They have a lot less runway to enshittify than everything else we've seen recently. Because AI is way more expensive than anything else we've gotten for "free". Which means they're already on borrowed time.
Hopefully they get it over with sooner rather than later. The longer it takes, the more my retirement savings gets fucked.
AI is just a financial grift to circlejerk money out of the stock market; and then reap a big, fat government bailout when the bubble inevitably pops.
If we share the profits, do we also share the risks? What happens to this plan when AI implodes?
Won't help with Macs ...
But if you really insist on using Windows or Office: look into Mass Gravel.
We tipped the delivery driver a few bucks for deliveries.
I'm saying that there weren't businesses where the entire model was: "Pay 2-3x what this food's worth in-store, and some rando will deliver it. They may even give you everything you ordered."
I was 19 in the '90s.
When nobody paid $20 to have GrubHub deliver their $5 McDonalds order from down the street to their house.
The thing is... I'm lucky enough to be able to afford all of this. In part, because I avoid terrible-value purchases. When the price of something goes up 40 to 400% percent, I say to myself, "Wow, it'd be really stupid to buy that thing RIGHT NOW."
Too many people apparently lack that critical judgment, and just have FOMO in its place.
Every Steam Deck has 16GB LPDDR5-6400. I'll use regular DDR5-6400 as a stand-in. In 2 years, that's gone from $100 to $300. So, +$200 in memory costs.
The cheapest 1TB M.2-2230 has gone from $70 to $170. So +$100 for the highest-tier OLED. (512GB M.2s are harder to find history on.. but they also seem to have gone up about $100.)
So, the RAM & Storage in a Steam Deck now cost another $300. (Yes, I realize the components are probably cheaper for Valve. But it just puts the prices into perspective.)
People are now conditioned to need INSTANT GRATIFICATION FOR EVERYTHING ALWAYS!
"I want a Steam Deck! I can't actually afford these new prices! I'm buying it anyways!"
Then retailers see the insane prices people pay for stuff without blinking. Steam Decks sell out after a 40% markup. RAM & SSDs & HDDs sell out at 4x what they sold for a year ago. So the prices never go back down.
And everyone goes full surprised-Pikachu-face when everything is now always goddamn expensive.
Show some fucking restraint for once, people!
Goddamn.
"Guys, we're scaling back on AI! Honest! Isn't this great publicity?!"
"Also, totally unrelated... but today we're launching SchmoPilot Assistant for Notepad!"
Unfortunately, like GPUs during the cryptomining era, consumers have shown their hand as to just-how-many-people will pay insane exorbitant prices. Remember when you could pay $200-300 every 2 years and get about double the GPU power? (It was only 5 years ago...) Nvidia & AMD learned that they no longer had to offer that anymore.
RAM prices have quadrupled in a year. Yet 25% of gamers still plan to upgrade this year, and 40% in the next 2 years. Even if we make believe that the previous status-quo was "everyone upgrades every year" (which is obviously a gross overestimation), this is a huge "line-going-up" scenario for the RAM manufacturers.
Why would they even bother lowering prices until forced to do so?
Micron sailed off into the sunset, flipping the bird at consumers with both hands. Hynix & Samsung are equally quadruple-pricing versus a year ago. All of them are seeing insane, record profits.
Unless a government steps in and does something crazy like declaring RAM a subsidy & setting price controls.... this is just the new normal.
The mutual funds in a typical 401k are just a bunch of stocks like this, wrapped up in a value meal package.
If you have a 401k, you probably already own stock in Nvidia, Tesla, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, etc...