hardware demand (at least because of hardware churn, but also because there are a lot of people in the world who currently don't have great access to this technology yet).
I don't know how much optimization will drive down hardware per token, but given that most people would rather wait like 5 seconds instead of 15 minutes for answers to their coding problems, I think it's safe to assume that hardware is going to be in demand for a long time, even if, for whatever wild reason, absolutely nothing happens on top of what has already happened.
7 replies →
Stabilize at an incredibly high price. Once they realize they can make more money selling high and producing less. I hate to say it, but the savings does not get passed on to the customer.
> You don't need storage space, use our cloud subscription
This is here already. A long time ago, maybe even before covid, I asked a table of iPhone-owning friends who pays Apple a monthly sub for storage, and every hand went up.
I know you mention home computers, but most of my friends don't have one. Their iPhone is their computer.
As sibling says, the question is too vague. I also pay for icloud, but I store all my things locally on my devices. The point is effortless sync and basic backup (protect pictures from phone theft).
I also pay Hetzner for a storage box or whatever it's called, where I regularly send backups of my stuff with restic. One of the sources is a local fat ZFS NAS, which I can access from everywhere via wireguard.
Yet, the only reason I'm contemplating buying a new iPhone is to get larger local storage. I'm also biting my fingers for not having pulled the trigger on a larger SSD for my main machine two months ago.
Every solution has different use cases, and I think no single one is perfect. I get the best value from using a mix.
You're someone who is comfortable in a terminal desktop environment on Linux. What you or I do for storage is irrelevant to the wider consumer market.
Apple's hardware prices mean that millions of people buy the smallest on offer and pay Apple monthly instead. It's a deliberate play for recurring services revenue.
My point is this: would they buy a phone that had virtually-zero free storage and rely solely on iCloud? Probably.
Some of them had 64GB models, in my view they are already doing that!
7 replies →
You tell me how to automatically sync photos across iOS+mac devices using non-Apple services. I'll wait. (hint: it's a monopoly, you can't use other services). Yeah, I know you can do a manual backup to e.g. Google Photos. It's not the same as seamless bidirectional sync.
OneDrive supports automatic syncing of photos from iOS to the Mac.
3 replies →
Dropbox works also. It would be cool if one could do it via usb like other phones before.
3uTools
Not everyone is in it for the storage though, I use it mostly as a reliable syncing solution for my photos, as well as for iCloud private relay.
> I use it mostly as a reliable syncing solution for my photos
That is... storage.
1 reply →
| Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and | all the power lies in subscription services?
arguably, we are already there. The majority of people don't use a computer anymore, they use their phone. The phone itself is just an interface to the cloud. If I lost my phone today, and got a new one, the only inconvenience would be the time it takes me to set up the new phone, and the cost of the new phone. I wouldn't lose anything because everything is on the cloud
The answer lies in one of your questions:
> Grocery stores closed to visitors, all shopping done online and delivered to your door
In the UK at least, and I'm sure in a lot of other places, a solid proportion of groceries are now delivered to the door. But, that doesn't mean that supermarkets have closed; if anything, they seem to be busier than ever.
Instead, we have a hybrid market where convenience for the consumer is the ruling factor. The same is going to be true for most of the other situations you mention.
In parts of the US, even low-crime areas, a significant amount of the items at grocery stores are locked up in glass cases. If you want them you have to track down an employee and beg for access (and in some stores they won't let you carry the items to the register). That part of the store might as well be closed to visitors, replaced by vending machines.
I won't buy this stuff on principle. Microcenter locking up the 5090s is one thing, Target locking up a $15 pack of socks is another.
Hah. In my Safeway, the ice cream and half the frozen aisles have a lock on every door. I can’t imagine how much inconvenience that causes everybody. The employees openly say it’s ridiculous and you regularly find a queue in each aisle waiting to be individually served by an employee with a key unlocking and re locking each door they want something from.
