Jep. And as long as we are thinking that money is the real existing problem, we will think that we can do nothing. How convenient.

About 95% of all CPUs produced in 2025 ended up in a datacenter. 80+% with the big four.

The complete consumer and enterprise on-prem market is a pure afterthought for the manufacturers at the moment.

The last time RAM was this expensive per megabyte was... 2015.

"New luxury product dependent on expensive components becomes expensive" is not the death rattle of an industry. It's a blip. When the supply increases or demand drops, the market will correct.

By all means - vote with your pocketbook. But - the competition to the new OLED steam decks are *already* more expensive.

As a gamer you have to play on whatever the mass markets supplies in the future.

If you look at the complexity of the supply chain, it would be more difficult to build an iPhone in the U.S. than the Manhattan project was.

Perhaps not impossible, but prohibitively expensive.

All that extra horsepower in a system that had 4x the specs of the previous were wasted. Just not even being tapped.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the coin, just booting Windows 11 with the basic corporate EDR and management stuff seems to use 10GB these days. I get that the software is probably better threaded, sitting on managed libraries, etc., but it's still pretty bonkers to see something like the Start Menu consuming hundreds of mega of memory and slamming multiple cores to do... whatever it is that it does these days.

Without knowing more about it, maybe that CRM software should do less in the browser and more on the back-end, where the resources between many connecting clients can be coalesced and cached, with the browser just showing what needs to be shown.

That being said, we have a huge archive of games even if people stop making as much, and we may need them to stop so everyone has time to strengthen their knowledge base.

I'm normally in favor of the march of progress and an understanding that newer things are bigger, but several things have changed in the last five years that should have us re-examining our traditional patterns. I don't think the things operating system and app developers are delivering by targeting larger systems are... actually in anyone's best interest.

However the actual hardware in use is good enough for further software development for the next years, as it is massively oversized. Fixit becoming a major player is not a bad thing. And letting China taking over the hardware delivery in the next years is a political decision we are making by voting for politics which is far from society orientation.
As always we will get what the democratic majority votes for.

Very glad I bought a 4070 Super last year, and a second hand ten year old workstation with lots of memory to test things on.

There will be a sdram national memory company that goes IPO in Shanghai, it will look like a missile in the chart imo.

But some office computers absolutely need RAM. One of our main systems is browser based and eats RAM alive. This is a major industry customer CRM, nothing crazy. It should probably be a much more efficient app but that wouldn’t be as updateable for them nor run on any OS so RAM is crucial for a smooth operation. All of our laptops have 32GB RAM to keep them going at full speed.

Unfortunately, I was also considering to buy a new PC back then, but delayed the decision.
Now that's delayed for quite a while at least.

Yes, my Steam Deck isn't a powerful gaming machine but *that's not what it's for*

@masek

PC processors and GPUs have been good enough for years and the development slowdown/longer cycles aren't a bad thing. Games are not bound by the limitations of a mid-range CPU or GPU now, the choices the developer makes are much more impactful.

I use 4-8 year old hardware and barely notice the difference between it and the latest. My son has a fantastic gaming experience on a PC with similar specs to a Steam Machine Mk2.

Yes, the AI effects on the market suck, but the gamer culture of always wanting to build beefier rigs was getting toxically absurd and pointless. We don't need to double specs at the edge every two years anymore; we shouldn't even want to.

I feel the same way about the processing power in PCs. We just don't need office computers to have 32GB RAM and terabytes of fast storage. That stuff is fun, but what we need is for developers to target operating systems and software at reasonable levels and stop expecting the installed edge to ride Moore's Law forever.

@grutzifix