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- GPU prices rising - RAM prices rising - hard drive prices rising Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the p

by xvxvx 10mo ago

- GPU prices rising - RAM prices rising - hard drive prices rising Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services? ‘You don't need storage space, use our cloud subscription’ ‘You don’t need processing power, stream your games through our subscription service.’ Game publishers have already publicly floated the idea of not selling their games but charging per hour. Imagine how that impact Call of Duty or GTA. Physical media could easily be killed off. Does my iPhone need 1TB of storage or will they shrink that and force everything through iCloud? How long before car ownership is replaced with autonomous vehicle car pools? Grocery stores closed to visitors, all shopping done online and delivered to your door by drone.

nova22033 10mo ago
* - GPU prices rising - RAM prices rising * How else is grok going to generate semi-naked images of minors?
aurareturn 10mo ago
Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services? No if we're in a working free market. Companies will see the rising prices and start making more of those things, bringing prices back down.
- JustFinishedBSG 10mo ago
  How, when foundries are a natural monopoly? How can you realistically create a startup to build a multibillion / multi year fab ?
  - immibis 10mo ago
    Same way you can create a startup to build a multibillion dollar data center presumably.
    - grim_io 10mo ago
      I don't think that laying bricks and operating a crane is on the same level(or universe) of complexity as making and operating high-end semiconductor machines.
  - aurareturn 10mo ago
    There are 3 foundries capable: Samsung, Intel, and TSMC. Companies can contract out some to Samsung and Intel. TSMC can (and is) build more fabs.
- oliwary 10mo ago
  Ideally. Companies may also be hesitant to invest in expanding production capacity if they assume this is a bubble though.
  - zozbot234 10mo ago
    Companies are always slow to expand production capacity. It takes time to react to unforeseen shifts in the market - but once it does happen, the scale can be quite huge.
- MSFT_Edging 10mo ago
  (Who's gonna tell him)
  - rfrey 10mo ago
    Tell him what? Why don't you start?
    - MSFT_Edging 10mo ago
      The free market as described is imaginary. Large companies due to their size hold a lot of power, and can use a mix of regulatory capture and monopolies to make better ideas financially infeasible to bring to light.
zwnow 10mo ago
> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services? Yes. Personal computing is dying if hardware vendors continue to cater to imaginary data centers for our imaginary AGI.
gonzalohm 10mo ago
If you don't own your computer, wouldn't you be more exposed to price increases?
zozbot234 10mo ago
> - GPU prices rising > - RAM prices rising > - hard drive prices rising This is great news. It means the industry is expanding a lot and we'll be getting better consumer hardware at the end of the day. Innovation has always dropped down from the enterprise space to the consumer, as far back as the first electronic calculators and microcomputers.
- ZoneZealot 10mo ago
  Keeping in mind the consumer space will see minimal trickle down from used datacenter electronics in ~3-5 years from this boom. The GPUs are generally rack-scale integrated units rather than PCIe. The bulk of the GPU RAM is HBM, so not very scavenge-able for consumer GPU mods. Power consumption of the blackwell GPUs in most solutions like the DGX B200 isn't really viable for home use even if you had the space and hookups for a fraction of the original 10ru system. The hard drives and SSDs will be likely be shredded on site and never re-sold as used. RAM will be registered ECC, only suitable for server-class motherboards.
  - zozbot234 10mo ago
    I'm pretty sure that those racks will be usable for something, even if it's not direct-to-consumer. Startup businesses, academic/research use, smaller-scale HPC etc. will all be creating demand for the stuff long after it stops being useful for cutting-edge AI workloads.
- ezst 10mo ago
  That's fallacious: enterprise stuff doesn't always make sense at consumer level and doesn't always "drop down" for that reason. We've yet to see whether that particular stuff makes consumer sense.
pydry 10mo ago
We're looking at a glut of all of these things once the bubble bursts and the mindless trend followers jump on a trend.
phito 10mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ll_own_nothing_and_be_happy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ll_own_nothing_and_be_ha... And as we've seen, once the market has been captured, they will start enshittifying everything to squeeze as much profit as they can and we'll have no alternatives.
walthamstow 10mo ago
> You don't need storage space, use our cloud subscription This is here already. A long time ago, maybe even before covid, I asked a table of iPhone-owning friends who pays Apple a monthly sub for storage, and every hand went up. I know you mention home computers, but most of my friends don't have one. Their iPhone is their computer.
- supriyo-biswas 10mo ago
  Not everyone is in it for the storage though, I use it mostly as a reliable syncing solution for my photos, as well as for iCloud private relay.
  - vcanales 10mo ago
    > I use it mostly as a reliable syncing solution for my photos That is... storage.
    - vladvasiliu 10mo ago
      I think GP's point was rather the "optimized storage" schtick of apple devices, where they "unload" whatever you have locally on iCloud and use that as "regular" storage. Syncing, even though it also actually stores, is a fairly different use case. Could you implement that some other way? Sure. But I still think it's fair to point it's a different use case than "regular storage".
- vladvasiliu 10mo ago
  As sibling says, the question is too vague. I also pay for icloud, but I store all my things locally on my devices. The point is effortless sync and basic backup (protect pictures from phone theft). I also pay Hetzner for a storage box or whatever it's called, where I regularly send backups of my stuff with restic. One of the sources is a local fat ZFS NAS, which I can access from everywhere via wireguard. Yet, the only reason I'm contemplating buying a new iPhone is to get larger local storage. I'm also biting my fingers for not having pulled the trigger on a larger SSD for my main machine two months ago. Every solution has different use cases, and I think no single one is perfect. I get the best value from using a mix.
mikasisiki 10mo ago
It’s possible. Either way, many people literally sleep in a monthly subscription model — rent.
- croes 10mo ago
  Because buying a house is even more unaffordable.
- zwnow 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  - forty 10mo ago
    I don't disagree, but I would argue that the same thing can be said from any kind of "investor" who then capture most of the value produced just because it turned out they had the money that others had not (most of the time just because they were born in the right family)
  - cpursley 10mo ago
    [flagged]
    - zwnow 10mo ago
      > Landlord isn’t nearly as profitable as some people think. I am aware of that, still doesnt stop people from speculation and therefor preventing others from buying.
      - cpursley 10mo ago
        If you’re talking about the corporate landlords, yeah. But the real issue is we’re not creating enough housing of the correct type in the US (like missing middle). Only choices are either McMansions or “luxury” apartments that are made from cardboard.
    - Der_Einzige 10mo ago
      Stuff like this is unironically (okay, kind of ironically) why I identify as a landchad. https://www.reddit.com/r/LoveForLandchads/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LoveForLandchads/
bocytron 10mo ago
This has been theorized as Technofeudalism: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technofeudalism https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technofeudalism
haritha-j 10mo ago
From a resource allocation perspective, this doesn't feel particularly undesirable, at least in terms of certain assets like vehicles. The current system of ownership is quite wasteful. I own a high end GPU that I use maybe 4 hours a week for gaming.
- wslh 10mo ago
  On the other hand companies go to cloud services as if they were scaling and complex as a FAANG.
- XorNot 10mo ago
  If capitalism prices me out of owning property, then I've not much use for it.
  - ezst 10mo ago
    Maybe what you're calling capitalism is just oligarchy, in which case the nuance really doesn't matter.
    - HPsquared 10mo ago
      I think the standard argument is that capitalism inevitably develops into oligarchy. Even the most basic setup of property rights protected by a legal system, presupposes a central authority of some kind who makes the ultimate decisions. Where there is law, there are courts, executive and legislative functions. More complex structures like joint stock companies introduce their own dynamics but also depend on a central authority to enforce contract law. Everything is downstream of security.
  - thrance 10mo ago
    Billions are already "priced out" of owning property, why do you think you joining them would have any broader impact? EDIT: I don't know why I'm being downvoted. Billions of human beings have absolutely nothing to their names, and they have no power to change things. Because they own nothing. That's a basic fact of our globalized capitalist economy.
immibis 10mo ago
It's just hoarding like at the start of COVID. How much does toilet paper cost right now, and do stores have it?
- esafak 10mo ago
  Are we going to go back to baking sourdough and cutting our own hair too?
pm90 10mo ago
Its a market signal; we’re going to see a massive boom in investment (mostly from China, but still) in capacity expansion. Eventually the prices will stabilize.
- lopis 10mo ago
  The problem I've seen described by some is that the industry is resistant to expand capacity right now, because a partial pop of the AI bubble is expected aaany time now for months, but it keeps not happening. But if it does happen and they have too much capacity, the whole GPU and RAM industry would not be able to recoup that investment and would collapse.
  - pm90 10mo ago
    Western (+allied) firms should 100% be worried but they are in a difficult spot: risk losing out on market share or risk overcapacity. The Chinese have the full might of Federal/State Governments behind them which may allow them to survive overcapacity, not so for the western firms.
    - shuntress 10mo ago
      Can you clarify the point you are trying to make?
  - jstummbillig 10mo ago
    People confuse themselves with the bubble-metaphor. If an AI bubble exists and pops (we need not discuss either) the already existing and on-the-way-demand will not just disappear. Millions of todays users will not just decide that they don't want to use claude code or chatgpt anymore. Instead, an increasing number of people are going to want AI stuff from here on out, forever, because it's proven to be good enough in the eyes of hundreds of millions and that will create continuous hardware demand (at least because of hardware churn, but also because there are a lot of people in the world who currently don't have great access to this technology yet). I don't know how much optimization will drive down hardware per token, but given that most people would rather wait like 5 seconds instead of 15 minutes for answers to their coding problems, I think it's safe to assume that hardware is going to be in demand for a long time, even if, for whatever wild reason, absolutely nothing happens on top of what has already happened.
