People have the option of just not buying stuff. I sold my Tesla in 2021 for a stupid price, drove a beater for two years, and bought another new car a couple years later. Now, certainly not everyone has that luxury, but this is computers, not real estate. Prices will crash.

>People have the option of just not buying stuff.

Unless you know, your main and only PC/notebook just died and need a replacement ASAP, they you don't really have an option to not buy. And no, the used market (where I live) is just as fucked, proportionally reflecting the retail gouging, with people wanting quite a lot of cash for tower PCs and notebooks from the Pentium 4 - Core 2 Duo era.

> Prices will crash.

Does your crystal ball also say when exactly? If my laptop broke, then I need a replacement now in the overpriced market, not in X years when prices will crash.

If this goes on long enough the prices crashing won't matter because the manufacturers of all the other PC hardware will be gone.

I think we're seeing the end of the PC as we know it, personally.

I hope so. I feel so, so, so terribly guilty for not building my wife a computer for her in 2023. She is rocking a 1080ti, and I really wish I had at least upgraded her system, but now I just straight cannot afford to even consider it, given the price of rent, food, gas, energy, all on top of the actual hardware prices.

And I am a SWE.I am not making bad money. I can't imagine what others are going through.

Way to miss the whole point of the article and fail to understand the point. Do you think if significant part of US industry goes bankrupt because they can't source parts for their products, work machines and consumers disappear... you'll still have luxury of running around in a Tesla?