I’m just afraid that prices of $everything will go up soon and will not come down anymore, like they did after Covid.

If it’s temporary I can live with it.

I guess this was inevitable with the absolute insane money being poured into AI.

The main thing that the powers that be have always underestimated is the insane creativity the common people have when it comes to wanting things, but being forced to use alternative ways. Not going to say it won't suck, but interesting ways will indeed be found.

Unless people notice that they just built lots of useless datacenters and push back towards a mainframe + terminal setup, because ah sorry, modern software just runs much better that way, and you can save money on our inexpensive laptop with subscription model

Saw this one coming and got my personal stuff out. It's running on an old Lenovo crate chucked in my hallway.

Work is fucked. 23TB of RAM online. Microservices FTW. Not. Each node has OS overhead. Each pod has language VM overhead. And the architecture can only cost more over time. On top of that "storage is cheap so we won't bother to delete anything". Stupid mentality across the board.

> The only silver lining is that newer devices will have to scale down memory, so developers will have to ditch memory-sucking frameworks and start to optimize things again.

No. Prices will just go up, less innovation in general.

At least we can add "use the least amount of RAM and drive space" to our AI prompts.

/s

> "Personal Computing" is going to become a luxury of the past, and we’ll all be terminal-renters in someone else's data center.

This is the game plan of course, why have customers pay one time for hardware when they can have you constantly feed them money over the long term. Shareholders want this model.

It started with planned obsolescence, now this new model is the natural progression.. There is no obsolescence even in discussion when you're only option is to rent a service, that the provider has no incentive to even make competitive.

I really feel this will be China's moment to flood the market with hardware and improve their quality over time.

> "Personal Computing" is going to become a luxury of the past, and we’ll all be terminal-renters in someone else's data center.

Yep. My take is that, ironically, it's going to be because of government funding the circular tech economy, pushing consumers out of the tech space.

it goes mainframe (remote) > PC (local) > cloud (remote) > ??? (local)

This is the result of the long-planned desire for consumer computing to be subscription computing. Ultimately, there is only so much that can be done in software to "encourage" (read: coerce) vendor-locked, always-online, account-based computer usage; there are viable options for people to escape these ecosystems via the ever growing plethora of web-based productivity software and linux distributions which are genuinely good, user friendly enough, and 100% daily-drivable, but these software options require hardware.

It's no coincidence that Microsoft decided to take such a massive stake in OpenAI - leveraging the opportunity to get in on a new front for vendor locking by force-multiplying their own market share by inserting it into everything they provide is an obvious choice, but also leveraging the insane amount of capital being thrown into the cesspit that is AI to make consumer hardware unaffordable (and eventually unusable due to remote attestation schemes) further enforces their position. OEM computers that meet the hardware requirements of their locked OS and software suite being the only computers that are a) affordable and b) "trusted" is the end goal.

I don't want to throw around buzzwords or be doomeristic, but this is digital corporatism in its endgame. Playing markets to price out every consumer globally for essential hardware is evil and something that a just world would punish relentlessly and swiftly, yet there aren't even crickets. This is happening unopposed.

> "Personal Computing" is going to become a luxury of the past, and we’ll all be terminal-renters in someone else's data center.

These things are cyclical.

"You'll own nothing. And you'll be happy"

Sorry, do people not immediately see that this is an AI bit comment?

Why is this allowed on HN?

The number of HDDs sold has been in decline for over a decade. I doubt there is massive appetite for expanding production capacity

On the other hand the total storage capacity shipped each year has risen, as a combination of HDDs getting larger and larger, and demand shifting from smaller consumer HDDs to larger data center, enterprise and NAS HDDs. I'm not sure how flexible those production lines are, but maybe the reaction will be shifting even more capacity to higher-capacity drives with cutting-edge technology

Server grade hardware (rack blades) is already poor fit for consumer needs and AI dedicated hardware straight up requires external liquid cooling systems. It will be expensive to adopt them.

If it takes 2 years to increase, after 2 years everything will be thin clients already. Completely locked in, fully under control and everybody used to it. Very dystopian TBH.

> According to Mosley, Seagate is not expanding its production capacities for now. Growth is to come only from higher-capacity hard drives, not from additional unit numbers.

True if production capacity increases but it's an oligopoly and manufacturers are being very cautious because they don't want to cut into their margins. That's the problem with concentration. The market becomes ineffective for customers.

yes https://www.reuters.com/world/china/intel-amd-notify-custome...

What's next is no custom built PCs. They want us running dumb thin clients and subscribing to compute. Or it will be like phones. We'll get pre-built PCs that we aren't allowed to repair and they'll be forced to be obsolete every few years.

I think hard drives was before RAM but it kind of all happened contemporaneously.

Better start hoarding Silica.

There is an increasing chance the "invention" will be that nobody owns personal computers, and now has to rent from the cloud.

Think that's more of a "silver lining" instead of the overall trend being a "good thing long term." It's still pretty terrible.

The real "computer hardware reserves" is the used market. Average folks and smaller businesses will realize that their old gear now has resale value and a lot more of it will be entering the resale/refurbishment market instead of being thrown away as e-waste.

That's not going to happen when AI is already propping up a significant chunk of the economy.

There is appetite in some circles for a consumer boycott but not much coordination on targets.

It just goes to show how totally corporations have captured western aligned governments. Our governments are powerless to do anything (aside from some baby steps from the EU).

China is now the only solution to fix broken western controlled markets.

> Sounds like we’re headed towards a “you will own nothing and be happy” type situation

That's when I sell of my current hardware and house, buy a cow and some land somewhere in the boondocks and become a hermit.

It could be a level up from that.

"You will use AI, because that will be the only way you will have a relaxed life. You will pay for it, own nothing and be content. Nobody cares if you are happy or not."

We could also vote the policians protecting these uncompetitive markets out of power and let regulators do their job. There has been too many mergers in the component market.

You also have to look at the current status of the market. The level of investment in data centers spurred by AI are unlikely to last unless massive gains materialize. It's pretty clear some manufacturers are betting things will cool down and don't want to overcommit.

That's the electronics industry in general though. The shortages are real and a normal part of growing pains for any industry that's so capital-intensive and capacity constrained.

You could do worse... https://youtu.be/1hc52_PWeU8

VHS cassettes: maybe not so obsolete, after all?

Also, the Return of PKZIP.

To be fair, heise is a german news site, and the very article is auto-translated by AI from its german counterpart.

We can also lose our jobs in a few years so there’s that

Honestly looks highly suspicious to me. Because ok they might need some big storage like petabits. But how can this be a match in proportion with the capacity that is currently usually needed for everything that is hard drive hungry. Any cloud service, any storage service, all the storage needed for private photo/video/media storage for everything that is produced everyday, for all consumer hardwares like computers...

Gpu I understand but hard drive looks excessive. It's like if tomorrow there is a shortage of computer cabling because ai datacenter needs some.

You may have answered your own question if they're wanting to train models on video and other media.

Chromebook with a 64gig shitty eMMC is what Google and friends would love you to use. Pay that cloud drive subscription!

The TV is best device for unleashing your creativity by upvoting your favourite Sora creators! Become an expert at any field by activating premium prompts from our partners! By connecting camera you can have meaningful motivating discussions with your deceased loved ones (camera required for fraud prevention. Remember, not looking at the screen during ads is punishable by law)

You have 31/999 credits remaining. What activity would you like to productively participate in today?

I feel traditional "rust" hard disks would be inefficient for AI use. Unless they include SSDs (which I feel these data centers are more likely to be using) in the definition as well...