muvlon 10mo ago
I don't know how everyone arrives at that conclusion when the cost of the subscription services is also going up (as evidenced by the very article we're talking about). People who are renting are feeling this immediately, whereas people who bought their computers can wait the price hikes out for a couple years before they really need an upgrade.
- Waterluvian 10mo ago
  People rent things they can’t afford to own.
  - nasmorn 10mo ago
    You could never afford a hyperscaler size data center. You could always just buy a server and stick it into Colo. it’s just not totally the same thing
    - 9rx 10mo ago
      I also couldn't afford to rent one. I can afford to rent fractional use of one, but by that token I could also afford to buy a very small fraction of one too.
    - olyjohn 10mo ago
      I can't afford the ram and storage in the server anymore though. So it kinda is the same thing.
      - conductr 10mo ago
        Rent vs own isn’t the issue then. It’s the cost of the underlying asset.
  - ffsm8 10mo ago
    That's one common reason for renting, not the only one. I've rented trailers and various tools before too, not because I couldn't afford to buy them, but because I knew I wouldn't need them after the fact and wouldn't know what to do with them after.
kotaKat 10mo ago
It already has and I’ve seen the worst of it in less than 24 hours. I signed up for a Windows Cloud PC trial, got settled into the Windows instance, then the next morning Microsoft terminated the trial for zero reason and wiped out everything in that instance. You will own nothing and rent nothing, too.
apexalpha 10mo ago
>Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services? Since they're thin clients anyway we could even make them small and mobile, perhaps replace mouse and keyboard with a touch screen.
gnfargbl 10mo ago
The answer lies in one of your questions: > Grocery stores closed to visitors, all shopping done online and delivered to your door In the UK at least, and I'm sure in a lot of other places, a solid proportion of groceries are now delivered to the door. But, that doesn't mean that supermarkets have closed; if anything, they seem to be busier than ever. Instead, we have a hybrid market where convenience for the consumer is the ruling factor. The same is going to be true for most of the other situations you mention.
- dpkirchner 10mo ago
  In parts of the US, even low-crime areas, a significant amount of the items at grocery stores are locked up in glass cases. If you want them you have to track down an employee and beg for access (and in some stores they won't let you carry the items to the register). That part of the store might as well be closed to visitors, replaced by vending machines.
  - FireBeyond 10mo ago
    Hah. In my Safeway, the ice cream and half the frozen aisles have a lock on every door. I can’t imagine how much inconvenience that causes everybody. The employees openly say it’s ridiculous and you regularly find a queue in each aisle waiting to be individually served by an employee with a key unlocking and re locking each door they want something from.
  - platevoltage 10mo ago
    I won't buy this stuff on principle. Microcenter locking up the 5090s is one thing, Target locking up a $15 pack of socks is another.
HPsquared 10mo ago
"you don't need end to end encryption, use our deduplicated storage"
cj 10mo ago
For Christmas I got an alarm clock that basically doesn’t function without a $50/year subscription. For an alarm clock (Hatch.co). Consumers need to get better at understanding TCO when buying things. Or maybe the government should be slapping those “annual cost” stickers like they do on washing machines to understand how much electricity they use.
- isoprophlex 10mo ago
  A 50$/year alarm clock?! Is it time to post the philip k dick Ubik quote again?! https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=I%27ll%20sue%20you%2C%20the%20door%20said%20as%20the%20first%20screw%20fell%20out&sort=byPopularity&type=all https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
  - boneitis 10mo ago
    Yes. I remember starting this book back in college and rolling my eyes at this scene for being so campy and tacky that I just dropped the book. I came back to it just a few weeks ago out of disbelief that that is where we've arrived today.
- tired-turtle 10mo ago
  Good thing you can fund it with your HSA or FSA in partnership with Truemed! \s
- andruby 10mo ago
  That's a terrible gift! Did the g(r)ifter know it needed such a subscription?
  - jerf 10mo ago
    An immense amount of abuse is being done to "consumers" because most people don't have a mental model for how expensive subscriptions are and end up counting them as nearly free, because they are not even tomorrow's problem, but next month's problem. Entire industries run on that principle, like the burgeoning buy now pay later space (which promise no interest but I promise you they're not making money on a whole bunch of "0% interest" loans so you do the math). Meanwhile companies love the recurring revenue. It's a perfect storm of corporate greed meeting a consumer blindspot. Even if they "knew" they may well have not been accounting for it properly. I've been annualizing all my subscription fees for a long time now and dealing with the resulting number, but that's still an unpopular approach. Subscription fees are bleeding more people than ever dry.
reactordev 10mo ago
Your PC has been viewed as an appliance now since 2017. The goal, to get you on as many service subscriptions as possible.
SPICLK2 10mo ago
>home computers are replaced by thin clients Ah, but that's the genius of this circuit around the tech cycle. You need a "thick client" to access those subscription services, as running the (web) interface requires shameful amounts of RAM and CPU resources.
- olyjohn 10mo ago
  Not if the browser rendering is done in the cloud. All you're looking at is a screen on a server somewhere, not actually the one on your phone.
  - SPICLK2 10mo ago
    RDP is the future? Makes sense. It's been a while since money was poured into networking.
    - vel0city 10mo ago
      Microsoft sells Windows 365 which is essentially cloud VMs with RDP to give to workers instead of employees running things locally. Cloud gaming continues to grow. Nvidia GeForce Now, Xbox Cloud Gaming, PlayStation Plus, and a number of smaller companies sell remotely rendered gaming services for subscriptions.
  - jerf 10mo ago
    Nobody wants to run browsers in the cloud. Too expensive. We really are getting the worst of all worlds with this, where we have to do all the expensive computations and all our subscriptions do is flip a flag in some database somewhere so that we're allowed to run a few milliseconds/month of computation on their servers while we're providing vast CPU resources to the rendering, and if the company is even half clever, WASM execution that actually costs money. Exceptions for services that actually cost some non-trivial money per consumer, but there's a lot of crap like an alarm clock or your smart watch's subscription for fitness tracking or other completely trivial bullshit charging $10/month out there.
  - silisili 10mo ago
rvz 10mo ago
"You will own nothing and be happy." - World Economic Forum (WEF)
superultra 10mo ago
I think a better or at least adjacent question might be: do consumers want to pay full price for an object that isn’t subsidized by services? Do we actually want physical objects? Even the things that aren’t technically subscription feel like they are. I have a Kenmore fridge I bought in 2020. The extended warranty just ran out and the thing died. I called a tech. $400 to replace a series of motors. I looked into doing it myself and it’s outside of my time or ability. I have a basement beer fridge that is admittedly less efficient but it’s still kicking and it’s from the mid 80s. I realized I’m effectively ON a subscription plan for a fridge. $900-$1,200 for five years. How much is a smartphone that lasts (do they even) and is NOT subsidized by cloud services? I have a 128gb iPhone and though I barely use any apps I’m constantly maxing my space because I take a lot of photos. I hate to sound like a graduate student writing a thesis on capitalism but like water flow, it just feels like companies will always default to maximum profits. Didn’t instant pot and tupper ware just go out of business because they made a product everyone needed but only once? There’s no long term profit growth in any model where we’re not sucking off the teet of some company.
steveBK123 10mo ago
Arguably a lot of non-techie personal computing has moved there. A lot of people are phone+tablet only, no desktop or laptop. As a result they are already living in a thin-ish client with fat server for storage/app/etc from their ecosystem of choice. Not great!
- ghaff 10mo ago
  Eh. I have newish Apple Silicon MacBook up in my office that I mostly use for multimedia work. But I spend the most time on a 10 year old MacBook on my dining room table that I basically use as a web browser because that's mostly what I need.
- SPICLK2 10mo ago
  Thin in form factor only! Phones and tablets represent the cutting edge of what humanity can mass-manufacture, and prices and difficulties are only going up.
lynndotpy 10mo ago
"Moore's Law" purports that there is more computer over time. "Sam's Law" purports that we asymptote to have a consistent amount of computer; or, we have the same amount of computer over time. "Leslie's Law" purports that we peak and then start to decrease; or, we eventually have less computer over time. We might be living in Sam's world or even Leslie's world.
- Noaidi 10mo ago
  "Moore's Law" thrives under socialism. "Sam's Law" exists under neoliberalism. "Leslie's Law" is the result of fascism.
  - diordiderot 10mo ago
    I mean, you just made that up but sure. China is essentially a pinko branded fascist state and they continue to develop better processors
    - Noaidi 10mo ago
      > China is essentially a pinko branded fascist Sorry, China is a unitary communist state. Fascism and communism are the opposite. Both have state control but the fascist control is from the corporations. The reason China has better chips is because they have a form of socialism Don't be a propagandist regurgitating propagandists ideas, it does nothing for intelligent conversation.
Tade0 10mo ago
More likely people will retain their current devices for longer and wait this whole thing out - there's less reason to upgrade than there was a decade ago. Processing power increases have noticeably plateaued, with e.g. Nvidia GPUs steadily increasing in TDP to make up for there not being enough gains from updated process nodes. The RTX 5080 is rated at 67% higher TDP than the RTX 2080, but you don't see such an increase throughout most of the 2010s, so before the latter was released.
- WhyNotHugo 10mo ago
  > More likely people will retain their current devices for longer and wait this whole thing out Wait it out? The rich have realised that they can buy the entire stock of computing power and deprive the common folk of it, renting it to them instead. In practical terms, they have infinite resources. Definitely enough to long outlast our lifetimes and the next generation and the next. We can’t “wait out” until they run out of money.
