Compared to crypto and NFTs, there is at least something in this mix, not that I could identify it.

I've become increasingly comfortable with LLM usage, to the point that myself from last year would hate me. Compared to projects I used to do with where I'd be deep into Google Reddit and Wikipedia, ChatGPT gives me pretty good answers much more quickly, and far more tailored to my needs.

I'm getting into home labs, and currently everything I have runs on ass old laptops and phones, but I do daydream if the day where I can run an ethically and sustainably trained, LLM myself that compares to current GPT-5 because as much as I hate to say it, it's really useful to my life to have a sometimes incorrect but overalls knowledgeable voice that's perpetually ready to support me.

The irony is that I'll never build a server that can run a local LLM due to the price hikes caused by the technology in the first place.

It's the space race all over again!

that would be the funniest thing.

At the same time, just expanding a device with new parts is a far cheaper way to get more performance than buying a new device - after all, whatever price problem there is with some kinds of parts, it will be the same whether they're sold as lose parts or as part of a device.

Poor working class young me in a poorer European country after getting his first PC quickly found out that to get a more powerful machine he had to start upgrading that machine because there wasn't money to buy a whole new one every couple of years.

My point is that this might very well yield the very opposite effect of what you describ: buying whole devices to replace older models becomes too expensive so people favor more expandable devices - because those can have their performance improved with just some new parts, which are cheaper than getting a whole new device - and the market just responds to that.

I think most people in countries which until recently were wealthier, such as the US, are far too used to the mindset of "throw the old one out and but a new one" which is not at all the mindset of people in places were resources are constrained or require a lot bigger fraction of people's income to buy (certainly my experience living in the UK after having grown up in a country which was much poorer left me with that impression: the Brits just felt incredibly wasteful to somebody who like me grew up in a situation were "gettting a new iPhone every 2 years" was the kind of think only a rich person or a stupid person would do).

what's baffling is that modular desktops are probably a better long-term money making strategy for hardware makers. When you can cycle gear with ease - the temptation to try something new will be bigger.

What makes you think that? Even as prices rise, people are still buying and building PCs.

The AI builders must be buying all the fab time and components to go to the build outs.

Desktops will go first and fade as the entire production chain stops.

Notebooks will be next, at least PC parts have a premium price, notebooks are too cheap to avoid it for long. Game consoles will face the same pressure.

The supply shock is going to be as bad as COVID.

You could just run Linux on a 2009 thinkpad. Oh no, I will have to buy even cheaper machines to run Linux.

I ordered an S10 tab, paid my first rate, they finally try to order it

Who is "they" in this? Some sort of intermediary you were using?

Doing everything in the cloud is crazy. I'm so glad I jumped over to Linux a couple years ago!

In my head I thought one could make relatively cheap high capacity in 2.5" SATA form factor by having more NAND chips of lower capacity. You give up speed and PCB space but that's fine since bandwidth and IOPS are limited by SATA anyway and there's plenty of space compared to M.2.

Turns out to not shake out that way, controller ICs that support SATA aren't coming out any more, and NAND ICs are internally stacked to use up channels while not taking up PCB space.

There are some enterprise options, but they're mad expensive.

There are a number of simultaneous bubbles at the moment, the AI one being a lot like the Internet bubble of the late 90s but possibly worse (bigger share of GDP and it seems there is actually less value in most of the tech invested in as "AI" than on the Internet-related tech) and at the same time there is a financial debt bubble like in 2007 (in the US mainly around loans for car purchase, but more in general overall consumer indebtness has reached the 2007 levels), a worldwide realestate bubble (measured in terms of house-price to income ratios) and a stockmarket bubble measured in terms of P/E ratios, just to mention the biggest ones.

The risk is that when one blows the rest blow by contagium: something the 2008 Crash showed us is that in modern markets when there are sudden large losses on a asset class it pulls money over to cover them from all other asset classes, in turn creating downwards price pressure in those other asset classes, which in turn might cause price collapses there with large losses and that will pull even more money out from other asset classes. IMHO assets classes with historically high valuation not backed by fundamentals (for example stocks with P/E which are 10+ times the historical average) are likely to be far more likely to collapse when money gets pulled away from them to cover losses elsewhere. Also there is the panic factor: fearing exactly what I describe, many investors will preemptivelly sell their assets in those assets classes they feel as more speculative - i.e. less supported by fundamentals - possibly creating the very problem they fear in those markets by starting a stampede to the exits.

All this to say that I expect this one when it blows up will be bigger than 2008 and 2000, possibly bigger than both of those combined.

I did similar when preparing my wife and I for windows 10 EOL. I went back to Linux on the new drive, my wife to Windows 11. Honestly both have a similar amount of issues (mostly wake from sleep challenges on Linux, although my PC wasn't great about waking from sleep on Windows to begin with) and most importantly my wife can still play Fortnite and I can have fun trying new stuff out and reveling at how every single game I try just works on Linux whereas 5 years ago it was more of a 50/50 chance whether or not a game would work

I bought exactly that one for my linux box (because I swapped mains to linux and wanted a big boot :-) ), but that was a while back, it's 280€ now, so $328...

This one if for the raz pi 5.

More importantly, what brand, type and/or specs. It's easy to get cheap disks with crap performance. I have a few around that we quickly dubbed "Super Slow Disks".

https://www.shopmyexchange.com/

For vets. No taxes and shipping is free or a standard $5 charge.

May all bankrupt when the bubble bursts.

Government. Ain't nobody want to get caught "stealing" from the government (they're probably going to be destroyed ten years after they're completely obsolete). Waste of damn near a hundred terabytes of storage.

And then most people won't know what to do with it, possibly flooding the helpdesk with requests.