How soon before modular PCs are killed outright and the only desktops you can buy are mini PCs with no expansion or upgradability at all?
Someone on the other thread in this same community (this was posted twice) suggested thin clients and subscription based cloud instances. Mini PCs would be a mercy in comparison and I don’t think we’re getting that mercy.
Well… modularity is kinda coming to an end anyway, regardless of supply chain moves. Apple’s M series has shown that op decoders and unified memory are the low-hanging fruit for overall system performance improvements, and that means less modularity.
I think Valve sees the writing on the wall and is trying to get ahead of the game via FEX and the Steam Frame. Intel and AMD are pretty much stuck playing Nvidia’s game at this point, and Qualcomm has an incredible opportunity here. I’m still rooting for RISC-V, and I think it may end up being the long-term winner in like 10-15 years time.
But either way, x86-style modularity is not long for this world. From a purely technical standpoint, I think that’s good. Adding the political and economic situation into the mix… well… fuck, we’re mega-fucked. About the only thing we have going for us as consumers is the fact that this is already headed towards a reset. So if we do gain some leverage, we can make a big change all at once. If we don’t though… things will get much worse.
So even the enthusiasts would rather, or are probably going to be forced to, give up their custom-built PCs, which they can do whatever they want with and run whatever OS and software they want on, for locked-down black boxes they don’t even own anymore, even possibly to the degree where they can’t even install their own OS anymore, so no more Linux or BSD outside of some niche hardware? That sucks.
You can run Linux on ARM. I do. And let’s not act like x86 wasn’t full of Microsoft-led efforts to undermine Linux. Anyone who’s had to disembowel their BIOS settings to the tune of “Your PC will be unsafe! Are you sure you want to run a LEGACY OS???” is familiar.
I’m not a huge fan of the idea of buying CPU+GPU+RAM+mobo all as one unit. But like… that’s what tends to happen. Audio cards, SATA drives, network cards, these things all used to be separated until motherboards offered features to streamline things.
The real problem is not form factor, but lack of competition. If there were 10-15 Qualcomms out there, offering different combos and a la carte options, there’d be no problem. It’s only because there are a tiny number of dominant players in the space that technical consolidation automatically translates to abusing consumers.
It’s almost like there are consequences when companies are allowed to merge until there’s only a few left.