  - lenkite 10mo ago
    They never run out of "their" money either. Can keep borrowing until eye-watering values are breached, making out like bandits and then run to the govt for a bailout when the bubble bursts.
  - jacekm 10mo ago
    Something or someone will eventually fill the void. Chinese are trying to manufacture GPUs, they are very far from what Nvidia can offer, but they'll slowly get there. As for RAM - the new factories are being built and will hopefully become operational in 2028.
nicoburns 10mo ago
> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services? The supply chains for high-end chips are brittle enough that it's a very real possibility we end up with a severe supply crunch such that neither clouds nor individual users can access new chips at anything approaching reasonable prices. TSMC owns 60% of the foundry market. So if China decides to invade Taiwan, that would likely mean ~60% of CPU and GPU manufacturing capacity permanently destroyed at once. That would be "iPhones are no longer for sale this year, and PCs now cost $5000 if you're lucky enough to get ahold of one" kind of territory.
- kllrnohj 10mo ago
  > TSMC owns 60% of the foundry market. So if China decides to invade Taiwan, that would likely mean ~60% of CPU and GPU manufacturing capacity permanently destroyed at once. While it would certainly be devastating, do note that TSMC has fabs in places that aren't Taiwan. So their entire production wouldn't immediately go offline, and presumably China would still want to keep selling those products and would have an interest in avoiding destroying those factories. If China suddenly decides it doesn't want to export electronics, though, then we're all super fucked. After all, what percentage of those TSMC chips flow through China to get mounted onto PCBs or need major supporting components from one of the "Foxconn Cities" in China?
  - SPICLK2 10mo ago
    These supply chains have very non-linear responses. Relatively small fluctuations in demand can have enormous effects on prices and leadtimes.
  - bluGill 10mo ago
    > presumably China would still want to keep selling those products and would have an interest in avoiding destroying those factories It has been hinted by people who might know something that Taiwan has rigged their factories to explode if China invades to ensure China can't get a hold of those factories. I'm not sure if it is true, but it wouldn't be hard to do (the hard part is ensuring the explosives don't go off for other reasons)
lm28469 10mo ago
> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services? It's the thin/thick client cycle, I've already been through it 1.5 times and I'm not that old.
1980phipsi 10mo ago
> Game publishers have already publicly floated the idea of not selling their games but charging per hour. Imagine how that impact Call of Duty or GTA. MMORPGs have had monthly subscription fees for a long time. For a lot of games if they charged by the hour would probably see less revenue...people buy tons of games and then barely ever play them.
- philistine 10mo ago
  You assume there's only one type of player. Some players fall into a category I lovingly call Madden Guy. These people will play some other games, but they will play one game *a lot*. Call of Duty, Arc Raiders, Destiny, Battlefield, Fortnite, these are the type of games who attract these kind of players. If a game has 600 purchasable items, a seasonal battlepass-type thing, multiple female rappers skins, and a publisher-financed pro scene, it's probably one of those games. Those games 100% already have game modes you pay by the hour. They will have special modes you access with currency and you need to keep paying to keep playing. Those modes are usually special, with increased and unique drops.
dayjaby 10mo ago
> How long before car ownership is replaced with autonomous vehicle car pools? Click here to subscribe for an activation of your seat heater.
alecco 10mo ago
You forgot: - while Big Tech is subsidized with our taxes - and even if you get a GPU it will be too expensive to run it due to electricity costs (thanks to Big Tech) - and most people end up working for Big Tech's gig economy without any benefits at below subsistence
layer8 10mo ago
I remember the dialup times when you had to pay for internet usage per minute. I hope we won’t revert back to that.
dev1ycan 10mo ago
This was always the plan, it's why they keep building datacenters when they know it's a bubble, they just plan to do GeForce NOW on steroids, this time with PCs costing $10k so nobody can afford it.
jrjeksjd8d 10mo ago
> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services? Always have been. Ever since the SaaS revolution of the early 2000s high-growth software businesses have been motivated to chase subscription revenue over one-time sales because you get a better multiple. From an economic perspective The Market would like the average person to spend all their money on rents, and the only option is how you allocate your spending to different rentals. Transportation, housing, food, entertainment (which is most of computing) are just different fiefs to be carved up by industry monopolists.
- KellyCriterion 10mo ago
  ++1
goalieca 10mo ago
> home computers are replaced by thin clients phones have 128GB storage and are vastly more powerful than the workstation i did my grad thesis on. Now that electron has exhausted the last major avenue for application bloat, i don't see why thin would mean anything.
Noaidi 10mo ago
I am starting to think the last smartphone I bought is the last one I am going to be able to afford unless AI capitalism crashes and burns.
infecto 10mo ago
Computers have never been more powerful. There is less and less of a reason to do annual upgrades. I don’t follow this logic at all. The average consumer does not even need a home computer anymore. Sure if you are upgrading you gaming PC or something similar than your going to feel a bit more of a squeeze but even then it’s not a wild increase in price compared to the hours spent using.
- esafak 10mo ago
  GPUs are still overpriced and memory-limited. There's room for 10-100x improvement that would be noticeable.
  - infecto 10mo ago
    Not for the person I was responding to. For the vast majority of consumers your statement does not apply.
coliveira 10mo ago
Say goodbye to falling AWS prices. From now on its gonna be higher and higher.
dcchambers 10mo ago
> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services? You will own nothing, and you will be happy.
general1465 10mo ago
> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services? No we don't. In Eastern Block during communism everything was either expensive or unavailable to the point that picking up broken TV on the side of the road and dismantling it for parts was making complete sense and you could actually learn something. Today it is much easier. You can visit eBay or AliExpress and buy old server crap from 2016 - i.e. Xeon E3 + X99 board + 32GB DDR4 RAM = 150EUR or just buying older laptops, computers from eBay. That's where consumer market is heading. The fact that hardware is going to be computationally constrained will finally force software developers to stop wasting resources. Having application which is able to run on old Windows 10 with i3 and 4GB of RAM without being sluggish will become competing advantage.
- pmdr 10mo ago
  Windows 10 is mostly EOL because M$ doesn't want you using older machines, no matter how powerful.
  - lossyalgo 10mo ago
    This should be a crime and they should be forced to either keep supporting Win10 (at least security updates) and/or let you install Win11 on older hardware without TPM 2.0 modules (which is a total fucking lie that it's necessary, it's purely for monetary gain so that they can track you with a unique ID for ads).
  - general1465 10mo ago
    That does not matter at all. When it comes to computation people will just use what's at hand. Windows 7 are still around, Windows 10 are going to be here for a long time.
pjmlp 10mo ago
I hope we go back into old days up to the late 1990's, and current generation of developers learn to target the computers users can afford.
- esafak 10mo ago
  Bill Gates used to use an average computer at work so he would have the same experience as users.
Forgeties79 10mo ago
Had to spend ~$200/ea on refurbished EXOS for work (14TB) when I got refurbished 14TB ultra stars for $90/ea a year ago. It’s getting ridiculous. The ram I put in my gaming rig I built earlier this year was $100, now it’s $500. I want to say “it can’t stay this high forever” but who knows?
nostrademons 10mo ago
Yes and no. I think what'll happen here is that these computing price increases will be what finally makes certain ML startups un-economical. That's what will precipitate the AI bubble burst. The whole thing runs on investor capital, so it keeps going until some investors lose their capital. Once the bubble bursts, you're going to get some really cheap GPUs, RAM, and hard drives (as well as cloud computing prices), as many of the more marginal data centers go out of business and liquidate their hardware. It's going to be a rough couple years for hobbyist computer aficionados though. In the near future I'd try to wait this one out and get a job at an AI startup instead.
jayd16 10mo ago
> Imagine how that impact Call of Duty or GTA By killing the golden goose... Game pass isn't doing well for developers and they know it.
63stack 10mo ago
Also, even if/when the AI bubble pops (whether it exists is irrelevant to my point), all the companies who have been hoarding the hardware can naturally progress into selling this new "stream everything through a subscription" service, further delaying (possibly forever if it's successful) price normalization.
tritip 10mo ago
Don't forget the end of Home Onwership.
ai-x 10mo ago
This directly contradicts the bubble narrative. If hyperscalers and neocloud have excess capacity and low demand, prices should be collapsing
glitchc 10mo ago
> Physical media could easily be killed off. Does my iPhone need 1TB of storage or will they shrink that and force everything through iCloud? For the mobile space, I think we are ripe for a memory inversion of sorts, where going forward a phone has 1TB or more of ram but very little non-volatile storage. The RAM would need to be fast enough to run inferences locally, whereas the storage is does the bare minimum to boot the device on the rare occasions it requires a reboot. All user-specific artifacts would be stored in the cloud. This seems a likely future for phones and other wearables going forward.
- layla5alive 9mo ago
  Storage costs less to manufacture and power than RAM. You are starting from a premise and making up a future where it's true, ignoring the realities of physics in the process.
hacker_homie 10mo ago
Time to go outside and touch grass it’s the only financially responsible thing to do until prices become reasonable again.
hiddew 10mo ago
> How long before car ownership is replaced with autonomous vehicle car pools? That is very much a future I look forward to living in. Not requiring to own a car but sharing it efficiently with folks in the neighborhood, would save quite some parking space for unused vehicles in front of homes, and centralize maintenance to the companies operating the vehicle fleet.
- fooker 10mo ago
