Comment by jack_tripper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jack_tripper | Hacker News Reader

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The Terry Davis tinfoil-hat version of me has a theory that this wider industry trend of pushing away consumers from general purpose home computers towards only using remote datacenters from locked down mobile/thin edge devices, is supported by both industries and governments because:

Number one, you become a recurring subscription instead of a one and done deal, making it incredibly profitable for industry

And number two, the government can more easily snoop on your data when it's all in the cloud versus a HDD box in your closet.

Granted, I think we're far away from that future, but I do feel that's the future the powers that be desire and they can use various mechanism to force that behavior, like convenience, and pricing, like for example making PC parts too expensive for consumers and subsidizing cloud and mobile devices to accelerate the move, and once enough consumers only know how to use Apple or Google devices they'll be less inclined to spend more money to build a PC and learn what a Linux is.

I'm cynical enough to not argue against your number two theory.

But the first one? I'm less convinced. I think the underlying assumption is that companies look to make the most money off consumers. I can get behind that.

But just the other day I was looking at a new GPU and considered running a local LLM. I was looking at spending no more than 1000 €. That would get a me 5070 TI 16 GB. Not enough to reasonably run anything interesting. I'm not looking to "tinker with things", I want to actually use them, mostly for coding. A JetBrains subscription would run less than 10 € per month [0], and keep me up to date with the evolution of things. My 5070 would be stuck at its mostly useless level forever, since I don't see requirements going down any time soon. If prices didn't change, I'd need more than 100 months, or 8 years, to break even. And during these 8 years, I'd never have a decent LLM experience by buying it outright.

Sure, this would be a capable GPU for other uses. But in my case, it would just sit around under my desk heating up my room.

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[0] You'd get a 20 € discount if paying for a whole year upfront (10/month, 100/year). I'm also excluding VAT, since I'd buy this for work and have a VAT registered company.

My suspicion is it’s mostly a result of the slowing pace of computing growth.

When computers go obsolete in 2 years nobody wants them on their balance sheets, when they last 6 sales go down and you get more years of profit from owning them. This hasn’t been an instantaneous transition, but a low shift in how the industry operates.

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