I’m so glad I bought my laptop when I did recently, with plenty of RAM and storage. Just in time before that stuff becomes impossible to find or impossibly unaffordable.
This generation of hardware will probably be the plateau. The decline and fall is just around the bend. Maybe another generation of CPUs before those go for bust, too. They can rent out GPUs, RAM, and storage, but as far as I’m aware the CPU needs to be local on the device. At least, a CPU needs to be on the device…
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this trend is occuring just as NPUs are starting to hit the market. Those chips are too powerful to let the plebeians own and use without restriction, in the corpo’s view.
Whether a better system replaces this one after it falls, or we enter an era where consumer hardware is a thing of the past, remains to be seen. Maybe when the AI bubble bursts, tech companies will have to liquidate their data centers and secondhand servers will become cheap. That would do wonders for the fediverse and the decentralized web…
Passerby6497@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Posting scammy Amazon links feels like cheating when having these discussions, but I kinda get where they’re coming from. The fact that people can try to sell a laptop with only 64gb disk is absolutely mental to me, because that’s not even enough to let the BASE OS run normally and update reliably. And that’s before you start doing anything on it.