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The end of the PC era?

The era of the personal computer may be coming to an end.

For almost 50 years, computers have been small enough and cheap enough that indivduals have bought and used them for many different things. Gaming, word-processing, communicating and all manner of other applications saw the PC become an invaluable part of every home.

Just about the only thing we don't do these days with our home computers is balance our cheque books and that's simply because cheques are no longer a thing.

However, it's starting to look very much as if the concept of having your own desktop or laptop computer is about to be relegated to the history books, at least for a while.

The reason for the looming decline of the PC is a simple one: price.

As trillions of dollars are poured into creating the infrastructure for artificial intelligence systems, the demand for critical components such as DRAM, GPUs and such has skyrocketed and since the world only has a finite amount of manufacturing capacity for such things, prices have also ascended to the heavens.

As previously reported in this column, the price of DRAM has more than doubled in a few short months and in some cases has even gone up three-fold.

With some manufacturers such as Micron deciding to switch all their capacity to service the enterprise market and completely ditching their commercial brands such as Crucial, the future looks bleak for keen PC builders and system integrators. The rest of the DRAM manufacturers are also placing an hugely increased focus on enterprise customers and that's causing massive issues in the PC maretplace.

CES is now underway in the USA and it's interesting to note the lack of gamer and PC-related products. Almost every single new product announcement is littered with the two letters "AI" and demonstrates a clear move away from the home and even small business markets.

This year, AMD has announced just one new processor and even that is simply a very slightly overclocked (binned) version of an existing device. In contrast, their stack of 30+ presentation slides has barely two or three that don't mention AI.

The sobering reality is that pretty soon, buying a new PC or even upgrading the DRAM or SSD capacity of an existing one will be prohibitively expensive.

I'm so lucky that I built w machine just a few short months ago, before all the prices decided to reach for orbit. To build the same machine today would cost hundreds of dollars more -- and mine was a relatively modest build based on the Ryzen 5600G with just 32GB of DRAM and a 512GB NVME SSD. By chasing bargains and "specials", I built that entire machine for a little over $500 -- how much to build it today I wonder?

Of course this plays nicely into the hands of big-tech which increasingly wants to sell you subscription-based services rather than software or hardware that you can actually own.

Adobe is milking its users for billions by forcing users of its Photoshop, Premiere, LightRoom and other products to pay a monthly or annual subscription in perpetuity while companies like Google, Amazon, Apple and others are ever-so-keen to have you rent cloud-based storage for a regular payment.

How long now before we see the PC become just a virtual machine in the cloud?

Unless you have a lot of spare cash you may have little option but to rent one of those virtual PCs if you want enough power to run the next generation of resource-intensive software. We're already seeing this in the gaming world where NVIDIA has been offering its GeForce NOW cloud-based gaming service for quite some time. Can't afford an RTX5090 to play the latest games at high framerates? Simple, pay NVIDIA a monthly fee and use one of their GPUs in the cloud.

Subscription-based services are the holy grail of all businesses. Once you lock a customer in, they have no option but to keep throwing money at you every month or every year. This highly dependable revenue stream allows for more precise fiscal planning which inevitably results in higher profit margins.

So, if you have a nicely spec'd PC, enjoy it while it's still useful. If you're someone who absolutely needs cutting-edge performance, it may be the last PC you ever own.

Meanwhile, those of us who refuse to sign up to "hardware as a service" will make do with our older, slower, aging hardware. Hey, who knows, there may even be a renaissance in the art of writing faster, smaller more optimised code -- like we used to do when 8-bit processors could only address a maximum of 64K RAM.

Carpe Diem folks!

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