Looking at what’s happening with RAM pricing and Crucial being shuttered, the doomer in me thinks they could just pull the same thing with every other PC component. It’s not like some plucky band of upstarts can start 3D printing organic free-range FOSS processors, hard drives and motherboards in their garage- all of this shit comes out of a couple of giant plants in Asia. If porky strangles the supply, that’s it. In the end all the average joe schmoe will be left with are cloud-based terminals that rely entirely on subscription services and that require strong identification to even use (and that will monitor and log every single fucking thing you do while drowning you in ads)
Wanna install Linux? Go ahead! What are you going to install it on though, your grandpa’s old Pentium? 
Wanna ditch subscription services and sail the seas? Oops, it looks like hard drives cost 5,000 dollars and are only sold to enterprise customers. I guess you’re not storing that media anywhere
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There’s really nothing wrong with old tech. Half of the world still runs on tape drives. Until very recently my laptop was still 4:3. I haven’t upgraded my desktop PC in something like 6 years and it’s still fine. I don’t play cutting edge video games or do intensive video rendering, but I imagine most people aren’t either and they could live without AAA games.
A 6 year old PC could probably run most AAA games just fine depending on your GPU, a GTX 1080 from almost ten years ago still gets surprisingly good results. Some people seem to be stuck in the 90s/early 2000s mentality where PC tech evolved much faster and a five year old PC was already obsolete, when a decade old or even older PC is still cromulent for browsing the web and paying your bills.
The main problem with playing AAA games on an older PC would probably be disk space, since at some point it became totally reasonable for a game to be 100+ GB.
Not the case for everyone ofc, but the rising availability of high speed internet makes that less of a concern. If you can download 100gb in twenty minutes, you don’t have to worry too much about storage.
Yeah, I was thinking more of cases where you have a 256 GB drive or something and fitting even one modern game + OS is a challenge.
It would be a very strangely constructed pc to be able to play a modern 100gb game but have so little storage
There were definitely prebuilts being sold a few years ago with 256 GB drives, although those were probably all rocking the GTX 1650, so their ability to play modern games is debatable. At least nowadays it seems like even the shittiest prebuilt with only 8 gigs of RAM has a 512 GB drive.