Sadly I fear worse, the bulk of people will adapt in the stupidest way...

What's coming... is obvious. When the AI bubble bursts, there will be an absurd amount more data centers than use for them... and all the hardware is in forms that aren't going to be convertable into consumer devices.

What's going to happen is what microsoft, amazon, and google have been dreaming of for a decade... Remember google Stadia, Luna etc...

People won't be buying PCs... they will be buying, thin clients. Your PC will just stream your hardware from a data center. The music and movie industries will be happy because the providers can scan for pirated content... governments may flat out ban individuals from owning personal computers, that's a security risk they can't control, they are already looking into bills to prevent personal AI systems. No worries of people bypassing age verification, or running custom OS's or firmware that can't be controlled.

Best of all it's super profitable, instead of a few grand for a one time purchase, they can hit you up every month... and gradually raise the prices like cable, like movie streaming. Maybe even vendor lockouts... you gotta stream an MS computer to get access to office 365, but you'll also need an amazon subscription to run some other applications, or games or whatever they locked in exclusivity for.

Saw this coming when Microsoft admitted to have bought up loads of hardware they couldn't actually use yet. I'm convinced the data centre build out is to hoard all the computing capacity so we are forced to use their cloud services because our own hardware isn't capable.

If this keeps up in a couple generations every personal computing device will essentially be a thin client with everything running remotely for a subscription.

You wish.

In 2015 it would've shipped with a functional operating system.

I am fucking 🤏 this close to starting a business where I just slam LMDE on poor people's laptops and put on LXQT and call it a day.

The only problem is that if someone can't afford a new laptop, they can hardly afford to pay me.

Also, I'm only good enough to just shove linux on a shitty computer, not be a 24/7 linux customiser. Also, getting paid to install linux on people's computers seems like it violates... something.

We allowed tech companies to have more money than entire countries by repealing the laws that forced them to reinvest their profits. They in turn bought out supplier's entire stock of RAM to stifle their competition and eventually remove tech ownership from the lower classes. This has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with greed.

Let's see the positive part of it! Now programmers will have to learn how to actually optimise their programs and NOT to use Electron, Tauri and any other hybrid framework ever again!! /s

Looks around Oh fu- Everyones just vibecoding their shit

My Latitude from like 2019 with 32GB of DDR4 sure is feeling fancy these days.

Silver lining? Just maybe software vendors might be a little more careful with memory usage.

I won't hold my breath though.

Welcome to the Brazilian personal computer experience. Enjoy!

Meanwhile at the Microsoft Store

I bought a computer in 2007 that was 8GB of RAM and a TB Hard-drive, but a recent windows update bricked the machine because it didn't have enough space. Is that what's going to happen to these machines? Just, right off-the-line and into the garbage?

Guys guys chill. Just use Claude to reverse engineer everything you use in Rust and it'll all fit in 4gb

I need to be honest here. I bought my current "gaming" laptop in 2020 because my PC got struck by lightning right at the height of the last GPU crisis and I needed something. It came with 8gb of RAM, upgradable to 32 gb. I have never needed more. That system runs Cyberpunk at 100 steady fps, and I have no desire to play anything more graphically intense than that.

That being said, I wanted to upgrade last year because it was possible. I looked up the price for SO-DIMM RAM right after it skyrocketed and said "nope, I'm good".

I had 32 gigs of RAM in the PC I built in 2015.

I don't actually see the point of needing 48 GB for a notepad instance.

Ah, yes, it runs on a framework of a framework and spies on me...

Just wait until AI sends most of us back to a time when we were unemployed.

8gb don't fit windows 11 plus chrome

To be fair, the amount of RAM was stagnating for a decade already.

Pretty sure the entry level machines has 4GB back then

They can make more money selling fewer items for higher prices. As long as there are people who can buym the prices will go up. Even the Chinese chip contenders are selling under performing products for the same or higher prices than the established ones.

That is no longer a laptop

Lol Win11 on 8GB. My job got me that at first, i was at 95% usage on idle.

Good! We do not need most of the volume of code that we ship nowadays anyway. Need to get out of the user’s way so they can do whatever they’re here to do, not give them a Hoover dam of bullshit

4GB is fine on a proper operating system. I'd still be using my 2011 mba with debian if it wasn't for the fan noise.

If you genuinely need more, good for you buy something more powerful. Most folks just use web browsers, and if you stay out of the chromium ecosystem those tend to be relatively lightweight in my experience.

I'm also of the opinion we should abandon the modern web and shift back to gopher but that's just like, my opinion, man