alt Hacker NewsWe won't be in a supply crunch forever. We'll have a demand crunch. The demand of powerful consumer hardware will shrink so much that producing them will lose the economics of scale. It 've always been bound to happen, just delayed by the trend of pursuing realistic graphics for games.
People who are willing to drop $20k on a computer might not be affected much tho.
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My bet is that phone hardware will be used more and more in mini PCs and laptops keeping the cost down and volume up. We see it with Apple and many Chinese mini PC makers I looked at.
Apple just launched a $600 amazing laptop and the top models have massive performance. What are we talking about here?
If they choke the consumer PC long enough the segment will die
> We'll have a demand crunch
This is what I'm afraid of. As more stuff moves to the cloud helped in part by the current prices of HW, the demand for consumer hardware will drop. This will keep turning the vicious cycle of rising consumer HW prices and more moves to the cloud.
I can already see Nvidia rubbing their hands together in expectation of the massive influx of customers to their cloud gaming platform. If a GPU is so expensive, you move to a rental model and the subsequent drop in demand will make GPUs even more expensive. They're far from the only ones with dollar signs in their eyes, between the money and total control over customers this future could bring.
Being entirely reliant on someone else's software and hardware is a bleak thought for a person used to some degree of independence and self sufficiency in the tech world.
The problem is that there is a very large incentive for three large companies to corner the market on computing components, forcing consumers to rent access instead of owning.
> We won't be in a supply crunch forever.
This what always happens in capitalism. Scarcity is almost always followed by glut
> People who are willing to drop $20k on a computer might not be affected much tho.
They probably won't, but those willing to drop $3-10k will be if the consumer and data-center computing diverge at the architectural level. It's the classical hollowing out the middle - most of the offerings end up in a race-to-the-bottom chasing volume of price-sensitive customers, the quality options lose economies of scale and disappear, and the high-end becomes increasingly bespoke/pricey, or splits off into a distinct market with an entirely different type of customers (here: DC vs. individuals).