So as I’m sure you all have noticed, PC hardware has gotten way more expensive. In fact it’s getting to the point where I’m beginning to seriously get concerned about my ability to replace hardware that dies. I’m primarily concerned about two categories of hardware. The first one is my Thinkpad laptop. The second one is the Raspberry Pis which essentially run my house. Virtually everything here at home runs from three different Raspberry Pi 500s that I have.
Regarding the Pis, the saving grace for me is that I still have my old Pi 400s that I upgraded from a few years ago. Moving back to one of those basically involves plugging everything that’s plugged into the 500 being replaced back into a 400. The reason that matters is that at today’s prices, I can’t recommend a Raspberry Pi to anybody because they are quite a bit more expensive than they used to be, just like everything else.
In the event that the old 400s didn’t work out for me, I could fall back to yet another option: Pull one of my old AMD Ryzen mini pcs out of the crate where I keep older hardware and install some headless server based Linux distro that interested me and transition over to that. I currently have three older mini PCs in that crate and I believe most of them have 32 gigs of DDR4 RAM still installed along with some NVME or another. In addition if things got really bad I could cannibalize my token Windows box which runs on another old mini PC and use it to keep house processes running.
So why do I have so many mini PCs? Well its because mini PCs were the last upgrade cycle I managed to break and that was done by purchasing a few Framework desktops which come with enough computer power, a small enough power requirement and decent enough Linux support to basically keep me happy for many years to come. All of these older mini PCs used to be either a living room gaming console (yes my standards are so low, integrated graphics is enough) or my office desktop PC. The oldest of them are four years old at this point. Two of them are Beelink SER boxes and the other two are Minisforum HM90 boxes. Another high point is that a few years ago I upgraded my console, my desktop and my laptop with 4 terabyte NVME drives. They were all around $250 a pop at the time. As of today those drives all sell for at least three times that price.
In any event, younger Jay anti-fucked up and decided to save this hardware rather than gifting it, selling it or trashing it. Present day Jay stands to reap the benefits of that decision. However I still can’t help but to be concerned. Mostly because when I’m not working in my home office, my primary piece of hardware, which I’m typing this blog post on, is a Thinkpad P16s Ryzen Gen 1 laptop that I’ve been using for nearly three years now. It’s getting a bit long in the tooth. While I have recently replaced the keyboard and the battery I can’t shake the fear that its going let me down.
Ignoring the laptop situation, I have ample backup options but that almost certainly makes me an outlier. What about everybody else?
I think most people still dependent on PC hardware are likely in the same situation as I find myself with my laptop. Sure it works and everything is fine right now, but that is true right up until it isn’t. Thankfully its repairable, ignoring the fact its RAM is soldered. Looking at the options out there makes me throw up in my mouth a bit. Laptop prices are insane. Desktop prices are insane. Obviously I’m a fan of Framework so I took a gander at their new 13 Pro Laptop and wow. It’s insane. Even without adding in an SSD its basically a $2000 purchase if I opt for 32 gigs of RAM. Same price for the Framework 16. A regular Framework 13 brings it down to just over $1500. The Thinkpad I’m using right now cost me about $1000 when I bought it in 2023 from an Amazon reseller. It’s a 2022 model so I got a pretty good deal, but wow. Competitive more up to date versions of what I have sell from $1500 on Amazon and that’s for a model with 16 gigs of RAM. Of course the new P16s models appear to be using RAM sticks… so in theory that’s something I could upgrade later on.
To put it bluntly: That’s some serious sticker shock. Doubly so when I’m staring down a future where my earning power is going to be much more limited in years to come as my time in the tech industry is coming to an end. But hey maybe it doesn’t matter because of that right? Maybe I don’t need all of this hardware if I’m no longer an official and professional “tech guy”, right?
Wrong. This hardware is a core part of the backbone of what allows me and others to still enjoy the rapidly fading happenstance known as free and open computing. If hardware capable of running unencumbered operating systems ever makes its way out of reach for the general populace, we will collectively lose that option. After that we will either be forced out of the mainstream completely and effectively be demoted to second class citizens or we will have to play ball. There are so many things that I cannot do without an internet connection and without a device capable of acting as a client to the services hosted there.
