The AI Boom That Ate the PC Market
by admin on March 10, 2026 at 1:21 pm
Category: AI, Opinion
There has been a lot of talk regarding the effect of AI on technology, education and employment. AI is being included into every facet of the tech space, with studies showing small productivity gains but a distinct lack of ROI, causing talk of another bubble. The education sector is having issues of students using ChatGPT to cheat on assignments giving teachers more stress over their usual fight over disruptive behavior and the recent after effects of social media of short attention spans. And now employment where businesses are trying to force AI use in work in any way possible or using it as an excuse to lay off staff for short term profit gains. Some argue that workers aren’t being replaced with AI and offshore is being pushed under the table with AI as the cover but the idea of offshore workers also using AI hasn’t been widely discussed.
Another recent effect is on prices in the consumer PC component market for RAM. GPUs and storage. These prices are increasing over the demand for those components in datacenters currently being built. DDR5 RAM being the one that is a server-first design and not really a consumer product. This means that for many the market for PCs and PC building is starting to be inaccessible and the idea of compute as a rental commodity is being pushed. Unfortunately, as the saying goes, the market can be irrational longer than people can be solvent….and there’s a lot of money in enterprise. So for those expecting prices to go down anytime soon (or even an AI crash forcing those prices down) you’re going to be waiting a long time. However, the possibility of the Chinese flooding the market with RAM and/or SSDs is on the cards. Whether or not Chinese PC components will be up to the standards that consumers expect remains to be seen.
Software & Operating Systems
So what does mean for software? Are we truly stuck for new software without the endless continuation of upgrades? Personally I think not as developers have been a little too lazy of late with RAD tools and the perception of shipping fast with endless libraries on libraries being glued together. For many it made sense, RAM was cheap but that is now catching up in the form of lacking in affordable price, and soon availability. It’s time developers started to learn to optimise more and be more selective with libraries – especially those that are now being targeted for malware injections. Will that slow down developer time? Maybe. But it might be worth doing so for software that isn’t half baked on release and has good longevity.
Then there’s Operating Systems, most use Microsoft Windows which has increasing requirements for CPU, RAM and storage for each release. But Microsoft’s debacles over its decisions to include AI in everything from the risky security hiccup of Recall, a feature that takes screen snapshots every 5 minutes, to AI in the basic Paint program is causing concern. Coupled with bugs in Windows 11 updates where Windows cannot shutdown or notepad won’t open makes users wonder if it’s worth continuing the Windows experience. From this there has been an increased shift to Linux/MacOSX, finally spurring the ongoing meme: ”20XX is the year of the Linux desktop”. To Linux’s credit, it has been well known for low RAM requirements and in some cases still supporting very old hardware on latest releases. Game compatibility was one major concern about the change to Linux but with the help of Steam and their SteamOS development, Proton has eased a lot of the lack of compatibility. With the wider adoption to Linux, consumers will certainly see improvements and developers will get better at optimisation as the Linux community doesn’t tend to sit well with dev bloat.
Self Hosting
Another thing to consider is self hosting. Why am I talking about this? If compute is rented then nothing is owned and you lose control of even the simple things. I have started to consider this for professional and personal use. For example, scheduling business calls without Google Calendar? Radicale has you covered. It’s a bit old school but works very well. Want to still develop a project but want to be private? Check out Forgejo. It still uses Git commands but self hosting gives you that private server without being crawled by AI and potentially having that code turn up in someone else’s code base. Then there’s Kanboard for idea generation without having to post on Trello’s increasingly shrinking features on its free tier. Check out this list of other self host options if you’re interested in seeing how this can work for you.
Don’t forget that we’re not in the time of 486 machines with 8MB RAM. We have multi core processors with 8 to 16GB RAM minimum and lots of storage. This gives consumers a lot of staying power, as long as developers don’t get wedded to corporate ideals. Unless corporations are willing to change the law requiring computers and components to be removed from consumer’s homes then we’ve got a strong push back against rental compute. Corporations may have the cash for now, but if we play it smart, we certainly have the time.
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