Comment by benjiro
17 days ago
Your forgetting a little detail ... While you do not need a lot of new stuff, companies need buyers. A lot of companies work on rather thing margins and losing potentially 10 a 20% sales can result in people getting fired, or companies shutting down.
Remember, its not just about "O, X big brands sells less, they can deal with it". But a lot of brands have suppliers who feed that system. Or PC component makers like ... heatsinks, Fans, Cases ... seeing a 20% less sales because people buy less new PCs.
People do not realize how much is linked in the industry. Smaller GPU card makers are literally saying that they may be forced to leave the industry because of drops in sales and the memory prices making the products too expensive.
We can live a long time on old hardware but hardware also limits. Hey, the wife's laptop is from 2019, just before Covid (2020 when a lot of people bought new laptops). The battery is barely holding on. Replacement? None (reputable) ... So in a year that laptop is dead.
How about phones? Same issue ... battery is the build in obsolete maker.
You see the issue. It goes beyond what what most people realize.
Wait when a recession hits when the whole AI bubble bursts and cascades down the already weakened industry. Unlike previous bubbles, the hardware being build is so specialized, that little will hit the normal consumer market. So there will not be a flood of cheap GPUs or memory being dumped on the market.
> the memory prices making the products too expensive.
There seems to be a very simple (if not expensive and time consuming) solution to this: increase capacity. If the market had real confidence in AI, manufacturers would have started yesterday on new fabs. Yet we're seeing the opposite. Companies exiting the consumer space altogether and nobody rushing in to claim that void in the market. It feels like everyone is in wait and see mode
Yeah, some hardware vendors that sell things like pc cases or coolers have definitely noticed that people are really building way less PCs
I'm honestly not worried. My laptop battery is at ~70% health, same for phone. It's not great but it's enough to be useful.
Hopefully current companies failing, and yes closing down, might in fact be the opportunity for new companies focusing precisely on different dimension, namely repairability rather than top specs. I have in mind MNT, Pine64, Librem, FairPhone, or projects like LiFePO4wered/Pi+ or battery adapters.
There are new actors that are not computer manufacturers but precisely reconsider the value chain instead of solely focusing on higher specs.