From a resource allocation perspective, this doesn't feel particularly undesirable, at least in terms of certain assets like vehicles. The current system of ownership is quite wasteful. I own a high end GPU that I use maybe 4 hours a week for gaming.
Join us on the floor of the gymnasium, Carol
That prompted some googling, but all I could guess, it is some “The walking dead” reference(?)
3 replies →
On the other hand companies go to cloud services as if they were scaling and complex as a FAANG.
> From a resource allocation perspective, this doesn't feel particularly undesirable, at least in terms of certain assets like vehicles. The current system of ownership is quite wasteful.
People are by and large not that dumb. If they consistently choose a more expensive alternative, it means the cheaper alternative is missing something that matters.
> I own a high end GPU that I use maybe 4 hours a week for gaming.
Why? Why currently prevents you from being more efficient and streaming your display from the cloud?
> Why? Why currently prevents you from being more efficient and streaming your display from the cloud?
Latency. 120ms extra latency makes many games uncomfortable, and some of them entirely unplayable.
I agree. However, I don't see the savings from the reduction of waste primarily going to consumers and everyone at large but being kept and collected by the owning class.
If capitalism prices me out of owning property, then I've not much use for it.
Property prices are a big concern nowadays indeed, especially in high-demand areas. Complete (rich) strangers can come and outbid you.
In the most capitalist places (rich areas without rent control), you can rent a place for years trying to save money to buy in the area and see the rent grow fast enough that you can't buy and even have to leave as a renter.
Capitalism seems to work well for transportable things though, including cars. A house isn't transportable and it also tends to be something quite unique, which makes it incompatible with production in series. Even if you are somehow authorized and able to buy a cheap home, you still have the issue of the terrain, which can be more expensive than the home.
That being said I'm sure that there are people living on cheap (per square meter) terrain and happy about it, but that requires the ability to make the best of it, work on it or find work close to it.
Trust me, losing freedom you most probably consider as basic as air we breathe since your birth will stop such petty worries.
And no system would give you property just because it would be nice, neither did communism (I know since I grew up in it and saw its destruction of everything good first hand - it had to be bought for non-trivial money with good old mortgages, and only regime-aligned people could).
8 replies →
Maybe what you're calling capitalism is just oligarchy, in which case the nuance really doesn't matter.
1 reply →
If communism you wouldn’t own anything?
1 reply →
Billions are already "priced out" of owning property, why do you think you joining them would have any broader impact?
EDIT: I don't know why I'm being downvoted. Billions of human beings have absolutely nothing to their names, and they have no power to change things. Because they own nothing. That's a basic fact of our globalized capitalist economy.
3 replies →
Can we please not kid ourselves with thoughts about how this being good from certain perspectives, when the development is _clearly_ bad for consumers?
I do agree with the negatives, but at the same time, I do see some upside. I live in a cycling city, and need to rent a car maybe once a year. why then should I bother myself with the annoyances of vehicle ownership?
1 reply →
Done charitably, I think the mainframe model of shared compute does meet most person's needs where they don't need to care about latency. It would allow us to take advantage of economies of scale. The problem, imo, is that no one has an incentive to do this as a service, so it would turn into rent-seeking.
4 replies →
I'm not sure if you're doing this intentionally or not, but it is incredibly funny to see people on HN doing what is effectively manufacturing consent for people to not actually own anything. We've gone from home computing is the future to no one should own a computer because it's wasteful.
I'm not sure where this sentiment even comes from but if the economy only consists of renters and landlords then we don't even have the thinnest veneer of capitalism anymore. We're just Feudalism 2.0.
The sentiment comes from techbros who see yet another avenue through which to exploit the average person.
Capitalism was never about owning things. It's about accumulating capital (hence the name), and renting stuff is more profitable than selling stuff.
3 replies →
> home computers are replaced by thin clients
phones have 128GB storage and are vastly more powerful than the workstation i did my grad thesis on. Now that electron has exhausted the last major avenue for application bloat, i don't see why thin would mean anything.
