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Comment by croemer | Hacker News Reader

I stopped reading after "Soon, you will not be able to afford your computer. Consumer GPUs are already prohibitively expensive."

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This is always a hilarious take. If you inflation adjust a 386 PC from the early 90s when 486's were on the market you'd find they range in excess of $3000 and the 486s are in the $5000 zone. Computers are incredibly cheap now. What isn't cheap is the bleeding edge. A place fewer and fewer people have to be at, which leads to lower demand and higher prices to compensate.

It is crazy you can buy a used laptop for $15 and do something meaningful with like writing code (meaningful as in make money)

I used to have this weird obsession of doing this, buying old chromebooks putting linux on them, with 4GB of RAM it was still useful but I realize nowadays for "ideal" computing it seems 16GB is a min for RAM

It's like the black Mac from 2007, I know its tech is outdated but I want it

Definitely one of my favourite machines of all time (until the plastic started falling off).

That's related more to NVidia's discovery that they could get away with huge margins, and the China GPU projects for graphics being years behind.[1]

[1] https://www.msn.com/en-in/money/news/china-s-first-gaming-gp...

It was kind or that way in early days of high end personal computing. I remember seeing an ad in the early 90s for a 486 laptop that was $6,000. Historically prices have always gone down. You just have to wait. SoTA is always going to go for a premium.

That irked me too. "_Bleeding edge" consumer GPUs are ...", sure, but you wait 6 months and you have it at a fraction of the cost.

It's like saying "cars are already prohibitively expensive" whilst looking a Ferraris.

> That irked me too. "_Bleeding edge" consumer GPUs are ...", sure, but you wait 6 months and you have it at a fraction of the cost.

That's demonstrably false. The RTX 4090 released in 2022 with an MSRP of $1,600. Today you'd be hard pressed to find one below $3K that isn't a scam.

The reality is that NVIDIA is taking advantage of their market dominance to increase their markup with every generation of products[1], even when accounting for inflation and price-to-performance. The 50 series is even more egregious, since it delivers a marginal performance increase, yet the marketing relies heavily on frame generation. The trickling supply and scalpers are doing the rest.

AMD and Intel have a more reasonable pricing strategy, but they don't compete at the higher end.

[1]: https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/nvidias-pricing-stra...

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