Anyone surprised by that? Components have become unaffordable, and so have PCs.
The artificial scarcity of components due to the ai craziness is all a plot to make people give up on local computing and use only phones and cloud services for everything /s (I’m afraid that I may not need that /s at all…)
No need for the /s. That’s exactly what it is. It’s a money grab and a bid for more control and surveillance we cannot dodge.
Ram prices. Those of us who saw it coming, apparently a number between 7% and 15%, bought a bridge PC before the price gouging started.
And now SSD and hard drive prices. Keep your tech going, it’s going to be a long few years, if ever, before affordability returns. They (cloud and AI tech-holes) want local compute and storage to be unaffordable so we use their crap. F-ck that, I’m gonna scavenge whatever I can to keep self-hosting to the bitter end.
i’ve salvaged enough older ddr3/ddr4 stuff and sata ssd to hopefully last until i see some newer stuff go through here destined for the recycle heap. but what i am short on is spinny hdd for more ‘‘archive’’ storage, i’m down to my last couple smaller hdd