Arguably a lot of non-techie personal computing has moved there.
A lot of people are phone+tablet only, no desktop or laptop. As a result they are already living in a thin-ish client with fat server for storage/app/etc from their ecosystem of choice.
Not great!
Thin in form factor only! Phones and tablets represent the cutting edge of what humanity can mass-manufacture, and prices and difficulties are only going up.
Eh. I have newish Apple Silicon MacBook up in my office that I mostly use for multimedia work.
But I spend the most time on a 10 year old MacBook on my dining room table that I basically use as a web browser because that's mostly what I need.
> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services?
Always have been. Ever since the SaaS revolution of the early 2000s high-growth software businesses have been motivated to chase subscription revenue over one-time sales because you get a better multiple.
From an economic perspective The Market would like the average person to spend all their money on rents, and the only option is how you allocate your spending to different rentals. Transportation, housing, food, entertainment (which is most of computing) are just different fiefs to be carved up by industry monopolists.
++1
> How long before car ownership is replaced with autonomous vehicle car pools?
Click here to subscribe for an activation of your seat heater.
More likely people will retain their current devices for longer and wait this whole thing out - there's less reason to upgrade than there was a decade ago.
Processing power increases have noticeably plateaued, with e.g. Nvidia GPUs steadily increasing in TDP to make up for there not being enough gains from updated process nodes. The RTX 5080 is rated at 67% higher TDP than the RTX 2080, but you don't see such an increase throughout most of the 2010s, so before the latter was released.
> More likely people will retain their current devices for longer and wait this whole thing out
Wait it out? The rich have realised that they can buy the entire stock of computing power and deprive the common folk of it, renting it to them instead.
In practical terms, they have infinite resources. Definitely enough to long outlast our lifetimes and the next generation and the next. We can’t “wait out” until they run out of money.
Something or someone will eventually fill the void. Chinese are trying to manufacture GPUs, they are very far from what Nvidia can offer, but they'll slowly get there. As for RAM - the new factories are being built and will hopefully become operational in 2028.
They never run out of "their" money either. Can keep borrowing until eye-watering values are breached, making out like bandits and then run to the govt for a bailout when the bubble bursts.
They've been planning this outcome for a long time. Here's Larry Ellison in 1997: https://youtu.be/Bk1_btV3oIk?t=402
“The personal computer was designed as a standalone device. There was no Internet around 1981 when the PC was invented. There weren't a lot of local area networks and corporations and schools and government agencies [online] back in 1981. The world has changed — there are networks everywhere; around the world and offices and schools and major governments and institutions. So why not have computer networks that are similar to television networks or telephone networks?
A television network is enormously complicated; it's got satellites and microwave relay stations and cable headends and recording studios, and you have this huge professionally-managed network accessed by a very low cost and simple appliance: the television.
Anyone can learn to use a television. 97% percent of American households have televisions. 94% of American households have telephones. They can have very simple appliance attached to enormously complex professionally-managed network. Why shouldn't the computer network be just the same?”
While businesses hate being a dumb pipe and love vendor lock in, lots of customers choose dependence on big tech. Each retail business that only has a Facebook page to save the cost of hiring a web developer reinforces this dependence.
Those people didn't chooso Big Tech; they chose the path of least resistance to getting themselves online and in front of as many eyeballs as possible, because Big Tech stacked the deck over many decades to make it that way.
Who is "they"?
How the hell should I know? Do you have any comments on Mr. Ellison's interview, or are you just here to nitpick my wording?
1 reply →
Computers have never been more powerful. There is less and less of a reason to do annual upgrades. I don’t follow this logic at all. The average consumer does not even need a home computer anymore. Sure if you are upgrading you gaming PC or something similar than your going to feel a bit more of a squeeze but even then it’s not a wild increase in price compared to the hours spent using.
