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Big Tech is turning you into a digital tenant, but there is a way to evict them (www.neowin.net)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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The shift to SaaS and Windows 11 updates means you no longer own your software. Here is how free software tools can help you reclaim control.

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[–] 86 points 3 months ago (28 children)

The death of the PC market will greatly affect the next 50 years of computing worldwide. Corporations have successfully been pushing for a computer market where we rent computing power online and never own anything.

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  • [–] 30 points 3 months ago (18 children)

    I don’t think the personal market will completely die out, but it will definitely shrink by a significant percentage over the next ten years or so.

    We’ll see a considerable volume of gamers move to thin clients, ditto for businesses, casual use (email, browsing, consuming media etc.) will continue to switch to mobile devices.

    PCs will still exist as a hobby for enthusiasts, but we’ve definitely seen peak-component sales.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    The PC market has shrunk 80-90% in one year.

    Even before that the GPU market was overvalued thanks to unusually high demand from COVID and unusually high demand from crypto mining the decade before.

    Even consoles are reaching the $1000 mark soon.

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  • [–] 14 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    The PC market has shrunk 80-90% in one year.

    The cost of GPU's and memory increased 5-10x in 1 year. What did you expect?

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  • [–] 12 points 3 months ago

    Also the old stuff still works great if you aren't running AI. Hell I have a FX-8350 and a 1060 which is just fine for most things....and I think that CPU is from 2015.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Not just GPUs. This time is RAM and storage are also massively inflated because they’re allocated for a product that nobody really wants and nobody wants to pay for.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    I heard a rumor that China is preparing to flood the RAM market - bringing prices back down.

    It's all artificial scarcity at the moment, they don't spin up foundaries quickly because the capital investment is huge, but overall the chips don't cost that much to build, even accounting for the capital up front. The problem is the market didn't provide enough supply to meet the AI demand, so - like $100+/bbl oil - we're faced with scarcity pricing (AKA record profits for those holding the stock.)

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  • [–] -3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (10 children)

    I'd wager that in 10 years, it will be illegal to own your own hardware.

    Edit: pay attention to what's currently happening in the tech and political sphere. Big tech corporations are a new branch of government and the end goal that most of these CEO's want is a change to how the world is run. Read Curtis Yarvin's slop diatribes for an insight into the ideology behind the global right.

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  • [–] 16 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    Fearmongering garbage.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

    A visceral reaction but aimed at the wrong person. It's just an observation of the trends. The fact that tech companies no longer need to sell to consumers, the intermingling of tech companies with the US government, the trending authoritarianism of world governments, and the moral panic being manufactured to implement age verification, the erosion of encryption, and the now-illegality of VPNs by first world governments.

    Go read some slop by Curtis Yarvin. He's the mind behind the ideology of the new right. That is where it's headed.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Or free money. Take the wager! Why don't you fine folk both put your money where your sermingly-confidently-omniscient mouths are?

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  • [–] 12 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    It won't be illegal, it will be unavailable. We just won't have access to anything cause they won't make it. Why make something they can only charge once for when they can rent the same equipment and earn multiples of what it would have sold for

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    You and I have come to the same conclusion. Compute as a service. I foresee it one step further - anyone with unlicensed personal compute that isn't tied to a corporate subscription will not be legal.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago

    Then I will be a criminal, again. If "they" implement the on OS ID, even if we are exempt from the identifying info on our systems (linux), there won't be anywhere to really visit online anymore and as I said (here? another thread?) once my pixel 6 is dead I will be going the dumb phone route. No google play, no QR scanning, so I guess no more browsing except for the few non compliant sites. Will IRC networks need to comply? That would be my last stop (00s) before going back to the 80s where I read books, went outside, and didn't worry about anything outside my little child world though it is hard not knowing what is going on in the world, tried it a few times. Hell, after my kinda "smart" tv dies (it doesn't require an internet connection, has not been connected since I got it) I don't know that I will find one of them that doesn't require internet connection just to play a video off my pc. I saw shit going south 3 decades ago, never thought it would get so bad in my life

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    The world is not America, there is no chance this would ever possibly happen.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago

    I admire your viewpoint and wish it was the case. America will use its military and economic force to bend the world to do what it wishes. It already does that now and they've shown intent to further this behaviour.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago* (6 children)

    One could argue that the personal computer has been dead since the introduction of the Intel Management Engine which is an internet-connected spy chip inside every computer with full access to all hardware that you cannot observe, modify, block, or disable.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    Imagine if an exploit was found for the IME. They'd have to recall all Intel PCs

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    A Raspberry Pi 5 feels every bit as capable as an Intel PC from 2005 - do we need anything more?

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (2 children)

    You also don’t know all of the traces etched into the proprietary ARM chip in your pi. There are magic API calls to low level hardware which remain for “debugging” in all the major processor tapes outs today.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago*

    You also don’t know all of the traces etched into the proprietary ARM chip in your pi.

    Great point.

    It is now possible to get a Raspberry Pi equivalent with a processor from Rokchip.

    Rokchip's sources are at: https://github.com/rockchip-linux

    I find that most stuff from LibreComputer is as open as possible, today.

    The Renegade is a pretty good place to start exploring. With Armbian loaded, it's a serviceable personal PC for $35.

    The catch is that pre-built Raspberry Pi images won't work for it - because the CPU chip requires different drivers. So it's not a drop-in replacement for various Raspberry Pi recipes. I've built some of those recipes from source code on it, and they work fine, of course.

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