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rainsfordtoday at 12:19 AM4 repliesview on HN

I know it's at least a little irrational, but I am indescribably angry with the pricing trajectory of personal computing. I'm not all that young and for pretty much all my life the computers you as a random person could buy have consistently become massively more performant and massively cheaper over time. Even when the exponential performance increases started to taper off, every few years you could buy or build a new computer that was either cheaper or faster than the one you already had.

That trend of the last several decades has been completely destroyed in the last year or so. Sure you can buy a new computer that might be slightly better than one a few years old, but it will be significantly more expensive to the point where an upgrade is almost certainly not worth it unless money is no object. Even replacing a computer from the pre-AI era would be virtually impossible at anywhere near what it cost you to buy it new unless it was verging on truly ancient by computer standards. Computers have always been a counterpoint to inflation everywhere else, but now that seems to be not only no longer true, but computer costs are inflating significantly worse than other goods.

I find myself increasingly in favor of the movement against data centers. Not because I think data centers are bad on their own, but because of the hording of computing resources they represent and the impact that has on people trying to buy any sort of computing device for their personal use. The PC I built 2 years ago is basically irreplaceable at anywhere near the price I paid for it. That's a truly unacceptable state of affairs in personal computing.


Replies

EvanAndersontoday at 1:42 AM

I don't think it's an accident that the market is on a trajectory toward personal computer (and particularly storage) rental being the only economically viable game. There are significant players who will profit directly. Indirectly it helps companies for whom end users owning general purpose computers and storage threaten their business models.

The industry has little incentive to fix this problem and as the market shrinks so does the incentive.

We lived thru the PC revolution. It looks over now to me.

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tqitoday at 2:00 AM

I feel like we are basically reliving the COVID era supply chain crunch, that it's basically inevitable that in 18-36 months more capacity will come online and prices will crash back to earth.

Whether OEMs like Apple pass these savings along to consumers is tbd though.

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ninjalanternshktoday at 3:19 AM

“It costs a lot to buy a new computer better than the one I have” is another way of saying “computers aren’t going obsolete as fast” which sounds like a great thing.

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apitoday at 12:50 AM

Isn’t this just inflation? We are in a highly inflationary environment. Everything is going up in nominal terms.

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