GPUs are still overpriced and memory-limited. There's room for 10-100x improvement that would be noticeable.
Not for the person I was responding to. For the vast majority of consumers your statement does not apply.
"Moore's Law" purports that there is more computer over time.
"Sam's Law" purports that we asymptote to have a consistent amount of computer; or, we have the same amount of computer over time.
"Leslie's Law" purports that we peak and then start to decrease; or, we eventually have less computer over time.
We might be living in Sam's world or even Leslie's world.
"Moore's Law" thrives under socialism.
"Sam's Law" exists under neoliberalism.
"Leslie's Law" is the result of fascism.
I mean, you just made that up but sure.
China is essentially a pinko branded fascist state and they continue to develop better processors
1 reply →
This directly contradicts the bubble narrative.
If hyperscalers and neocloud have excess capacity and low demand, prices should be collapsing
Next stage will be significant broadband/mobile price rises.
This is happening in the UK - 24 month contracts with annual 10-18% rises built in are the norm now
(The regulator worked in cahoots with the companies. A big storm was created during the high-interest rate period inventing/overstating a problem that people can't predict their bills because the rises were based on official inflation figures, which naturally varied. So the companies went: ok sure we can do fixed price rises...(At a nice high rate). This was sold as a 'win' because the rises are now 'predictable')
Plus the cheaper broadband (ADSL) is being phased out and replaced with fibre which for many people is overkill and everyone has to pay the price for that the upgrade whether you need it or not.
Three and Vodafone just merged which will mean price rises in mobile data too due to reduced competition
Subscriptions have always been, and will always be, more economical and efficient than ownership.
Unless you're using a resource 100% of the time, that resource is partially wasted. A GPU can be much cheaper for you if others are allowed to use it when you're asleep.
I don't think this will ever work for gaming, as gaming has strict bandwidth and latency requirements. This means you need to colocate gaming datacenters with the people who actually use them, and people in a given timezone usually play at similar times.
LLMs are a completely different beast. The user experiences of using an LLM next door and using an LLM from across the world are basically indistinguishable. This means you can have a single datacenter with really high GPU utilization during the day.
I like to play AAA games casually. Think Witcher etc... I own a macbook, not really made for that.
Years ago I got a subscription to GE Force Now and never looked back. I can play all the games I want , no problem.
The only thing really needed is a good Internet connection, and my Gbps fiber link works very well.
So... Subscriptions also work well for casual gaming, no problem.
> Game publishers have already publicly floated the idea of not selling their games but charging per hour. Imagine how that impact Call of Duty or GTA.
Don't you worry! R* is already selling one (albeit optional) [1]. it is expected to be there from day 1 in their next title. perhaps this could become closer to reality once the current subscription becomes commonplace.
[1] https://www.rockstargames.com/gta-plus/benefits
>Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services?
Since they're thin clients anyway we could even make them small and mobile, perhaps replace mouse and keyboard with a touch screen.
* - GPU prices rising - RAM prices rising *
How else is grok going to generate semi-naked images of minors?
> Physical media could easily be killed off. Does my iPhone need 1TB of storage or will they shrink that and force everything through iCloud?
For the mobile space, I think we are ripe for a memory inversion of sorts, where going forward a phone has 1TB or more of ram but very little non-volatile storage. The RAM would need to be fast enough to run inferences locally, whereas the storage is does the bare minimum to boot the device on the rare occasions it requires a reboot. All user-specific artifacts would be stored in the cloud.
This seems a likely future for phones and other wearables going forward.
Storage costs less to manufacture and power than RAM. You are starting from a premise and making up a future where it's true, ignoring the realities of physics in the process.
> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients
FWIW these kinds of claims have been a cyclical thing constantly throughout my nearly 3 decades long career. We're always on the verge of thin clients replacing desktops, and then we're suddenly not and things calm down for a couple of years before, oops back again!
