>The average person does not really benefit from recent AI tech

ChatGPT and Gemini offer enormous consumer value for free.

>The average person does not really benefit from recent AI tech

Really? Most people I know seem to have found the chatbots tremendously helpful. It's much faster than researching via a bunch of google searches.

What does this have to do with the steam deck?

My thirteen year old PC is holding up fine. I've replaced the disk (condition of me getting it; it was a disused Windows machine), installed Ubuntu, Debian, then Kubuntu, and upgraded the video card, but beyond that...basically as it shipped from Dell. The last BIOS update was 2013.

I'm completely on board with your view, I'm still rocking a 1080ti. But I'd also like to buy my kids a gaming computer someday, and I don't know when that will be, especially with prices being what they are. It took a shockingly long amount of time for a graphics card to come out at 1080 performance that costed less than a 1080.

> older hardware and often very inexpensively

What makes you think demand won't drive those prices up as well? And this is more than just gaming, the Steam Deck prices are increased due to the increase cost of general components like RAM, which impacts machines used to do work as well.

>I’m much more concerned by the skyrocketing cost of housing, energy, food, and transport than the cost of tech luxuries.

I'm with you, but given that I have no control over any of them I wouldn't have minded that my luxury fun was still cheap. About a decade or so ago, I remember saying something like "We're in an odd period historically: if you except housing, healthcare, and education, everything else is _stunningly_ cheap by historical norms." I wasn't trying to discount the importance of those things, but it felt like there was at least some relief among the rising costs there. Now, it seems like "everything else" has caught up and it's simply that everything is expensive.

The difference is those have largely all been steadily increasing every year for decades. Tech and entertainment (streamers etc) have been one of the few bright spots you could point to as something that would usually improve yearly.

At this point there is hardly anything left and I think it leads to some pretty dark scenarios when we have a society where we have somehow decided: fuck it, almost everything gets worse for almost all of you every single year.

Those same components are contained in tech everything, not just "luxuries". If you want to stick with your current hardware, you just need to hope that your existing setup will outlast you and never have any part failures.