IMO, sadly: the DIY PC world is on life support and will likely be something that isn't even really possible to do, for top-of-the-line performance, by 2028.

I don't necessarily think that everything is going doomer "subscription based cloud streaming"; the economics of these services never made sense, especially for gaming, and there's little reason to believe that the same incentives that led to Nvidia, Crucial, etc wanting out of the consumer hardware business wouldn't also impact that business.

Instead, the future is tightly integrated single-board computers (e.g. Framework Desktop, the new HP keyboard, Mac Mini, RPi, etc). They're easier for consumers to buy. Integrated memory, GPU, and cooling means we can drive higher performance. All of the components getting sourced by one supplier means the whole "X is leaving the consumer market" point is moot, and allows better bulk deals to be negotiated. They're smaller. It allows one company (e.g. Framework) to capture more margin than sharing with ten GPU or memory middle-men who just slap a sports car-looking cooler on whatever they bought from Micron and saying they're a real business.

My lingering hope is that we do see some company succeed who can direct-sell these high-end SBCs to consumers, so if you want to go the route of a custom case and such, you still can. And that we don't lose modular storage. But I've lost all hope that DIY PCs will survive this decade; to be frank, they haven't made economic sense for a while.

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fc417fc802 4 hours ago | parent [-]

> All of the components getting sourced by one supplier means the whole "X is leaving the consumer market" point is moot, and allows better bulk deals to be negotiated.

I don't think that checks out. The fabs are booked out AFAIU. This is going to hit SoCs (and anything else you can come up with) sooner rather than later because it all depends on the same fabs producing the same silicone at the end of the day. It's just packaged differently.

They left the consumer market due to the price difference. It's not that there aren't middlemen willing to purchase in bulk right now. It's that the OEMs aren't willing to sell at any price because they've already sold their entire future inventory at absurd prices for the next however many months or years.

I assume there will still be at least a few SoCs to choose from but the prices will likely be completely absurd because they will have to match the enterprise price for the components that go into them.

	▲	827a 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They're booked out by the people making these bulk deals. Apple has significant weight to throw at TSMC, Micron, etc when it comes to negotiating both capacity and price; far more than the DIY manufacturers. The same laws apply to Nvidia, Quallcomm, and AMD. The sub-argument to this is that graphics cards will drive up fab prices for other packaged silicon products; this has probably been true for the past two years, but its very likely that we'll see this change in 2026. Even if theoretical demand stays high (which is debatable, but not for today): every major AI lab is sitting on warehouses of gigawatts of ready silicon, with nowhere to power them, so real demand will drop as the bottlenecks of data center construction and power delivery are solved. Those problems will take another few years. Even if these companies have the money and want to spend it: It makes zero sense to buy cards today, to have them sit in a warehouse for two years, when you can sit on the cash and buy newer-generation cards in a year. I would bet very real money that, sometime in 2026, we will see Nvidia reduce or cancel a committed fab order from TSMC.