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He is conflating a couple of ideas: a push to make the consumer dependent and the overall collapse of the industry to sell you hardware.
The key points are rising costs (tarrifs, uncertainty, AI demands changing manufacture to HBM (high memory bandwidth) instead of consumer RAM. Only 3 companies control 90 percent of all ram.
Then there was consumers who saw all this coming and horded and purchased a lot up front, creating a demand that suddenly collapsed, which is an interesting additional problem. Largely consolidation to the larger vendors, as smaller ones had a rush and then quick decline in sales.
But the most interesting part of the conversation is about right to ownership, right to repair, and licensing with services. Corporations are pushing hard to define hardware as “software in a box” and require licensing. There are a lot of published papers on this.
The confluence of the hardware shortages (not just for hobbyists, but also in all consumer devices) is causing a rise in companies pushing for low power cheap devices connected to their licensed services. In order to maintain a profit they are now incentivized to use software locks, subscriptions, and centralized cloud services.
There it is in a nutshell.
Solutions? Open-source, local first hardware, diversification of the hardware chain. Several fabs are coming on line but it will take some time.
Dude, I appreciate the ever-loving f*** out of you actually taking the time to compile this, and a site sources. This is genuinely what I was hoping to get out of the thread ( all of the haterade was just… An unhealthy bonus, I guess?) And I’ll be diving into those links.
I sometimes feel torn about these kinds of market consolidation issues, because it’s certainly not Samsung or skhynix’s fault there are no at-scale fabs from first party American brands, and that both until and AMD did everything in their power to reduce domestic production and spin off their own Fab facilities for literally anyone else to manage wherever possible.
It’s Red Lobster and every other Private Equity managed restaurant chain becoming a real estate holding company, just with a lot more electrons.
But it’s not like TSMC or SK Hynix did this to us, and it’s on all of the consumers to keep the board partners and oackagers honest.
Thst said, I tend to think consolidation is universally bad, absent any nationalization of infrastructure, and my country has this same nightmare playing out with its housing as Blackrock and other equity groups have make a clear effort to force all of us to be perpetual renters.
We in this thread are likely universally in agreement about the problems at hand. I respect that you cut across my bullshit and everyone else’s to actually bring citations and thoughts. Cheers.
He is conflating a couple of ideas: a push to make the consumer dependent and the overall collapse of the industry to sell you hardware.
The key points are rising costs (tarrifs, uncertainty, AI demands changing manufacture to HBM (high memory bandwidth) instead of consumer RAM. Only 3 companies control 90 percent of all ram.
see: https://enkiai.com/ai-market-intelligence/memory-shortage-2026-how-ai-will-cause-a-supply-crisis/
and
https://www.investing.com/analysis/the-end-of-cheap-memory-why-2026-marks-a-structural-shift-in-tech-economics-200675634
Then there was consumers who saw all this coming and horded and purchased a lot up front, creating a demand that suddenly collapsed, which is an interesting additional problem. Largely consolidation to the larger vendors, as smaller ones had a rush and then quick decline in sales.
But the most interesting part of the conversation is about right to ownership, right to repair, and licensing with services. Corporations are pushing hard to define hardware as “software in a box” and require licensing. There are a lot of published papers on this.
The book The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy published at MIT press and completely free to read, gets into the details, even though it was from 2016, it still applies today. https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4662/The-End-of-OwnershipPersonal-Property-in-the
Another good resource is this paper: Restrictions on Use in Digital Services Contracts: The Legal Implications of Licensing vs. Ownership Models https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/ahmadova_shabnam.pdf
The confluence of the hardware shortages (not just for hobbyists, but also in all consumer devices) is causing a rise in companies pushing for low power cheap devices connected to their licensed services. In order to maintain a profit they are now incentivized to use software locks, subscriptions, and centralized cloud services.
There it is in a nutshell.
Solutions? Open-source, local first hardware, diversification of the hardware chain. Several fabs are coming on line but it will take some time.
Interestingly pc shipments in general are expected to rise again, see here for various links: https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20260411-pc-market-2026-q1/#gsc.tab=0
Dude, I appreciate the ever-loving f*** out of you actually taking the time to compile this, and a site sources. This is genuinely what I was hoping to get out of the thread ( all of the haterade was just… An unhealthy bonus, I guess?) And I’ll be diving into those links.
I sometimes feel torn about these kinds of market consolidation issues, because it’s certainly not Samsung or skhynix’s fault there are no at-scale fabs from first party American brands, and that both until and AMD did everything in their power to reduce domestic production and spin off their own Fab facilities for literally anyone else to manage wherever possible.
It’s Red Lobster and every other Private Equity managed restaurant chain becoming a real estate holding company, just with a lot more electrons.
But it’s not like TSMC or SK Hynix did this to us, and it’s on all of the consumers to keep the board partners and oackagers honest.
Thst said, I tend to think consolidation is universally bad, absent any nationalization of infrastructure, and my country has this same nightmare playing out with its housing as Blackrock and other equity groups have make a clear effort to force all of us to be perpetual renters.
We in this thread are likely universally in agreement about the problems at hand. I respect that you cut across my bullshit and everyone else’s to actually bring citations and thoughts. Cheers.