  > That is very much a future I look forward to living in. What makes you think owning homes will be convenient in that future? To quote a proponent of this future: “You’ll own nothing and be happy”.
sneak 10mo ago
Eggs and hard currencies like gold are also going up as denominated in USD. It’s not so much that the things are increasing in value as much as the part of large scale inflation that the federal government can’t hide by cooking the CPI. The dollar is in freefall.
elorant 10mo ago
This assumes everyone’s sitting on a fast fiber connection which is hardly the case. Even metropolitan areas in most cities don’t have universal fiber connection.
clickety_clack 10mo ago
All the more reason to self host some part of your life at least. If there’s a market, someone will figure out how to service it, but if everyone gives up totally then all we’ll have is massive, cold, immovable corporations holding all our data.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
dev_l1x_be 10mo ago
Or we rewrite everything in Rust and stop using JS on websites and watch how the computational efficiency and lack of bloat impacts the market?
TacticalCoder 10mo ago
Silver price rising. Gold price rising. Bitcoin price rising. It's got another name: inflation. Western economies are crumbling under gigantic public debt, representing 130% of the GDP in many countries and they're doubling down on public spending. The only way out is either defaulting on the debt (like Greece partially did) or debasing the currency. Monkeys have been left at the helm since decades and they only know how to do one thing: spending taxpayers dollars and endebtting countries ever more.
Schnitz 10mo ago
Assuming you are a capitalist that is in it to maximize shareholder value then yes, that is the direction you will push the world in. Why sell me a car once if you can charge me a rent forever?
hexbin010 10mo ago
Next stage will be significant broadband/mobile price rises. This is happening in the UK - 24 month contracts with annual 10-18% rises built in are the norm now (The regulator worked in cahoots with the companies. A big storm was created during the high-interest rate period inventing/overstating a problem that people can't predict their bills because the rises were based on official inflation figures, which naturally varied. So the companies went: ok sure we can do fixed price rises...(At a nice high rate). This was sold as a 'win' because the rises are now 'predictable') Plus the cheaper broadband (ADSL) is being phased out and replaced with fibre which for many people is overkill and everyone has to pay the price for that the upgrade whether you need it or not. Three and Vodafone just merged which will mean price rises in mobile data too due to reduced competition
marcosdumay 10mo ago
Subscriptions usually add up to the cost of buying in less than an year. Companies hope on people being none-the-wiser, but live mostly of people that subscribe for short durations or need the internet component of the services. So, no, prices going up will make subscriptions less popular, not more. This is different from expensive goods pools (rental cars, houses, airplanes, etc) because there's actual competition on those.
hyperbovine 10mo ago
On the flip side, if the rumored AI crashdepressionapocalyspe does in fact materialize, those things will become super cheap.
- BadBadJellyBean 10mo ago
  but no one has money anymore to buy it. :(
miki123211 10mo ago
Subscriptions have always been, and will always be, more economical and efficient than ownership. Unless you're using a resource 100% of the time, that resource is partially wasted. A GPU can be much cheaper for you if others are allowed to use it when you're asleep. I don't think this will ever work for gaming, as gaming has strict bandwidth and latency requirements. This means you need to colocate gaming datacenters with the people who actually use them, and people in a given timezone usually play at similar times. LLMs are a completely different beast. The user experiences of using an LLM next door and using an LLM from across the world are basically indistinguishable. This means you can have a single datacenter with really high GPU utilization during the day.
- realo 10mo ago
  I like to play AAA games casually. Think Witcher etc... I own a macbook, not really made for that. Years ago I got a subscription to GE Force Now and never looked back. I can play all the games I want , no problem. The only thing really needed is a good Internet connection, and my Gbps fiber link works very well. So... Subscriptions also work well for casual gaming, no problem.
deadbabe 10mo ago
New physical media could be killed off, but we already have a ton of old retro physical media, more than a person could ever consume in their lifetime. I wouldn’t worry about it. There are more old games and movies out there than you’ll ever be able to watch or play.
chabes 10mo ago
> - GPU prices rising - RAM prices rising - hard drive prices rising They tell me the economy is booming
giancarlostoro 10mo ago
> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services? I've been hearing this since 2010s when Microsoft introduced UEFI iirc and I've heard it for a while. I honestly thought in my teens in the mid to late 2010s that by now I'd have a few Petabyte hard drives. Shame. I've said it many times, everyone wants AI but nobody wants to foot the real bill for AI. The cost is too high. Once the bubble bursts, whoever is left standing might charge reasonable prices that are profitable, until it becomes more cost effective.
ihsw 10mo ago
[dead]
Twirrim 10mo ago
> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients FWIW these kinds of claims have been a cyclical thing constantly throughout my nearly 3 decades long career. We're always on the verge of thin clients replacing desktops, and then we're suddenly not and things calm down for a couple of years before, oops back again! Every time there's arguments about saving on cost of hardware, etc. but the reality never seems to line up with the dream.
peab 10mo ago
| Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and | all the power lies in subscription services? arguably, we are already there. The majority of people don't use a computer anymore, they use their phone. The phone itself is just an interface to the cloud. If I lost my phone today, and got a new one, the only inconvenience would be the time it takes me to set up the new phone, and the cost of the new phone. I wouldn't lose anything because everything is on the cloud
Lammy 10mo ago
They've been planning this outcome for a long time. Here's Larry Ellison in 1997: https://youtu.be/Bk1_btV3oIk?t=402 https://youtu.be/Bk1_btV3oIk?t=402 “The personal computer was designed as a standalone device. There was no Internet around 1981 when the PC was invented. There weren't a lot of local area networks and corporations and schools and government agencies [online] back in 1981. The world has changed — there are networks everywhere; around the world and offices and schools and major governments and institutions. So why not have computer networks that are similar to television networks or telephone networks? A television network is enormously complicated; it's got satellites and microwave relay stations and cable headends and recording studios, and you have this huge professionally-managed network accessed by a very low cost and simple appliance: the television. Anyone can learn to use a television. 97% percent of American households have televisions. 94% of American households have telephones. They can have very simple appliance attached to enormously complex professionally-managed network. Why shouldn't the computer network be just the same?”
- Dylan16807 10mo ago
  Who is "they"?
  - Lammy 10mo ago
    How the hell should I know? Do you have any comments on Mr. Ellison's interview, or are you just here to nitpick my wording?
    - Dylan16807 10mo ago
      It's not nitpicking. I read the quote and I don't see anything about "planning this outcome", so I took that as something you added, so I asked you. He's zipping around between topics and I would have said websites already fulfill what he's talking about.
- supertrope 10mo ago
  While businesses hate being a dumb pipe and love vendor lock in, lots of customers choose dependence on big tech. Each retail business that only has a Facebook page to save the cost of hiring a web developer reinforces this dependence.
vee-kay 10mo ago
Valve changed its Steam Store's ToS, so officially it means Steam users no longer own the content they purchased in it, they merely bought a subscription to rent it for a while, until the game publisher decides to revoke the online content at any time they choose. TakeTwo Interactive (2K Games, the makers of popular games series Borderlands) changed its ToS to allow it to spy on and capture anything on the user's machine, including browser behaviors (websites visited, bookmarks saved, etc.), payment information (credit card details, etc.), programs installed & usage, etc. Gaming industry has moved on to become evil, by default. Most AAA games these days cannot even be played without an internet connection. And most AAA games demand intrusive DRMs, and same games demand the dangerous kernel-level DRMs like Denuvo which cannot be monitored by major antimalware.
pllbnk 10mo ago
That's exactly it. It's not like all these data centers are only going to teach models or perform inference. The goal is renters' economy.
bitwize 10mo ago
> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services? Astronaut 2: Always have been...
cyanydeez 10mo ago
No, we're looking at a future where the bubble bursts and more people get shoved back into poverty. None of the AI investment makes any sense.
okr 10mo ago
"You won't own anything and you will love it!"
hello_moto 10mo ago
The future is we all gonna go to war when there's no more juice to squeeze by the billionaires. The future is coming in hot. Just look at what's happening lately.
Psype 10mo ago
You will own nothing and be happy. Also check the agenda 2030. The European digital wallet. The cyberscore. All those elements together makes a digital Europe (and more) where there's no cash anymore, where your website has to be compliant to be working with EU's ID and payments systems. It's going to be all centralised and about subscriptions, no matter if it's about your electricity bill or your groceries.
paulddraper 10mo ago
You’ll own nothing and like it
zvqcMMV6Zcr 10mo ago
> all the power lies in subscription services I think NVidia already decided they have all the power when the decided to add 100h limit to their GForce Now service, with that limit getting effective for legacy plans right now. It would be bad if people like they service so much that they avoid buying overpriced hardware :D
snickerbockers 10mo ago
"You will own nothing and be happy."
pojzon 10mo ago
No we dont. Valve will make sure this subscription model will die in infancy. And thank god for that.
samrus 10mo ago
How does that make sense with this news that cloud gpu costs have risen? That would make the subscription services more expensive as well
rldjbpin 10mo ago
> Game publishers have already publicly floated the idea of not selling their games but charging per hour. Imagine how that impact Call of Duty or GTA. Don't you worry! R* is already selling one (albeit optional) [1]. it is expected to be there from day 1 in their next title. perhaps this could become closer to reality once the current subscription becomes commonplace. [1] https://www.rockstargames.com/gta-plus/benefits https://www.rockstargames.com/gta-plus/benefits

