I think it's probably for the best, the hyperconsumerism around electronics was getting out of hand. Computers are fast and have been fast for a while now. An iPhone 12 is probably more than fine to do iPhone things, if Apple didn't sabotage their old phones with poorly-written poor-performance software.

There also seems to have been a major shift in strategy from AMD / Intel / Apple / NVidia due to this, as I was used to CPU / GPU / chipset upgrades coming out more regularly with double-digit percentage improvements each year, but that seems to be basically over for the consumer space now that everyone is just trying to build as much AI hardware as fast as possible for enterprise markets.

I also used to rebuild my desktop every 1-2 years and upgrade laptops every 2-3 years, but I'm currently a bit past that and have no plans to refresh anything in the near future. I'll probably wait another CPU and GPU generation or two to even consider it, especially with prices being this ridiculous.

I'm fully anticipating AI hardware demand to dry up once Anthropic and OpenAI start tanking financially in a few years after missing earnings and investors and banks wanting their loans paid back combined with more folks realizing that LLMs cannot achieve AGI. After that, I would hope that the demand that's driving this pricing spike will fall along with it, but I also fully expect hardware companies to be as greedy as possible, so maybe a 32TB HDD will just cost $1000 going forward and the era of "a decent gaming PC made up of the tier of components one step below TOTL costs ~$2000" we've been in since the 1990s is fully over, and it's just going to be more like $5k going forward.

I'm running a 12 year old i5 3.2ghz CPU with 16 GB of memory, an SSD and an AMD RX 480 (8 GB) GPU. Currently using a 100% scaled 4k monitor and a 2nd 1440p monitor. I keep the machine on 24 / 7. It's great for software development along with video + image editing and casual gaming. Everything feels fast and snappy.

I will use this until the hardware stops. There's a 0% chance I'd buy hardware at the current prices.

I have a 2021 M1 pro and see no reason to upgrade it... ever?

I do web & general java work on it and it's plenty fast even using a memory hog like IntelliJ (which is typically disk bound anyway). Claude tells me that a new macbook would feel about 1.8x faster in my CPU-bound cases, which is not common.

If memory prices returned to normal and if local inference gets over the hump, I could see upgrading for local AI agents, but I'm fine waiting for a good long while on that.

I say all this as someone who, five years ago, was a perpetual upgrader: immediately bought new product and got excited for next product. Wonder if the future will see the end of that culture in tech and, looking back, it was a little silly and wasteful anyway.

I'm also using an iPhone mini 12 and it's fine.

There isn't much to upgrade to if all you want is a desktop for gaming, a non-workstation work box or just a decent laptop. Much like smartphones, there just hasn't been much innovation of late. A midrange gaming desktop from mid 2023, something like rtx 4070 and ryzen 7800x3d, can still play pretty much any video game on max settings and high framerate at 1440p, and has sufficient performance for most workstation-esque tasks as long as you have enough ram. Similarly, the only thing my spare macbook m2 lacks compared to m5 is hardware av1 decoding - the performance is worse, but I don't really notice it in normal usage, and macOS 27 runs perfectly well on it.

Local AI will crush any machine, of course, and if you need a 512gb ram box you'll probably need to sell both kidneys, but you're well past the average consumer territory with those.

So, fingers crossed nothing breaks down and that some of the funny money goes into R&D which will eventually trickle down to consumer devices in a few years (16TB gum stick SSDs at sane prices pretty please) instead of endless datacenter GPUs and SSDs that will be tossed into a shredder in x years.

My desktop PC turns 20 next year. I've never seen any need to upgrade it, went out of my way to build it with silent parts and it rarely if ever goes outside a single-digit CPU load (before anyone asks, software development and a bit of CAD work). I'll upgrade it when something in it physically fails, which means I'll need to replace it with new hardware with 5-10x the specs just to get the same performance.

My laptop is currently about two years into a typically 5-year lifespan, limited by when the keys start to fail rather than any need to upgrade it just because. The RAM in it is now worth more than the rest of the laptop.

I've had a RAM stick fail.

Granted, I've been building my own computer for 30 years and I've only seen it happen ONCE.

But I've seen plenty of other failures:

- Two hard drives -- One got dropped on the floor, so it was no surprise, the other was showing degraded performance and SMART showed some scary numbers and I was able to replace it before I lost data.

- One GPU, replaced under warranty.

- One AIO water cooler, replaced under warranty. Somehow, the water vanished from the loop. I'm guessing a microscopic leak that evaporated as fast as it leaked.

- Two power supplies -- One randomly exploded. Just started making popping noises and shooting sparks out the back. At autopsy, I determined that the fan failed (it was hard to spin manually) and it overheated. The other was just being overloaded. I had just gotten a new GPU and the PSU wasn't big enough for it.

- Several case fans.

Never seen a CPU or motherboard failure, even when my AIO water cooler was failing and my CPU was constantly at thermal limits. Never had an SSD/NVMe failure.

Anecdotally, RAM failures are more common than they used to be in previous decades, I assume due to increased capacities and smaller process nodes. Looser manufacturing standards may also play a part.

The component category I've never seen fail is CPU.

Most devices never test their memory and don’t have ecc, so you generally never know. Random instability can be fixed by restarting and your program not being in an area with bad bits anymore.

I had a 2012 mac book pro that burned out 2 different crucial memory sticks. Would have bricked the machine if it was the soldered-on type, but it was the last model apple sold that have swappable memory. Crucial had a lifetime warranty so they replaced them for free.

I used to game on it and I think the design just couldn't handle the cpu and dgpu being active for long periods, it would get extremely hot in the area close to where the memory was.

You may literally be the only one.

I recently had part of a 32 gig DIMM go bad on a 128 gig system. One of the larger VMs was spontaneously rebooting for no apparent reason. I was able to find the addresses with MemTest86 and map out 512 megs of the affected DIMM with the Linux kernel memmap option.

Well, you’re lucky. I had to change laptop memory sticks a few times. Though not since they are soldered directly to the motherboard

on older PC bios would perform a memory test - you may remember those - and that's where it would mark a bunch of pages dead/unusuable and it was not uncommon at all.

Same, it's either bad to begin with or it's basically immortal.

This isn’t true anymore beginning with DDR4 speeds.

Interesting, I've had two fail already in much shorter time. One was brand new, another quite old.

I've seen some fail. Might have had to do with the fact that the computers were literally flooded (river came up faster than the sandbaggers could keep up) while running.

I've had a few RAM sticks fail, but the ECC usually caught it first. Also had one case that somehow the stick slightly unseated itself; dunno how but it was out of service for months until someone opened it up and reseated the stick.

...granted though I've also seen a backpane on a server fail. I didn't think that was even possible until that point.

[dead]

DRAM fabs are multi-billion dollar investments which take years to come online. That's the whole reason we're in this situation, there is no quick fix available.