Every time there's arguments about saving on cost of hardware, etc. but the reality never seems to line up with the dream.
Subscriptions usually add up to the cost of buying in less than an year.
Companies hope on people being none-the-wiser, but live mostly of people that subscribe for short durations or need the internet component of the services. So, no, prices going up will make subscriptions less popular, not more.
This is different from expensive goods pools (rental cars, houses, airplanes, etc) because there's actual competition on those.
> all the power lies in subscription services
I think NVidia already decided they have all the power when the decided to add 100h limit to their GForce Now service, with that limit getting effective for legacy plans right now. It would be bad if people like they service so much that they avoid buying overpriced hardware :D
> How long before car ownership is replaced with autonomous vehicle car pools?
That is very much a future I look forward to living in. Not requiring to own a car but sharing it efficiently with folks in the neighborhood, would save quite some parking space for unused vehicles in front of homes, and centralize maintenance to the companies operating the vehicle fleet.
> That is very much a future I look forward to living in.
What makes you think owning homes will be convenient in that future?
To quote a proponent of this future: “You’ll own nothing and be happy”.
Had to spend ~$200/ea on refurbished EXOS for work (14TB) when I got refurbished 14TB ultra stars for $90/ea a year ago. It’s getting ridiculous. The ram I put in my gaming rig I built earlier this year was $100, now it’s $500. I want to say “it can’t stay this high forever” but who knows?
No if we're in a working free market. Companies will see the rising prices and start making more of those things, bringing prices back down.
How, when foundries are a natural monopoly? How can you realistically create a startup to build a multibillion / multi year fab ?
There are 3 foundries capable: Samsung, Intel, and TSMC. Companies can contract out some to Samsung and Intel. TSMC can (and is) build more fabs.
Same way you can create a startup to build a multibillion dollar data center presumably.
1 reply →
Ideally. Companies may also be hesitant to invest in expanding production capacity if they assume this is a bubble though.
Companies are always slow to expand production capacity. It takes time to react to unforeseen shifts in the market - but once it does happen, the scale can be quite huge.
(Who's gonna tell him)
Tell him what? Why don't you start?
1 reply →
New physical media could be killed off, but we already have a ton of old retro physical media, more than a person could ever consume in their lifetime. I wouldn’t worry about it. There are more old games and movies out there than you’ll ever be able to watch or play.
All the more reason to self host some part of your life at least. If there’s a market, someone will figure out how to service it, but if everyone gives up totally then all we’ll have is massive, cold, immovable corporations holding all our data.
If you don't own your computer, wouldn't you be more exposed to price increases?
> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services?
It's the thin/thick client cycle, I've already been through it 1.5 times and I'm not that old.
This was always the plan, it's why they keep building datacenters when they know it's a bubble, they just plan to do GeForce NOW on steroids, this time with PCs costing $10k so nobody can afford it.
How does that make sense with this news that cloud gpu costs have risen? That would make the subscription services more expensive as well
This assumes everyone’s sitting on a fast fiber connection which is hardly the case. Even metropolitan areas in most cities don’t have universal fiber connection.
Or we rewrite everything in Rust and stop using JS on websites and watch how the computational efficiency and lack of bloat impacts the market?
I hope we go back into old days up to the late 1990's, and current generation of developers learn to target the computers users can afford.
Bill Gates used to use an average computer at work so he would have the same experience as users.
On the flip side, if the rumored AI crashdepressionapocalyspe does in fact materialize, those things will become super cheap.
but no one has money anymore to buy it. :(
It's just hoarding like at the start of COVID. How much does toilet paper cost right now, and do stores have it?
Are we going to go back to baking sourdough and cutting our own hair too?
I remember the dialup times when you had to pay for internet usage per minute. I hope we won’t revert back to that.
No we dont. Valve will make sure this subscription model will die in infancy.
And thank god for that.
> Imagine how that impact Call of Duty or GTA
By killing the golden goose...