by xvxvx 10mo ago

nova22033 10mo ago

* - GPU prices rising - RAM prices rising * How else is grok going to generate semi-naked images of minors?

aurareturn 10mo ago

Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services? No if we're in a working free market. Companies will see the rising prices and start making more of those things, bringing prices back down.

JustFinishedBSG 10mo ago
How, when foundries are a natural monopoly? How can you realistically create a startup to build a multibillion / multi year fab ?
- immibis 10mo ago
  Same way you can create a startup to build a multibillion dollar data center presumably.
  - grim_io 10mo ago
    I don't think that laying bricks and operating a crane is on the same level(or universe) of complexity as making and operating high-end semiconductor machines.
- aurareturn 10mo ago
  There are 3 foundries capable: Samsung, Intel, and TSMC. Companies can contract out some to Samsung and Intel. TSMC can (and is) build more fabs.
oliwary 10mo ago
Ideally. Companies may also be hesitant to invest in expanding production capacity if they assume this is a bubble though.
- zozbot234 10mo ago
  Companies are always slow to expand production capacity. It takes time to react to unforeseen shifts in the market - but once it does happen, the scale can be quite huge.
MSFT_Edging 10mo ago
(Who's gonna tell him)
- rfrey 10mo ago
  Tell him what? Why don't you start?
  - MSFT_Edging 10mo ago
    The free market as described is imaginary. Large companies due to their size hold a lot of power, and can use a mix of regulatory capture and monopolies to make better ideas financially infeasible to bring to light.

zwnow 10mo ago

> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services? Yes. Personal computing is dying if hardware vendors continue to cater to imaginary data centers for our imaginary AGI.

gonzalohm 10mo ago

If you don't own your computer, wouldn't you be more exposed to price increases?

zozbot234 10mo ago

> - GPU prices rising > - RAM prices rising > - hard drive prices rising This is great news. It means the industry is expanding a lot and we'll be getting better consumer hardware at the end of the day. Innovation has always dropped down from the enterprise space to the consumer, as far back as the first electronic calculators and microcomputers.

ZoneZealot 10mo ago
Keeping in mind the consumer space will see minimal trickle down from used datacenter electronics in ~3-5 years from this boom. The GPUs are generally rack-scale integrated units rather than PCIe. The bulk of the GPU RAM is HBM, so not very scavenge-able for consumer GPU mods. Power consumption of the blackwell GPUs in most solutions like the DGX B200 isn't really viable for home use even if you had the space and hookups for a fraction of the original 10ru system. The hard drives and SSDs will be likely be shredded on site and never re-sold as used. RAM will be registered ECC, only suitable for server-class motherboards.
- zozbot234 10mo ago
  I'm pretty sure that those racks will be usable for something, even if it's not direct-to-consumer. Startup businesses, academic/research use, smaller-scale HPC etc. will all be creating demand for the stuff long after it stops being useful for cutting-edge AI workloads.
ezst 10mo ago
That's fallacious: enterprise stuff doesn't always make sense at consumer level and doesn't always "drop down" for that reason. We've yet to see whether that particular stuff makes consumer sense.

pydry 10mo ago

We're looking at a glut of all of these things once the bubble bursts and the mindless trend followers jump on a trend.

phito 10mo ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ll_own_nothing_and_be_happy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ll_own_nothing_and_be_ha... And as we've seen, once the market has been captured, they will start enshittifying everything to squeeze as much profit as they can and we'll have no alternatives.

walthamstow 10mo ago

> You don't need storage space, use our cloud subscription This is here already. A long time ago, maybe even before covid, I asked a table of iPhone-owning friends who pays Apple a monthly sub for storage, and every hand went up. I know you mention home computers, but most of my friends don't have one. Their iPhone is their computer.

supriyo-biswas 10mo ago
Not everyone is in it for the storage though, I use it mostly as a reliable syncing solution for my photos, as well as for iCloud private relay.
- vcanales 10mo ago
  > I use it mostly as a reliable syncing solution for my photos That is... storage.
  - vladvasiliu 10mo ago
    I think GP's point was rather the "optimized storage" schtick of apple devices, where they "unload" whatever you have locally on iCloud and use that as "regular" storage. Syncing, even though it also actually stores, is a fairly different use case. Could you implement that some other way? Sure. But I still think it's fair to point it's a different use case than "regular storage".
vladvasiliu 10mo ago
As sibling says, the question is too vague. I also pay for icloud, but I store all my things locally on my devices. The point is effortless sync and basic backup (protect pictures from phone theft). I also pay Hetzner for a storage box or whatever it's called, where I regularly send backups of my stuff with restic. One of the sources is a local fat ZFS NAS, which I can access from everywhere via wireguard. Yet, the only reason I'm contemplating buying a new iPhone is to get larger local storage. I'm also biting my fingers for not having pulled the trigger on a larger SSD for my main machine two months ago. Every solution has different use cases, and I think no single one is perfect. I get the best value from using a mix.

mikasisiki 10mo ago

It’s possible. Either way, many people literally sleep in a monthly subscription model — rent.

croes 10mo ago
Because buying a house is even more unaffordable.
zwnow 10mo ago
[flagged]
- forty 10mo ago
  I don't disagree, but I would argue that the same thing can be said from any kind of "investor" who then capture most of the value produced just because it turned out they had the money that others had not (most of the time just because they were born in the right family)
- cpursley 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  - zwnow 10mo ago
    > Landlord isn’t nearly as profitable as some people think. I am aware of that, still doesnt stop people from speculation and therefor preventing others from buying.
    - cpursley 10mo ago
      If you’re talking about the corporate landlords, yeah. But the real issue is we’re not creating enough housing of the correct type in the US (like missing middle). Only choices are either McMansions or “luxury” apartments that are made from cardboard.
  - Der_Einzige 10mo ago
    Stuff like this is unironically (okay, kind of ironically) why I identify as a landchad. https://www.reddit.com/r/LoveForLandchads/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LoveForLandchads/

bocytron 10mo ago

This has been theorized as Technofeudalism: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technofeudalism https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technofeudalism

haritha-j 10mo ago

From a resource allocation perspective, this doesn't feel particularly undesirable, at least in terms of certain assets like vehicles. The current system of ownership is quite wasteful. I own a high end GPU that I use maybe 4 hours a week for gaming.

wslh 10mo ago
On the other hand companies go to cloud services as if they were scaling and complex as a FAANG.
XorNot 10mo ago
If capitalism prices me out of owning property, then I've not much use for it.
- ezst 10mo ago
  Maybe what you're calling capitalism is just oligarchy, in which case the nuance really doesn't matter.
  - HPsquared 10mo ago
    I think the standard argument is that capitalism inevitably develops into oligarchy. Even the most basic setup of property rights protected by a legal system, presupposes a central authority of some kind who makes the ultimate decisions. Where there is law, there are courts, executive and legislative functions. More complex structures like joint stock companies introduce their own dynamics but also depend on a central authority to enforce contract law. Everything is downstream of security.
- thrance 10mo ago
  Billions are already "priced out" of owning property, why do you think you joining them would have any broader impact? EDIT: I don't know why I'm being downvoted. Billions of human beings have absolutely nothing to their names, and they have no power to change things. Because they own nothing. That's a basic fact of our globalized capitalist economy.

immibis 10mo ago

It's just hoarding like at the start of COVID. How much does toilet paper cost right now, and do stores have it?

esafak 10mo ago
Are we going to go back to baking sourdough and cutting our own hair too?

pm90 10mo ago

Its a market signal; we’re going to see a massive boom in investment (mostly from China, but still) in capacity expansion. Eventually the prices will stabilize.

lopis 10mo ago
The problem I've seen described by some is that the industry is resistant to expand capacity right now, because a partial pop of the AI bubble is expected aaany time now for months, but it keeps not happening. But if it does happen and they have too much capacity, the whole GPU and RAM industry would not be able to recoup that investment and would collapse.
- pm90 10mo ago
  Western (+allied) firms should 100% be worried but they are in a difficult spot: risk losing out on market share or risk overcapacity. The Chinese have the full might of Federal/State Governments behind them which may allow them to survive overcapacity, not so for the western firms.
  - shuntress 10mo ago
    Can you clarify the point you are trying to make?
- jstummbillig 10mo ago
  People confuse themselves with the bubble-metaphor. If an AI bubble exists and pops (we need not discuss either) the already existing and on-the-way-demand will not just disappear. Millions of todays users will not just decide that they don't want to use claude code or chatgpt anymore. Instead, an increasing number of people are going to want AI stuff from here on out, forever, because it's proven to be good enough in the eyes of hundreds of millions and that will create continuous hardware demand (at least because of hardware churn, but also because there are a lot of people in the world who currently don't have great access to this technology yet). I don't know how much optimization will drive down hardware per token, but given that most people would rather wait like 5 seconds instead of 15 minutes for answers to their coding problems, I think it's safe to assume that hardware is going to be in demand for a long time, even if, for whatever wild reason, absolutely nothing happens on top of what has already happened.

muvlon 10mo ago

I don't know how everyone arrives at that conclusion when the cost of the subscription services is also going up (as evidenced by the very article we're talking about). People who are renting are feeling this immediately, whereas people who bought their computers can wait the price hikes out for a couple years before they really need an upgrade.

