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.
Anyone surprised by that? Components have become unaffordable, and so have PCs.
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