319 - Hardware Without Purpose
Today as I looked through a variety of very unevenly bloated prices on PC components, I realized something critical that has changed in the past few years, which the market hasn't caught up to yet.
People used to buy better hardware for two things, better core functionality, things like communication or storing, handling, editing, and hosting files for work, and for gaming, where a more performant system was both more enjoyable and a strategic advantage. Here is the problem with that:
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Core functionality for work is a very low bar, which even low-budget systems can now readily meet. Nothing mid or high-tier is needed or even offers any benefits to this. Much is now handled by mobile devices.
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Most games being produced today absolutely suck, in horrendous and laughable ways. The video game industry has long since moved past the golden age, with waves of progressively crappier, more addictive, and cheaply produced mobile games taking market share, alongside a variety of other comorbidities. This industry is now circling the toilet drain quickly, as "AI Agents" flood the space with trash "games" generated by "vibe coders".
This leads us to the new proposed reason for buying better desktop/laptop hardware, AI, except that the hardware is built specifically for trash AI, most of which is hosted on cloud servers anyway. This reason is effectively stillborn, never to be.
While a handful of games may be produced in a 3-5 year period that benefit from mid to high-tier hardware (and are actually worth playing), the number is now so small as to effectively quadruple the sticker price of each game just to cover the additional hardware cost for that time period. Core functionality needs none of that higher-class hardware, and trash AI offers no tangible justification.
Previously I had thought that perhaps when Nvidia's revenue eventually implodes as the current AI scams collapse they could fall back on their market of gamers…but when the gamers have virtually no games left that are worth playing, they have no reason to pay Nvidia's premium. Jensen should never have chased that bird.
