Comment by upboundspiral
5 hours ago
Phones and laptops from a few years ago are not suddenly unusable.
Yes, the cutting edge is very nice, but any laptop past 2016 is useable for the average person. Even gpu inference on older process nodes is perfectly doable. The HPC space absolutely prefers newer chips but hasn't ripped out their 2018 chips in their clusters because they still deliver value.
And sure, the latest best things sells for higher margins for now, but with the way consumer prices are going, people may start choosing older still perfectly capable models that cost less.
The greater danger to a working economy is not absence of the absolute must cutting edge chips but lack of independence which this initiative seems to seek to curtail. Good for Germany.
>Yes, the cutting edge is very nice, but any laptop past 2016 is useable for the average person.
Except, it's the cutting edge that makes more money than making HW from 2016. And EU would definitely like to make more money rather than less.
Plus, Germany and EU doesn't even make 2016 levels of PC HW to have sovereignty there. They still depend on importing US chips made in Taiwan even if they want 2016 HW.
>people may start choosing older still perfectly capable models that cost less.
Doesn't really matter what people are choosing, the high margin parts are going towards datacenter customers now, not to consumers. Consumers have little choice now.
And with new consumer stuff seeing price increases, even old used HW is also seeing price increases due to supply and demand. And none of this is a win for Germany and the EU since they don't capture much value from this.