Of course the big tech oligarchs wouldn’t let me go without. No sir. They’ll be more than happy to offer me access to some heavily subsidized piece of hardware which also happens to rend any remaining sense of pride and privacy I have into a million bloody pieces. Or perhaps they will allow me to rent it from them for a small monthly fee until I die instead.
I don’t want to live that life and I suspect most of the people reading this post don’t want to live that life either. But at the rate things are going, we are now staring down the barrel of this new and dystopian future and it scares the absolute living hell out of me.
So what can be done? Well I have a few ideas on that front:
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Decide to go without
Depending on your situation and needs this may be a tough nut to swallow. I get that. I’m certainly not going to pick this option unless I’m forced to. A decent laptop is a core part of my personal computing experience and one way or another, I’m going to have one.
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Do more with less
I think for most people, myself included, this is going to be the way to go. We don’t need the latest processor, the latest GPU, the most / fastest RAM or the most / fastest storage. We really don’t. If there is one lesson that extended computing cycles have taught me above all else, you don’t need a lot of the new shiny shit that big tech is pushing. Sure I may have splurged and gotten an iPhone but that iPhone is currently four years old and it works perfectly fine. Sure my laptop is a bit old, but after replacing the keyboard and battery it does everything I need it to do.
I think its a mistake, doubly so in this situation, to subscribe to the big tech authored notion that “newer is better” or that “newer is more capable”. The reality is that they haven’t been living up to those expectations for quite awhile now and we really ought to collectively stop rewarding them for it.
A relevant example of this for me sometime next year might be what I choose to replace my aging iPhone with. Obviously I could choose to opt out of that entirely and use my older iPhone until it dies, but the reality is that I’ll probably end up upgrading to something far less “spectacular” than the baseline iPhone I have now. For reference I’m currently leaning towards whatever the current e model happens to be when I get around to this in late 2027.
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Repair broken things rather than replace them
This is also a tough suggestion because ultimately a lot of our current tech has been designed to not be repaired easily and thus cannot be repaired with anything less than an extraordinary level of effort. The iPhone is a decent example of this syndrome at work. Although if you are going to replace a broken piece of tech that isn’t repairable, perhaps attempting to replace it with something that can be repaired is the way to go.
Disposable tech is the noose that is robbing us of the ability to create, produce, think and live. It’s as simple as that. Buying a piece of repairable hardware and remaining committed to maintaining it properly is ultimately the most effective thing you can do to push back on this. However this approach is not without its downsides. Repairable hardware is generally more expensive than non-repairable hardware. Take Framework hardware for example.
The harsh truth is that no matter when the AI bubble behind all of this pain pops, this situation is likely going to persist throughout a large portion of, if not the entirety of, the 2027 calendar year. The collective insanity driving this bubble has proven to be stubbornly resilient even in the face of what are now weekly leaks that reveal just how deeply in debt, how little money they make and just how unstable the AI “industry” is.
Meanwhile, take good care of your hardware. It’s becoming more precious with each and every passing day and you should treat it as such. The key to succeeding here is to remember that you don’t have to do anything big tech tells you. Microsoft says that your laptop isn’t compatible with Windows 11? Fuck em. Give them the finger and install Linux on it instead. Don’t let shitty software decisions made by MBA wankers like Satya Nadella force you into a corner. That’s generally the easiest thing to work around, especially when it comes to open hardware platforms like PCs.
We will of course talk about this more as its a constantly evolving situation. Feel free to reach out and let me know what your hardware situation is and if you have any fresh and novel ways of making things work or how to keep older hardware relevant, please share your tips and tricks. We can all benefit.
P.S. I was recently interviewed by Andy Farnell, one of the hosts of the The Cyber Show. If you are interested, you can find the episode here. I really had a blast meeting with Andy (virtually of course as we live on different sides of proverbial “pond”) and we meshed on a lot of different levels. I am of course totally open to making a return visit in the future to discuss the ongoing evolution of the “Colonized by MBA Wankers” situation! For reference, this interview is referring to the comments I made in my post from last month, “The Viral Nature of Institutionalized Uncertainty”.