Waterluvian 10mo ago
People rent things they can’t afford to own.
- nasmorn 10mo ago
  You could never afford a hyperscaler size data center. You could always just buy a server and stick it into Colo. it’s just not totally the same thing
  - 9rx 10mo ago
    I also couldn't afford to rent one. I can afford to rent fractional use of one, but by that token I could also afford to buy a very small fraction of one too.
  - olyjohn 10mo ago
    I can't afford the ram and storage in the server anymore though. So it kinda is the same thing.
    - conductr 10mo ago
      Rent vs own isn’t the issue then. It’s the cost of the underlying asset.
- ffsm8 10mo ago
  That's one common reason for renting, not the only one. I've rented trailers and various tools before too, not because I couldn't afford to buy them, but because I knew I wouldn't need them after the fact and wouldn't know what to do with them after.

kotaKat 10mo ago

It already has and I’ve seen the worst of it in less than 24 hours. I signed up for a Windows Cloud PC trial, got settled into the Windows instance, then the next morning Microsoft terminated the trial for zero reason and wiped out everything in that instance. You will own nothing and rent nothing, too.

apexalpha 10mo ago

>Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services? Since they're thin clients anyway we could even make them small and mobile, perhaps replace mouse and keyboard with a touch screen.

gnfargbl 10mo ago

The answer lies in one of your questions: > Grocery stores closed to visitors, all shopping done online and delivered to your door In the UK at least, and I'm sure in a lot of other places, a solid proportion of groceries are now delivered to the door. But, that doesn't mean that supermarkets have closed; if anything, they seem to be busier than ever. Instead, we have a hybrid market where convenience for the consumer is the ruling factor. The same is going to be true for most of the other situations you mention.

dpkirchner 10mo ago
In parts of the US, even low-crime areas, a significant amount of the items at grocery stores are locked up in glass cases. If you want them you have to track down an employee and beg for access (and in some stores they won't let you carry the items to the register). That part of the store might as well be closed to visitors, replaced by vending machines.
- FireBeyond 10mo ago
  Hah. In my Safeway, the ice cream and half the frozen aisles have a lock on every door. I can’t imagine how much inconvenience that causes everybody. The employees openly say it’s ridiculous and you regularly find a queue in each aisle waiting to be individually served by an employee with a key unlocking and re locking each door they want something from.
- platevoltage 10mo ago
  I won't buy this stuff on principle. Microcenter locking up the 5090s is one thing, Target locking up a $15 pack of socks is another.

HPsquared 10mo ago

"you don't need end to end encryption, use our deduplicated storage"

cj 10mo ago

For Christmas I got an alarm clock that basically doesn’t function without a $50/year subscription. For an alarm clock (Hatch.co). Consumers need to get better at understanding TCO when buying things. Or maybe the government should be slapping those “annual cost” stickers like they do on washing machines to understand how much electricity they use.

isoprophlex 10mo ago
A 50$/year alarm clock?! Is it time to post the philip k dick Ubik quote again?! https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=I%27ll%20sue%20you%2C%20the%20door%20said%20as%20the%20first%20screw%20fell%20out&sort=byPopularity&type=all https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- boneitis 10mo ago
  Yes. I remember starting this book back in college and rolling my eyes at this scene for being so campy and tacky that I just dropped the book. I came back to it just a few weeks ago out of disbelief that that is where we've arrived today.
tired-turtle 10mo ago
Good thing you can fund it with your HSA or FSA in partnership with Truemed! \s
andruby 10mo ago
That's a terrible gift! Did the g(r)ifter know it needed such a subscription?
- jerf 10mo ago
  An immense amount of abuse is being done to "consumers" because most people don't have a mental model for how expensive subscriptions are and end up counting them as nearly free, because they are not even tomorrow's problem, but next month's problem. Entire industries run on that principle, like the burgeoning buy now pay later space (which promise no interest but I promise you they're not making money on a whole bunch of "0% interest" loans so you do the math). Meanwhile companies love the recurring revenue. It's a perfect storm of corporate greed meeting a consumer blindspot. Even if they "knew" they may well have not been accounting for it properly. I've been annualizing all my subscription fees for a long time now and dealing with the resulting number, but that's still an unpopular approach. Subscription fees are bleeding more people than ever dry.

reactordev 10mo ago

Your PC has been viewed as an appliance now since 2017. The goal, to get you on as many service subscriptions as possible.

SPICLK2 10mo ago

>home computers are replaced by thin clients Ah, but that's the genius of this circuit around the tech cycle. You need a "thick client" to access those subscription services, as running the (web) interface requires shameful amounts of RAM and CPU resources.

olyjohn 10mo ago
Not if the browser rendering is done in the cloud. All you're looking at is a screen on a server somewhere, not actually the one on your phone.
- SPICLK2 10mo ago
  RDP is the future? Makes sense. It's been a while since money was poured into networking.
  - vel0city 10mo ago
    Microsoft sells Windows 365 which is essentially cloud VMs with RDP to give to workers instead of employees running things locally. Cloud gaming continues to grow. Nvidia GeForce Now, Xbox Cloud Gaming, PlayStation Plus, and a number of smaller companies sell remotely rendered gaming services for subscriptions.
- jerf 10mo ago
  Nobody wants to run browsers in the cloud. Too expensive. We really are getting the worst of all worlds with this, where we have to do all the expensive computations and all our subscriptions do is flip a flag in some database somewhere so that we're allowed to run a few milliseconds/month of computation on their servers while we're providing vast CPU resources to the rendering, and if the company is even half clever, WASM execution that actually costs money. Exceptions for services that actually cost some non-trivial money per consumer, but there's a lot of crap like an alarm clock or your smart watch's subscription for fitness tracking or other completely trivial bullshit charging $10/month out there.
- silisili 10mo ago

rvz 10mo ago

"You will own nothing and be happy." - World Economic Forum (WEF)

superultra 10mo ago

I think a better or at least adjacent question might be: do consumers want to pay full price for an object that isn’t subsidized by services? Do we actually want physical objects? Even the things that aren’t technically subscription feel like they are. I have a Kenmore fridge I bought in 2020. The extended warranty just ran out and the thing died. I called a tech. $400 to replace a series of motors. I looked into doing it myself and it’s outside of my time or ability. I have a basement beer fridge that is admittedly less efficient but it’s still kicking and it’s from the mid 80s. I realized I’m effectively ON a subscription plan for a fridge. $900-$1,200 for five years. How much is a smartphone that lasts (do they even) and is NOT subsidized by cloud services? I have a 128gb iPhone and though I barely use any apps I’m constantly maxing my space because I take a lot of photos. I hate to sound like a graduate student writing a thesis on capitalism but like water flow, it just feels like companies will always default to maximum profits. Didn’t instant pot and tupper ware just go out of business because they made a product everyone needed but only once? There’s no long term profit growth in any model where we’re not sucking off the teet of some company.

steveBK123 10mo ago

Arguably a lot of non-techie personal computing has moved there. A lot of people are phone+tablet only, no desktop or laptop. As a result they are already living in a thin-ish client with fat server for storage/app/etc from their ecosystem of choice. Not great!

ghaff 10mo ago
Eh. I have newish Apple Silicon MacBook up in my office that I mostly use for multimedia work. But I spend the most time on a 10 year old MacBook on my dining room table that I basically use as a web browser because that's mostly what I need.
SPICLK2 10mo ago
Thin in form factor only! Phones and tablets represent the cutting edge of what humanity can mass-manufacture, and prices and difficulties are only going up.

lynndotpy 10mo ago

"Moore's Law" purports that there is more computer over time. "Sam's Law" purports that we asymptote to have a consistent amount of computer; or, we have the same amount of computer over time. "Leslie's Law" purports that we peak and then start to decrease; or, we eventually have less computer over time. We might be living in Sam's world or even Leslie's world.

Noaidi 10mo ago
"Moore's Law" thrives under socialism. "Sam's Law" exists under neoliberalism. "Leslie's Law" is the result of fascism.
- diordiderot 10mo ago
  I mean, you just made that up but sure. China is essentially a pinko branded fascist state and they continue to develop better processors
  - Noaidi 10mo ago
    > China is essentially a pinko branded fascist Sorry, China is a unitary communist state. Fascism and communism are the opposite. Both have state control but the fascist control is from the corporations. The reason China has better chips is because they have a form of socialism Don't be a propagandist regurgitating propagandists ideas, it does nothing for intelligent conversation.

Tade0 10mo ago

More likely people will retain their current devices for longer and wait this whole thing out - there's less reason to upgrade than there was a decade ago. Processing power increases have noticeably plateaued, with e.g. Nvidia GPUs steadily increasing in TDP to make up for there not being enough gains from updated process nodes. The RTX 5080 is rated at 67% higher TDP than the RTX 2080, but you don't see such an increase throughout most of the 2010s, so before the latter was released.

