O7
We will deal with old hardware on clandestine black markets running from matabots & exchanging USB drives with foss software, dank memes, & old games …
I don’t think we’re the last generation of PC builders. But I do agree with /u/kahjtheundedicated 's comment that it is increasingly going to skew towards very high-end builds.
I think there’s a couple reasons for this. The first, of course, is the strangulation of supply causing sharp, sharp price increases. When the entry point for making a “decent” machine starts to sit around $1200+, it’s obviously going to turn people away (especially when one of the big points of Build Your Own was once ‘it is actually financially better’).
But the other is that there is far less of a growing market. People in the ‘young-teenager’ to ‘young adult range’ - the point at which they’d once start getting excited over punchy new specs and customizing their computer - are increasingly attached to handheld devices and even the instant gratification of consoles rather than high-spec PC games or the custom built machines to run them.
Please sir, may I rent a computer please?
On one hand things suck and we are getting priced out of our hobby, but on the other side, pc gaming was going through a consumerism/fomo era so I’m glad that has ended.
Put it on the massive pile of stuff that will bite us in the ass in a major way in the future.
I’d buy em if I could afford em.
Doubt it, but it does feel like the good times are behind us. I imagine pc building as we know it is going to continue to skew towards high end.
Though I can see mid range and lower end stuff move in the direction of sbc’s and stuff like the Framework desktop, where your cpu, ram, and probably gpu are a single package soldered to your main board. So when you upgrade you might keep your chassis, psu, and storage, but everything else is one piece and has to be replaced at the same time. Which, tbh, I don’t think is the worst thing in the world.
If all the medium range stuff is just last year’s high end, I can live with that.
I see it going high end builds, mid and low end will become single board mini computers. Super charge this as we phase out x86
I feel like the popularity or gaming handhelds could help accelerate this as well. I would actually love a higher performance sbc standard that you could chuck into a mini desktop, laptop, or handheld. That would kind of be the dream for me. You could cascade your boards down to your other systems. Like take the board out of the desktop and put it in your handheld, and the one from your handheld into your laptop. Would be sick
You will own nothing–because you can’t afford it, and be happy
