Part of this has been a long-standing move by every industry to prioritize business-to-business sales as opposed to consumer sales simply because businesses have money and consumers don’t, because businesses are pocketing all the profits and refusing to pay their employees (consumers) a living wage, let alone a thriving wage.
It’s been a long time coming for the PC industry, because it’s been a general trend for at least two decades as sales to business have become more profitable over consumer sales ever since the late 90s.
It’s just more evidence that the bottom 90% of earners are just being priced out of anything but bare subsistence and the wealthy do not give a single fuck about it, in fact, they’re embracing it.
I am so glad to see someone else talking about this. Yeah, We’re going back to feudalism… And only the upper ranks of society will be able to afford goods and be able to engage in trade.
I mean, it’s very arguable that we’ve just been doing “feudalism with extra steps” for a very long time anyway.
To be less US/Europe-centric than my original post, the majority of the world has been in the “priced out of anything but bare subsistence” basket for most of the history of modern capitalism. Only the citizens of the Imperial Democracies of the Western world were benefiting while the majority of the Southern and Eastern hemispheres were simply locked out from being beneficiaries either through trade embargoes or outright exploitation via not paying foreign workers the home-country equivalent, and instead paying them a much lower “localized” rate.
It’s really that the Imperial Boomerang has finally made it’s way home to the citizens of the West.
This is an important point in general. The old story of “voting with your wallet” is now more and more obviously mathematically absurd.
I’m looking forward to cheap Chinese video cards that out perform Nvidia shit for 1/4 the price.
I hope you’re right because Intel and AMD still can’t compete with high end Nvidia cards, and that’s how we ended up with a $5000 5090.
FIVE THOUSAND?!
Jesus nun-fucking Christ, what an absolute scam. I bought a 1070 for $220 in the first few months after release. Guess I’ll just have to hope it can run for another 10 years…
Tell me about it. I also paid about the same for a 1070 back in 2016 and it lasted me all the way until 2022, when I finally decided to be a sucker and pony up the $1600 for a brand new 4090 at launch. Which as insane as that is, I’m glad I did because now 4090s go for about $3K used!
If you didn’t buy a new GPU by mid 2023, you’re pretty much stuck with what you have for the foreseeable future, given how insane prices are now with no signs of slowing down.