WhyNotHugo 10mo ago
> More likely people will retain their current devices for longer and wait this whole thing out Wait it out? The rich have realised that they can buy the entire stock of computing power and deprive the common folk of it, renting it to them instead. In practical terms, they have infinite resources. Definitely enough to long outlast our lifetimes and the next generation and the next. We can’t “wait out” until they run out of money.
- lenkite 10mo ago
  They never run out of "their" money either. Can keep borrowing until eye-watering values are breached, making out like bandits and then run to the govt for a bailout when the bubble bursts.
- jacekm 10mo ago
  Something or someone will eventually fill the void. Chinese are trying to manufacture GPUs, they are very far from what Nvidia can offer, but they'll slowly get there. As for RAM - the new factories are being built and will hopefully become operational in 2028.

nicoburns 10mo ago

> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services? The supply chains for high-end chips are brittle enough that it's a very real possibility we end up with a severe supply crunch such that neither clouds nor individual users can access new chips at anything approaching reasonable prices. TSMC owns 60% of the foundry market. So if China decides to invade Taiwan, that would likely mean ~60% of CPU and GPU manufacturing capacity permanently destroyed at once. That would be "iPhones are no longer for sale this year, and PCs now cost $5000 if you're lucky enough to get ahold of one" kind of territory.

kllrnohj 10mo ago
> TSMC owns 60% of the foundry market. So if China decides to invade Taiwan, that would likely mean ~60% of CPU and GPU manufacturing capacity permanently destroyed at once. While it would certainly be devastating, do note that TSMC has fabs in places that aren't Taiwan. So their entire production wouldn't immediately go offline, and presumably China would still want to keep selling those products and would have an interest in avoiding destroying those factories. If China suddenly decides it doesn't want to export electronics, though, then we're all super fucked. After all, what percentage of those TSMC chips flow through China to get mounted onto PCBs or need major supporting components from one of the "Foxconn Cities" in China?
- SPICLK2 10mo ago
  These supply chains have very non-linear responses. Relatively small fluctuations in demand can have enormous effects on prices and leadtimes.
- bluGill 10mo ago
  > presumably China would still want to keep selling those products and would have an interest in avoiding destroying those factories It has been hinted by people who might know something that Taiwan has rigged their factories to explode if China invades to ensure China can't get a hold of those factories. I'm not sure if it is true, but it wouldn't be hard to do (the hard part is ensuring the explosives don't go off for other reasons)

lm28469 10mo ago

> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services? It's the thin/thick client cycle, I've already been through it 1.5 times and I'm not that old.

1980phipsi 10mo ago

> Game publishers have already publicly floated the idea of not selling their games but charging per hour. Imagine how that impact Call of Duty or GTA. MMORPGs have had monthly subscription fees for a long time. For a lot of games if they charged by the hour would probably see less revenue...people buy tons of games and then barely ever play them.

philistine 10mo ago
You assume there's only one type of player. Some players fall into a category I lovingly call Madden Guy. These people will play some other games, but they will play one game *a lot*. Call of Duty, Arc Raiders, Destiny, Battlefield, Fortnite, these are the type of games who attract these kind of players. If a game has 600 purchasable items, a seasonal battlepass-type thing, multiple female rappers skins, and a publisher-financed pro scene, it's probably one of those games. Those games 100% already have game modes you pay by the hour. They will have special modes you access with currency and you need to keep paying to keep playing. Those modes are usually special, with increased and unique drops.

dayjaby 10mo ago

> How long before car ownership is replaced with autonomous vehicle car pools? Click here to subscribe for an activation of your seat heater.

alecco 10mo ago

You forgot: - while Big Tech is subsidized with our taxes - and even if you get a GPU it will be too expensive to run it due to electricity costs (thanks to Big Tech) - and most people end up working for Big Tech's gig economy without any benefits at below subsistence

layer8 10mo ago

I remember the dialup times when you had to pay for internet usage per minute. I hope we won’t revert back to that.

dev1ycan 10mo ago

This was always the plan, it's why they keep building datacenters when they know it's a bubble, they just plan to do GeForce NOW on steroids, this time with PCs costing $10k so nobody can afford it.

jrjeksjd8d 10mo ago

> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services? Always have been. Ever since the SaaS revolution of the early 2000s high-growth software businesses have been motivated to chase subscription revenue over one-time sales because you get a better multiple. From an economic perspective The Market would like the average person to spend all their money on rents, and the only option is how you allocate your spending to different rentals. Transportation, housing, food, entertainment (which is most of computing) are just different fiefs to be carved up by industry monopolists.

KellyCriterion 10mo ago
++1

goalieca 10mo ago

> home computers are replaced by thin clients phones have 128GB storage and are vastly more powerful than the workstation i did my grad thesis on. Now that electron has exhausted the last major avenue for application bloat, i don't see why thin would mean anything.

Noaidi 10mo ago

I am starting to think the last smartphone I bought is the last one I am going to be able to afford unless AI capitalism crashes and burns.

infecto 10mo ago

Computers have never been more powerful. There is less and less of a reason to do annual upgrades. I don’t follow this logic at all. The average consumer does not even need a home computer anymore. Sure if you are upgrading you gaming PC or something similar than your going to feel a bit more of a squeeze but even then it’s not a wild increase in price compared to the hours spent using.

esafak 10mo ago
GPUs are still overpriced and memory-limited. There's room for 10-100x improvement that would be noticeable.
- infecto 10mo ago
  Not for the person I was responding to. For the vast majority of consumers your statement does not apply.

coliveira 10mo ago

Say goodbye to falling AWS prices. From now on its gonna be higher and higher.

dcchambers 10mo ago

> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services? You will own nothing, and you will be happy.

general1465 10mo ago

> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services? No we don't. In Eastern Block during communism everything was either expensive or unavailable to the point that picking up broken TV on the side of the road and dismantling it for parts was making complete sense and you could actually learn something. Today it is much easier. You can visit eBay or AliExpress and buy old server crap from 2016 - i.e. Xeon E3 + X99 board + 32GB DDR4 RAM = 150EUR or just buying older laptops, computers from eBay. That's where consumer market is heading. The fact that hardware is going to be computationally constrained will finally force software developers to stop wasting resources. Having application which is able to run on old Windows 10 with i3 and 4GB of RAM without being sluggish will become competing advantage.

pmdr 10mo ago
Windows 10 is mostly EOL because M$ doesn't want you using older machines, no matter how powerful.
- lossyalgo 10mo ago
  This should be a crime and they should be forced to either keep supporting Win10 (at least security updates) and/or let you install Win11 on older hardware without TPM 2.0 modules (which is a total fucking lie that it's necessary, it's purely for monetary gain so that they can track you with a unique ID for ads).
- general1465 10mo ago
  That does not matter at all. When it comes to computation people will just use what's at hand. Windows 7 are still around, Windows 10 are going to be here for a long time.

pjmlp 10mo ago

I hope we go back into old days up to the late 1990's, and current generation of developers learn to target the computers users can afford.

esafak 10mo ago
Bill Gates used to use an average computer at work so he would have the same experience as users.

Forgeties79 10mo ago

Had to spend ~$200/ea on refurbished EXOS for work (14TB) when I got refurbished 14TB ultra stars for $90/ea a year ago. It’s getting ridiculous. The ram I put in my gaming rig I built earlier this year was $100, now it’s $500. I want to say “it can’t stay this high forever” but who knows?

nostrademons 10mo ago

Yes and no. I think what'll happen here is that these computing price increases will be what finally makes certain ML startups un-economical. That's what will precipitate the AI bubble burst. The whole thing runs on investor capital, so it keeps going until some investors lose their capital. Once the bubble bursts, you're going to get some really cheap GPUs, RAM, and hard drives (as well as cloud computing prices), as many of the more marginal data centers go out of business and liquidate their hardware. It's going to be a rough couple years for hobbyist computer aficionados though. In the near future I'd try to wait this one out and get a job at an AI startup instead.

jayd16 10mo ago

> Imagine how that impact Call of Duty or GTA By killing the golden goose... Game pass isn't doing well for developers and they know it.

63stack 10mo ago

Also, even if/when the AI bubble pops (whether it exists is irrelevant to my point), all the companies who have been hoarding the hardware can naturally progress into selling this new "stream everything through a subscription" service, further delaying (possibly forever if it's successful) price normalization.

tritip 10mo ago

Don't forget the end of Home Onwership.

ai-x 10mo ago

This directly contradicts the bubble narrative. If hyperscalers and neocloud have excess capacity and low demand, prices should be collapsing

glitchc 10mo ago

> Physical media could easily be killed off. Does my iPhone need 1TB of storage or will they shrink that and force everything through iCloud? For the mobile space, I think we are ripe for a memory inversion of sorts, where going forward a phone has 1TB or more of ram but very little non-volatile storage. The RAM would need to be fast enough to run inferences locally, whereas the storage is does the bare minimum to boot the device on the rare occasions it requires a reboot. All user-specific artifacts would be stored in the cloud. This seems a likely future for phones and other wearables going forward.

layla5alive 9mo ago
Storage costs less to manufacture and power than RAM. You are starting from a premise and making up a future where it's true, ignoring the realities of physics in the process.

hacker_homie 10mo ago

Time to go outside and touch grass it’s the only financially responsible thing to do until prices become reasonable again.

hiddew 10mo ago

> How long before car ownership is replaced with autonomous vehicle car pools? That is very much a future I look forward to living in. Not requiring to own a car but sharing it efficiently with folks in the neighborhood, would save quite some parking space for unused vehicles in front of homes, and centralize maintenance to the companies operating the vehicle fleet.

fooker 10mo ago
> That is very much a future I look forward to living in. What makes you think owning homes will be convenient in that future? To quote a proponent of this future: “You’ll own nothing and be happy”.

sneak 10mo ago

Eggs and hard currencies like gold are also going up as denominated in USD. It’s not so much that the things are increasing in value as much as the part of large scale inflation that the federal government can’t hide by cooking the CPI. The dollar is in freefall.

elorant 10mo ago

This assumes everyone’s sitting on a fast fiber connection which is hardly the case. Even metropolitan areas in most cities don’t have universal fiber connection.

clickety_clack 10mo ago

All the more reason to self host some part of your life at least. If there’s a market, someone will figure out how to service it, but if everyone gives up totally then all we’ll have is massive, cold, immovable corporations holding all our data.

