GN: Collapse of Personal Computing - Investigation Into the Destruction of Ownership (video)

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyQwAhppWj8

"In this investigation into the destruction of PC ownership through excessive consumer pricing as AI companies go post-consumer. We flew around the world to to line-up interviews to learn about the collapse of the PC industry. Memory and storage prices are higher than ever, and companies with no control over the silicon components are left to flounder at a fraction of their typical sales volume. As a backdrop, the possibility of owning a personal computer is disintegrating in real-time as data centers fuel a shortage and try to offer more compelling cloud compute options than owning your own computer."

TLDR; AI is eating the enthusiast market alive. I couldn't help but feel ill after watching. Still, since I didn't see a post I thought it warranted attention, if nothing but to start a constructive conversation on this topic. Thoughts or comments?

Yeah, this is rather bothersome to me.

The personal computer market, particularly customizing and building machines is a large part of who I am and who I have been for the last 35 years. The potential of that going away makes me sick to my stomach.

I don't think there is any explicit intent to try to push individuals away from ownership (at least not in this particular case), but rather it is a side effect of the extreme demand for every square millimeter of manufactured silicon chips the AI industry can get their hands on.

If AI truly is in a bubble, and I have to admit that many aspects of it really do look bubble-like, that bubble needs to hurry up and pop already, or our collective hobby is doomed.

I will own a RTX 6090 andmost likely 128 GB RAM on the CPU side so keep dreaming that A.I will go away it is called dellusional.

Gaming is my cheap hobby but it seems the new "black" to to cry on the internet, soft generations followed Gen X for sure

Zarathustra[H] said:

If AI truly is in a bubble, and I have to admit that many aspects of it really do look bubble-like, that bubble needs to hurry up and pop already, or our collective hobby is doomed

Click to expand...

Nah, people will start buying cheaper, less sophisticated hardware. They will start making very optimized software for that hardware. People will compete to see who can make the coolest thing run on a toaster. It happened before, it'll happen again.

YouTubers like to use hyperbole, especially at outlets like GN, so I would take that "you will own nothing" language with a grain of salt.

The boring reality is that personal ownership is becoming uncomfortably expensive, but that the current situation won't last forever and that there's still plenty of life left in the affordable computing space. Multiple vendors at Computex just announced systems that aren't priced into the stratosphere (see the new XPS 13 as an example).

we will probably end up back in the dark ages before any of this matters with the way we are going.

In a world where you can buy a Neo for $599, it is still not 1994 level of expensive to own a personal computer/smarthphone that can do a lot.

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/1109...ite-memory-crisis-and-price-crunch/index.html
Global PC shipments actually grew in Q1 2026,
Global PC shipments rose 2.5% in Q1 2026

Saying destruction of ownership when the sales of new PC last quarter was between 60 to 65 millions units and of course the useful life of old PC is getting longer and longer.....

https://www.costco.com/p/-/skytech-...00mhz-1tb-gen-4-nvme-ssd/4201003784?langId=-1
1,900 USD, 32GB/1TB SSD, RTX 5070, core ultra 7 265K....

that not the best it ever been of course, but that so much cheaper than 1994:

View: https://i.imgur.com/nJQ5onT.jpg

a compact computer was $5000 in today dollars, cheapest options over $2200 and virtually no used market existed for capable to do the upcoming Internet-windows 95 computer at a good price.

People that think/say that they would not pay current price if that was the only way to have a computers (regardless of the format).... oh yes they would. They would just buy less computer than usual, but they certainly would, people were paying double-triple for computers when they were not nearly as valuable-useful as today.

Table 1: Preliminary Worldwide PC Vendor Unit Shipment Estimates for 1Q26 (Thousands of Units)


Not sure if people at Apple agree with this notion of a collapse of personnal computing device... of course if you go talk to small boutique, DIY, stuff that live on the spot price that must be true...

But worldwide personnal computer sales, have yet to really collapse, Q1 2026 (maybe boosted by people making reserve.... fearing even worse avaibiltiy in q2-q3-q4) was bigger than Q1 2025 in units sales.

Or Intel clients computing side of things.
was still the majority of Intel revenues and still a tiny bit bigger than Q1 2025, not good of course but not some big collapse.

Offtopic but maybe similar. Security of something I can "know" is better than security that I cannot "know", and even worse is security I cannot "control".

So, while, sure, FOSS/OSS advocates all nod.... the latter is the situation with the "black box" device that all must have... that is, our mobile phones. IMHO, that's the best hack point because it is so black box.

Sure, we can argue that in our new AI world, that people have subtracted from their knowledge and IQ, and so, we live in ignorance, and ignorance is bliss, but as someone that still believes in security, I find this to be very frustrating. That is, for people fearing the end of ownership, I'd argue that shark was jumped years ago and you're ok with it.

LukeTbk said:

Table 1: Preliminary Worldwide PC Vendor Unit Shipment Estimates for 1Q26 (Thousands of Units)

Company	1Q26 Shipments	1Q26 Market Share (%)	1Q25 Shipments	1Q25 Market Share (%)	1Q26-1Q25 Growth (%)
Lenovo	16,645	26.5	15,199	25.2	9.5
HP Inc.	12,142	19.3	12,766	21.1	-4.9
Dell	10,337	16.5	9,608	15.9	7.6
Apple	6,684	10.6	5,933	9.8	12.7
ASUS	4,210	6.7	3,801	6.3	10.8
Acer	4,001	6.4	3,853	6.4	3.9
Others	8,780	14.0	9,205	15.2	-4.6
Total	62,800	100.0	60,365	100.0	4.0

Not sure if people at Apple agree with this notion of a collapse of personnal computing device... of course if you go talk to small boutique, DIY, stuff that live on the spot price that must be true...

But worldwide personnal computer sales, have yet to really collapse, Q1 2026 (maybe boosted by people making reserve.... fearing even worse avaibiltiy in q2-q3-q4) was bigger than Q1 20266 in units sales.

Click to expand...

PC vendors have warned that Q2 is when you'll really see the full impact as companies run out of the inventory they've been stockpiling to keep prices down. Some computers are relatively cheap, like the MacBook Neo and new XPS 13, but we're already seeing some ridiculously-priced computers like the new Alienware 15 and Microsoft's latest Surfaces.

I expect Apple to thrive as it's supply-constrained for the Neo and has already factored prices into all its 2026 Macs released so far, but it's going to get messy for most of the others until the component market stabilizes.