Game pass isn't doing well for developers and they know it.
> - GPU prices rising - RAM prices rising - hard drive prices rising
They tell me the economy is booming
Eggs and hard currencies like gold are also going up as denominated in USD.
It’s not so much that the things are increasing in value as much as the part of large scale inflation that the federal government can’t hide by cooking the CPI.
The dollar is in freefall.
Don't forget the end of Home Onwership.
It already has and I’ve seen the worst of it in less than 24 hours.
I signed up for a Windows Cloud PC trial, got settled into the Windows instance, then the next morning Microsoft terminated the trial for zero reason and wiped out everything in that instance.
You will own nothing and rent nothing, too.
Yes and no.
I think what'll happen here is that these computing price increases will be what finally makes certain ML startups un-economical. That's what will precipitate the AI bubble burst. The whole thing runs on investor capital, so it keeps going until some investors lose their capital. Once the bubble bursts, you're going to get some really cheap GPUs, RAM, and hard drives (as well as cloud computing prices), as many of the more marginal data centers go out of business and liquidate their hardware.
It's going to be a rough couple years for hobbyist computer aficionados though. In the near future I'd try to wait this one out and get a job at an AI startup instead.
> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services?
Astronaut 2: Always have been...
> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services?
I've been hearing this since 2010s when Microsoft introduced UEFI iirc and I've heard it for a while. I honestly thought in my teens in the mid to late 2010s that by now I'd have a few Petabyte hard drives. Shame.
I've said it many times, everyone wants AI but nobody wants to foot the real bill for AI. The cost is too high. Once the bubble bursts, whoever is left standing might charge reasonable prices that are profitable, until it becomes more cost effective.
Your PC has been viewed as an appliance now since 2017. The goal, to get you on as many service subscriptions as possible.
I think a better or at least adjacent question might be: do consumers want to pay full price for an object that isn’t subsidized by services? Do we actually want physical objects?
Even the things that aren’t technically subscription feel like they are. I have a Kenmore fridge I bought in 2020. The extended warranty just ran out and the thing died. I called a tech. $400 to replace a series of motors. I looked into doing it myself and it’s outside of my time or ability. I have a basement beer fridge that is admittedly less efficient but it’s still kicking and it’s from the mid 80s. I realized I’m effectively ON a subscription plan for a fridge. $900-$1,200 for five years.
How much is a smartphone that lasts (do they even) and is NOT subsidized by cloud services? I have a 128gb iPhone and though I barely use any apps I’m constantly maxing my space because I take a lot of photos.
I hate to sound like a graduate student writing a thesis on capitalism but like water flow, it just feels like companies will always default to maximum profits. Didn’t instant pot and tupper ware just go out of business because they made a product everyone needed but only once? There’s no long term profit growth in any model where we’re not sucking off the teet of some company.
Assuming you are a capitalist that is in it to maximize shareholder value then yes, that is the direction you will push the world in. Why sell me a car once if you can charge me a rent forever?
You will own nothing and be happy.
Also check the agenda 2030. The European digital wallet. The cyberscore.
All those elements together makes a digital Europe (and more) where there's no cash anymore, where your website has to be compliant to be working with EU's ID and payments systems.
It's going to be all centralised and about subscriptions, no matter if it's about your electricity bill or your groceries.
The future is we all gonna go to war when there's no more juice to squeeze by the billionaires.
The future is coming in hot. Just look at what's happening lately.
Also, even if/when the AI bubble pops (whether it exists is irrelevant to my point), all the companies who have been hoarding the hardware can naturally progress into selling this new "stream everything through a subscription" service, further delaying (possibly forever if it's successful) price normalization.
We're looking at a glut of all of these things once the bubble bursts and the mindless trend followers jump on a trend.
> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services?
No we don't. In Eastern Block during communism everything was either expensive or unavailable to the point that picking up broken TV on the side of the road and dismantling it for parts was making complete sense and you could actually learn something.