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

dev_l1x_be 10mo ago

Or we rewrite everything in Rust and stop using JS on websites and watch how the computational efficiency and lack of bloat impacts the market?

TacticalCoder 10mo ago

Silver price rising. Gold price rising. Bitcoin price rising. It's got another name: inflation. Western economies are crumbling under gigantic public debt, representing 130% of the GDP in many countries and they're doubling down on public spending. The only way out is either defaulting on the debt (like Greece partially did) or debasing the currency. Monkeys have been left at the helm since decades and they only know how to do one thing: spending taxpayers dollars and endebtting countries ever more.

Schnitz 10mo ago

Assuming you are a capitalist that is in it to maximize shareholder value then yes, that is the direction you will push the world in. Why sell me a car once if you can charge me a rent forever?

hexbin010 10mo ago

Next stage will be significant broadband/mobile price rises. This is happening in the UK - 24 month contracts with annual 10-18% rises built in are the norm now (The regulator worked in cahoots with the companies. A big storm was created during the high-interest rate period inventing/overstating a problem that people can't predict their bills because the rises were based on official inflation figures, which naturally varied. So the companies went: ok sure we can do fixed price rises...(At a nice high rate). This was sold as a 'win' because the rises are now 'predictable') Plus the cheaper broadband (ADSL) is being phased out and replaced with fibre which for many people is overkill and everyone has to pay the price for that the upgrade whether you need it or not. Three and Vodafone just merged which will mean price rises in mobile data too due to reduced competition

marcosdumay 10mo ago

Subscriptions usually add up to the cost of buying in less than an year. Companies hope on people being none-the-wiser, but live mostly of people that subscribe for short durations or need the internet component of the services. So, no, prices going up will make subscriptions less popular, not more. This is different from expensive goods pools (rental cars, houses, airplanes, etc) because there's actual competition on those.

hyperbovine 10mo ago

On the flip side, if the rumored AI crashdepressionapocalyspe does in fact materialize, those things will become super cheap.

BadBadJellyBean 10mo ago
but no one has money anymore to buy it. :(

miki123211 10mo ago

Subscriptions have always been, and will always be, more economical and efficient than ownership. Unless you're using a resource 100% of the time, that resource is partially wasted. A GPU can be much cheaper for you if others are allowed to use it when you're asleep. I don't think this will ever work for gaming, as gaming has strict bandwidth and latency requirements. This means you need to colocate gaming datacenters with the people who actually use them, and people in a given timezone usually play at similar times. LLMs are a completely different beast. The user experiences of using an LLM next door and using an LLM from across the world are basically indistinguishable. This means you can have a single datacenter with really high GPU utilization during the day.

realo 10mo ago
I like to play AAA games casually. Think Witcher etc... I own a macbook, not really made for that. Years ago I got a subscription to GE Force Now and never looked back. I can play all the games I want , no problem. The only thing really needed is a good Internet connection, and my Gbps fiber link works very well. So... Subscriptions also work well for casual gaming, no problem.

deadbabe 10mo ago

New physical media could be killed off, but we already have a ton of old retro physical media, more than a person could ever consume in their lifetime. I wouldn’t worry about it. There are more old games and movies out there than you’ll ever be able to watch or play.

chabes 10mo ago

> - GPU prices rising - RAM prices rising - hard drive prices rising They tell me the economy is booming

giancarlostoro 10mo ago

> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services? I've been hearing this since 2010s when Microsoft introduced UEFI iirc and I've heard it for a while. I honestly thought in my teens in the mid to late 2010s that by now I'd have a few Petabyte hard drives. Shame. I've said it many times, everyone wants AI but nobody wants to foot the real bill for AI. The cost is too high. Once the bubble bursts, whoever is left standing might charge reasonable prices that are profitable, until it becomes more cost effective.

ihsw 10mo ago

[dead]

Twirrim 10mo ago

> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients FWIW these kinds of claims have been a cyclical thing constantly throughout my nearly 3 decades long career. We're always on the verge of thin clients replacing desktops, and then we're suddenly not and things calm down for a couple of years before, oops back again! Every time there's arguments about saving on cost of hardware, etc. but the reality never seems to line up with the dream.

peab 10mo ago

| Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and | all the power lies in subscription services? arguably, we are already there. The majority of people don't use a computer anymore, they use their phone. The phone itself is just an interface to the cloud. If I lost my phone today, and got a new one, the only inconvenience would be the time it takes me to set up the new phone, and the cost of the new phone. I wouldn't lose anything because everything is on the cloud

Lammy 10mo ago

They've been planning this outcome for a long time. Here's Larry Ellison in 1997: https://youtu.be/Bk1_btV3oIk?t=402 https://youtu.be/Bk1_btV3oIk?t=402 “The personal computer was designed as a standalone device. There was no Internet around 1981 when the PC was invented. There weren't a lot of local area networks and corporations and schools and government agencies [online] back in 1981. The world has changed — there are networks everywhere; around the world and offices and schools and major governments and institutions. So why not have computer networks that are similar to television networks or telephone networks? A television network is enormously complicated; it's got satellites and microwave relay stations and cable headends and recording studios, and you have this huge professionally-managed network accessed by a very low cost and simple appliance: the television. Anyone can learn to use a television. 97% percent of American households have televisions. 94% of American households have telephones. They can have very simple appliance attached to enormously complex professionally-managed network. Why shouldn't the computer network be just the same?”

Dylan16807 10mo ago
Who is "they"?
- Lammy 10mo ago
  How the hell should I know? Do you have any comments on Mr. Ellison's interview, or are you just here to nitpick my wording?
  - Dylan16807 10mo ago
    It's not nitpicking. I read the quote and I don't see anything about "planning this outcome", so I took that as something you added, so I asked you. He's zipping around between topics and I would have said websites already fulfill what he's talking about.
supertrope 10mo ago
While businesses hate being a dumb pipe and love vendor lock in, lots of customers choose dependence on big tech. Each retail business that only has a Facebook page to save the cost of hiring a web developer reinforces this dependence.

vee-kay 10mo ago

Valve changed its Steam Store's ToS, so officially it means Steam users no longer own the content they purchased in it, they merely bought a subscription to rent it for a while, until the game publisher decides to revoke the online content at any time they choose. TakeTwo Interactive (2K Games, the makers of popular games series Borderlands) changed its ToS to allow it to spy on and capture anything on the user's machine, including browser behaviors (websites visited, bookmarks saved, etc.), payment information (credit card details, etc.), programs installed & usage, etc. Gaming industry has moved on to become evil, by default. Most AAA games these days cannot even be played without an internet connection. And most AAA games demand intrusive DRMs, and same games demand the dangerous kernel-level DRMs like Denuvo which cannot be monitored by major antimalware.

pllbnk 10mo ago

That's exactly it. It's not like all these data centers are only going to teach models or perform inference. The goal is renters' economy.

bitwize 10mo ago

> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services? Astronaut 2: Always have been...

cyanydeez 10mo ago

No, we're looking at a future where the bubble bursts and more people get shoved back into poverty. None of the AI investment makes any sense.

okr 10mo ago

"You won't own anything and you will love it!"

hello_moto 10mo ago

The future is we all gonna go to war when there's no more juice to squeeze by the billionaires. The future is coming in hot. Just look at what's happening lately.

Psype 10mo ago

You will own nothing and be happy. Also check the agenda 2030. The European digital wallet. The cyberscore. All those elements together makes a digital Europe (and more) where there's no cash anymore, where your website has to be compliant to be working with EU's ID and payments systems. It's going to be all centralised and about subscriptions, no matter if it's about your electricity bill or your groceries.

paulddraper 10mo ago

You’ll own nothing and like it

zvqcMMV6Zcr 10mo ago

> all the power lies in subscription services I think NVidia already decided they have all the power when the decided to add 100h limit to their GForce Now service, with that limit getting effective for legacy plans right now. It would be bad if people like they service so much that they avoid buying overpriced hardware :D

snickerbockers 10mo ago

"You will own nothing and be happy."

pojzon 10mo ago

No we dont. Valve will make sure this subscription model will die in infancy. And thank god for that.

samrus 10mo ago

How does that make sense with this news that cloud gpu costs have risen? That would make the subscription services more expensive as well

rldjbpin 10mo ago

> Game publishers have already publicly floated the idea of not selling their games but charging per hour. Imagine how that impact Call of Duty or GTA. Don't you worry! R* is already selling one (albeit optional) [1]. it is expected to be there from day 1 in their next title. perhaps this could become closer to reality once the current subscription becomes commonplace. [1] https://www.rockstargames.com/gta-plus/benefits https://www.rockstargames.com/gta-plus/benefits