We're not in the 2010s anymore, consumer hardware is actively regressing. Smartphones are actually a great example to bring up, because I believe 2026 was the first year in which smartphone hardware did not advance at all (and arguably declined) relative to price, due to AI-related shortages.

Nobody can predict the future, of course, but I personally believe this pattern will hold. A decade from now, the idea of a consumer being able to purchase a personal device with more than 8GB of RAM will be a thing of the past, all significant compute will be done in the cloud using the massive amounts of hardware being hoarded by corporations as we speak.