(rambling) I have a theory about the future of budget computing

[GideonWilhelm]

There's no doubt in my mind that you're still gonna have consumers blowing huge amounts of dough on expensive gaming rigs, of course, but I feel like dedicated graphics cards and high RAM counts are gonna significantly diminish.

With NVIDIA pushing in the direction of AI and their new cards generally not improving as much as in the past, as well as becoming more and more expensive, coupled with rising prices in the AAA gaming space and AI datacenters eating up all the RAM sticks, I would not be surprised to see an uptick in ARM or RISC-V processors with no graphics card at all and limited RAM (at least, in comparison to the 16/32+ gigs I see in a lot of high-end builds now).  I can't help but wonder if the modern era of computing has hit a sort of ceiling in terms of bloat, and if they want to improve, they're going to have to optimize or start shedding excess fat.

Plus, with money becoming tighter and tighter, I figure we'll see a huge uptick in 'budget' computing where people just buy computers that accomplish the necessities without as much concern for powerhouse performance.

Now granted, my perspective is a little warped, since I've spent like two thirds of my 35 years on this earth coveting the most powerful gaming rigs and paying a lot of attention to that space, and only recently fell back on the simpler side of things, so I could be totally out of touch.  I'm not even sure I grasp exactly what I intended to say here, I just kinda had thoughts and wanted to put them out there.

[starbreaker]

I'm surprised that more people aren't buying secondhand computer and figuring out how to install GNU/Linux (or bribing somebody familiar with Linux to help them.) There's a lot of perfectly good hardware that might not be up to AAA gaming, but is still quite useful for other use cases. Hell, I'm typing this in Firefox on a Thinkpad T60 from 2007.

[GideonWilhelm]

I've been thinking about hunting for a secondhand laptop for a while, I swear if I were a wealthy man, I'd be a laptop collector.  Sadly, I am not wealthy, so I have to stick to the one I have.  It's a good one, an ROG Zephyrus, but I really romanticize lower-power hardware.  I wonder if that introduces some bias in my original post...