651
Motherboard sales are now collapsing amid unprecedented shortages fueled by AI
(www.tomshardware.com)
Oh boy, if its not the consequences of their own actions.
this post was submitted on 07 May 2026
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Good! Motherboard prices have been wildly out of control for a while now. Asus selling 1k motherboards when that same tier of motherboard used to top out at 400 bucks max. Let these greedy fucks have their lunch.
Don't forget gutting the connectivity on lower end motherboards. Apparently PS/2 ports and LED error lights are premium features now.
Do people still use PS/2 ports?
Yea, those with balls.
It's important for my PS2 mouse!
The wet dream for big tech has been to get people to pay subscription fees for compute, just like businesses do for cloud hosting. They tried with Stadia to get people to play games hosted in the cloud, but that was never going to fly.
With the compute demands of AI (which is comparable to a AAA game except for the largest models), they dont want to make the same mistake and let you have the compute. They see this as an oppurtunity for subscription fees for the earth.
The fact that we cant get hardware for a reasonable price is an added bonus to this plan.
All of this only works of everyone subscribes to this shit. Businesses will, because its just easier to manage it. Consumers though should not give in. If you want to run an agent, use a small local model.
The best thing that can be done is to make local open source agents and models approachable for regular users. Right now, they arent.
I work for a large retailer that you've definitely heard of. We are pulling away from our cloud hosted presence and are building out a self-managed virtual data center in one of our own physical data centers.
Even enterprise knows that paying a monthly uncontrolled cost is shit.
So you guys are bascially building out your own cloud? Where does one even start with something like that?
We are fully cloud where I am, but i have this dream where we self host our inferrence. Ever since i learned more about that 40k acre data cneter in Utah offering capacity for the big guys (AWS, etc), im very skeptical about how safe our data is when sending it to a model. Ethical issues aside
The wet dream for big tech has been to get people to pay subscription fees for compute, just like businesses do for cloud hosting.
Imagine the mental health benefits when AI datacentres make computers unaffordable, so we all have to go outside more, and then the AI datacentres shrivel because they have no customers, because we can't access anything with no computers. So the AI companies die off.
I can dream, ok?
I would love this to be an unintended outcome from all this. However, I don't think that's where we're headed.
I, for one, think there's a lot of slop in and around the engineering of phones. We might see a lot more software, storage, and overall activity crunched, compressed, and crammed into our portable devices instead. And with more stuff in the cloud/SaaS realm, they can also become (even) thinner clients at the same time. :(
It's "heavier" gear like laptops and desktops that'll probably get pushed into the pro and "prosumer" market.
The wet dream for big tech has been to get people to pay subscription fees for compute, just like businesses do for cloud hosting.
Thankfully there's a growing number of businesses that have been burned by this, and it seems like companies are starting to try bringing their critical systems back in-house again
There is this tipping point where it becomes more cost effective to bring it inhouse, even with the staffing requirements. For small to medium sized buinesses though cloud all the way.
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Me running old Asus B350 AM4 Board from 2017...
Hey, it works! I'm running a 5800x and don't plan on touching a thing unless I need to.
I run 5700X3D on this thing combined with 7900XTX. It just works. I'm going to use this motherboard until that setup is outdated
AI is an amazing tool for fascists.
Annihilate private access to computing, censor and rewrite all comms, destroy free software and the last remnants of education...
Every single decision made for evil.
And all these vendors who are locking themselves into one customer are about to learn why that's a bad idea.
The worst thing is that when used for good AI is fantastic! Scientific progress with purpose built AI to find planets, predict the weather, and tons of pattern matching has been in use for decades with positive benefits!
Even LLMs can be a useful tool in the right situations where looking like words people would say but accuracy is NOT important.
The problem is trying to use LLMs to do everything and failing while running the tech industry, the environment, and soon the economy into the ground. They took something positive, ruined it and coopted the terminology while shoving it down everyone's throats.
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How has this whole saga not been an obvious indictment of 'the free market?'
Big players shouldn't be allowed to gobble up all the resources needed by small ones. How is it not obvious that they need to wait until production increases to meet their needs before embarking on their little project?
The free market means the market is free to fuck you. Yes you in particular 😅
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No this is exactly what the free market is. Regulations that make things fairer for small people is communism.
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There is no Free Market, that's just a myth they tell us to allow them to do whatever they want. They don't really want a true Free Market because it leads to Luigis.
I have a home server waiting around for an SSD for a year now. I have the money, but I don't like feeling like I'm getting scammed. So I'd rather wait for this market to collapse than give them my money.
Who knew cartels were bad for markets? I am sure economists and regulators were screaming at legislators for years but I guess they couldn't hear them over the sound of the bags of dirty lobbyist money landing on their desks.
And then there are the financial "irregularities" funding the AI boom which are also not getting any attention.
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When is the best time to buy pc parts? Should I still wait?
About 2019.
If it still works, keep using it.
If you need it for work/self now - best time is now, if you don't need it for now - later.
Speculating for necessary items (even with rental bullshit) won't help you most likely, and would just add mental pain.
Can always buy used, and older, if that works for you (though the prices are ridiculously also high)
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Can we create a fund with gamers, and then buy the manufacturers that go under?
We need just one of each, MB, PS, GPU, hopefully something for CPU will be buyable as well.
I literally don't think we will have enough money. These are near trillion dollar factories we're talking about. Whole countries can't even afford to make more.
The sheer amount of global cooperation necessary to make these things is baffling.
If they are going under, maybe we can grab a good deal.
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I still see fewer NAS motherboard options on Aliexpress than a year ago.
right before mother's day as well! smh.
If we can't make a time machine to go backwards, can we at least pause time? The future absolutely fucking sucks, let's just avoid it altogether lol
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I keep thinking maybe things will good by 2030 and remember that's 4 years away. Game devs please target the Steam Deck and Switch 2 as the baseline. Mid range and high end is just too premium for most people. Even entry level enthusiast gaming hardware is too expensive because of memory and storage. Steam Deck and Switch 2 are good low power draw integrated graphics level. That's not terrible for pricing
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Motherboards were already way too goddamn expensive, anyway.
About a year ago I was considering upgrading my AM4 PC to AM5. The rock-bottom cheapest motherboards were only slightly cheaper than the relatively high-end one I got 5-ish years ago. I decided to stick with my current PC.
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