I do not generally believe that """they""" are trying to take personal computing away from you. This is an increasingly popular chant among the Computer Hardware commentariat, that """they""" want you to use cloud storage and cloud gaming and cloud apps and that the high prices of computer hardware are an attempt to squeeze you out of owning and into renting.

There's a lot wrong here. If there is any truth, many interest groups want more control over what you do on your devices. Music producers, authors, movie studios, game developers, often want to make sure you pay for their thing, and so they add onerous DRM and demand streaming-only releases and online-only features. Apple, Google, Microsoft all want you to be bought into their specific ecosystem of stuff so that you're locked in to wherever you've uploaded a decade of photos and files. Banks and storefronts want to know that you are who you say you are for fraud and marketing and compliance reasons, and will use the integrated security systems in modern devices to verify that.

There was no Glorious Past where really good computing technology was widely available and cheap. The idea that """they""" are oppressing you because the newest shiniest GPU is $800 is crazy. A defining experience of the young tech idiot is scavenging around for hardware that's five years out of date and barely compatible to scrabble together a system. Your Dad in 1986 buying the latest 386 PC was looking at spending literally thousands of (period!) dollars to satisfy whatever strange impulse makes dads buy PC's in 1986.

This is not to say that computers haven't gone up in price lately, they have, but certainly not enough to ruin the promises of personal computing. If you want to work with mega-scale 4D Gaussian Splats for film-studio level 3DCG, you need a monster workstation and a server farm, but it's not like that level of computing was once available to us and has been snatched away, it's always demanded a render farm of dozens of high end servers. If you want to Play Videogames, you certainly don't have to spend more than $700 even if you plan to get everything brand new. If what you want to do is make the movie Flow, you can do that on basically any workstation desktop you can get for $2000.

It has never been the case that most people buy the latest shiniest hardware full price and go "ah, that's lovely and reasonable" no! We all bitch and moan about how the R9 290X is too expensive and then we scrape together a PC from a CPU we found in a dumpster and a GPU that was top of the line two years ago and memory from four different kits, jammed into a system that used to be a Dell office PC whose side panel doesn't close because the new PSU you put in there is too big.

The accessibility of computing is amazing now! You can just go buy a whole entire x86 laptop with a processor as fast as the one I had in my gaming laptop in 2016 for like $250 brand new, inflation adjustments will show you that's under $180 in 2016 dollars. You can use it to write programs and edit images and record podcasts and do all the other things computers do because fundamentally we've plateaued in many ways! Editing 4k video was a feat in 2013, you can cut together 4k videos on a budget phone these days. Even with the skyrocketing price of storage, a 1TB drive is still the kind of thing you can sling around in a backpack to sneakernet movies to your friends.

There has been a slowdown in performance gains but it comes along with a slowdown in performance demands. 16GB of RAM has been "a decent budget gaming system" for over a decade, meanwhile in 2006 you would have been hard pressed to fit 8GB of RAM in a consumer system, and in 1996 a desktop would hardly have had sixteen megabytes of memory if you were lucky. The increasing cost of the best hardware is partially a response to this, an outstanding GPU now can't rely on technological improvements as much, it also just has to get bigger, more memory, more transistors, bigger dies.

I also think some of this is just Money Illusion and a significant increase in what top-end consumer part performance gets you. Like, the Nvidia 80-series GPU's used to be high-end but reasonably practical premium GPU's, it was not a crazy thing for a high earning gamer to buy a GTX 780 or 1080, but a new RTX 5080 is a total monster, way way overspecced for almost any game you can run today , the 5070->5080 gap is colossal. The inflation adjusted price of a new 5070 12GB is pretty much the same as a GTX 980!

At the same time the market for ultra-budget cards like the 750 Ti and 1050 is mostly gone, but that's because it has more or less been eaten by mobile and console gaming, to say nothing of plentiful cheap old hardware and high end integrated graphics found in laptops and handhelds. And I mean, the RTX 5050 is a bad deal but it is about as fast as an RTX 2080! The RTX 2080 remains no slouch, the idea that you could have held on to a PC from eight years ago and still be having a pretty good time in modern games simply was not a thing, we live in a different computing landscape, people who who want to game cheap and who aren't enthusiasts now will just play Fortnite on their phone or get a Switch Lite.

If you were used to the rapid rate of change of the 60's to the 2000's then I think I can see why you'd think something is being hidden from you. You're so used to the idea that in five years your new computer will completely obsolete whatever you had, and it'll be cheaper, and more efficient, and smaller. That hasn't been true for a while, and the gains being made recently tend to come with greater increases in cost.

I don't like the current state of the hardware market, it is genuinely squeezed by a lot of speculative and messy AI buildout. Some hardware companies are struggling to deal with the slimmer margins and slower movement, while others are the cause of those slim margins and are earning record profits. There are real impacts on hardware affordability, but there's no conspiracy to steal computers from us and they aren't significantly less accessible than they've ever been. Hell, even if you're an enthusiast, I don't think it's that much less accessible, what, was it a sound financial choice to throw money at Intel's HEDT systems back in the 2010's?