Today it is much easier. You can visit eBay or AliExpress and buy old server crap from 2016 - i.e. Xeon E3 + X99 board + 32GB DDR4 RAM = 150EUR or just buying older laptops, computers from eBay. That's where consumer market is heading.
The fact that hardware is going to be computationally constrained will finally force software developers to stop wasting resources. Having application which is able to run on old Windows 10 with i3 and 4GB of RAM without being sluggish will become competing advantage.
Windows 10 is mostly EOL because M$ doesn't want you using older machines, no matter how powerful.
This should be a crime and they should be forced to either keep supporting Win10 (at least security updates) and/or let you install Win11 on older hardware without TPM 2.0 modules (which is a total fucking lie that it's necessary, it's purely for monetary gain so that they can track you with a unique ID for ads).
That does not matter at all. When it comes to computation people will just use what's at hand. Windows 7 are still around, Windows 10 are going to be here for a long time.
"you don't need end to end encryption, use our deduplicated storage"
Time to go outside and touch grass it’s the only financially responsible thing to do until prices become reasonable again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ll_own_nothing_and_be_ha...
And as we've seen, once the market has been captured, they will start enshittifying everything to squeeze as much profit as they can and we'll have no alternatives.
I am starting to think the last smartphone I bought is the last one I am going to be able to afford unless AI capitalism crashes and burns.
"You will own nothing and be happy."
> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services?
You will own nothing, and you will be happy.
No, we're looking at a future where the bubble bursts and more people get shoved back into poverty.
None of the AI investment makes any sense.
You’ll own nothing and like it
"You won't own anything and you will love it!"
[dead]
"You will own nothing and be happy." - World Economic Forum (WEF)
> - GPU prices rising
> - RAM prices rising
> - hard drive prices rising
This is great news. It means the industry is expanding a lot and we'll be getting better consumer hardware at the end of the day. Innovation has always dropped down from the enterprise space to the consumer, as far back as the first electronic calculators and microcomputers.
Keeping in mind the consumer space will see minimal trickle down from used datacenter electronics in ~3-5 years from this boom.
The GPUs are generally rack-scale integrated units rather than PCIe. The bulk of the GPU RAM is HBM, so not very scavenge-able for consumer GPU mods. Power consumption of the blackwell GPUs in most solutions like the DGX B200 isn't really viable for home use even if you had the space and hookups for a fraction of the original 10ru system. The hard drives and SSDs will be likely be shredded on site and never re-sold as used. RAM will be registered ECC, only suitable for server-class motherboards.
I'm pretty sure that those racks will be usable for something, even if it's not direct-to-consumer. Startup businesses, academic/research use, smaller-scale HPC etc. will all be creating demand for the stuff long after it stops being useful for cutting-edge AI workloads.
That's fallacious: enterprise stuff doesn't always make sense at consumer level and doesn't always "drop down" for that reason. We've yet to see whether that particular stuff makes consumer sense.
Say goodbye to falling AWS prices. From now on its gonna be higher and higher.
That's exactly it. It's not like all these data centers are only going to teach models or perform inference. The goal is renters' economy.
You forgot:
- while Big Tech is subsidized with our taxes
- and even if you get a GPU it will be too expensive to run it due to electricity costs (thanks to Big Tech)
- and most people end up working for Big Tech's gig economy without any benefits at below subsistence
> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services?
Yes. Personal computing is dying if hardware vendors continue to cater to imaginary data centers for our imaginary AGI.
Silver price rising. Gold price rising. Bitcoin price rising.
It's got another name: inflation. Western economies are crumbling under gigantic public debt, representing 130% of the GDP in many countries and they're doubling down on public spending.
The only way out is either defaulting on the debt (like Greece partially did) or debasing the currency.
Monkeys have been left at the helm since decades and they only know how to do one thing: spending taxpayers dollars and endebtting countries ever more.