The unadmitted reason this is happening (and the AI bubble besides): Moore's Law *has ended*.
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@furicle @cstross It is not what it was and a whole lot of effort has gone into, e.g. doing things with on board computers to prevent off-brand parts. (Not, in autos, as much as in heavy machinery including farm machinery.) "Right to repair" didn't start with small electronic gadgets.
Or look at the cost of replacing a headlight; lots of effort has gone into making you buy the big assembly and not either a standard headlight or replacing a bulb.
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I just noticed I have 18Tb of storage plugged into my desktop (a laptop with its own 2Tb of built-in SSD) and WTF am I doing with it all?!?
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@graydon @furicle This goes back a long way, though. I remember being appalled in 1991 when the windscreen wiper on my car packed up and discovering it needed a sealed assembly with motor, gearing, and two arms to fix it—it wasn't designed to be repairable. (I shared a house with a car kitbasher, though, so he got it working again: opened it up and replaced the stripped plastic gear.)
The parts are bought by the OEMs as assemblies, and installed as assemblies. They aren't interested in fixing them as it's cheaper to use whole units that robots assemble.
No attempt to kill the aftermarket - the aftermarket is happy to sell whole wiper motors instead of almost zero profit bushings springs and brushes, and one part instead of 1000 per car.
Lots of things have changed, and may be anti consumer, not arguing that, but it's driven by costs and requirements.
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@falken @furicle @graydon @cstross Speaking of parking sensors, my mother bought a new car 3 years ago. The model she chose included parking sensors, and had to be sold with them – except thanks to the shortages, Opel couldn't actually include them, so the dealership had to add aftermarket sensors to the car.
@jernej__s @falken @graydon @cstross
GM supplied them for my truck a good nine months after purchase, along with the seat warmer controller computer.
Gave me a discount for it at least. -
@cstross @blogdiva My desktop computer broke a year ago. I replaced the required parts and now it’s working again, of course on paper, as the old one was over ten years old — mostly.
But in practice, the difference is not very much. Disk access is faster as I upgraded the spinning metal with SSDs, but mostly it does what its previous incarnation did.
And I’ve also been running a Thinkpad over a decade old (with debian), and it, too, does most of the things I want a computer to do.
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A Angela shared this topic
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@graydon @furicle This goes back a long way, though. I remember being appalled in 1991 when the windscreen wiper on my car packed up and discovering it needed a sealed assembly with motor, gearing, and two arms to fix it—it wasn't designed to be repairable. (I shared a house with a car kitbasher, though, so he got it working again: opened it up and replaced the stripped plastic gear.)
@cstross @graydon @furicle At various repair cafés over the past year I've fixed 3 Kenwood mixers, the oldest from 1950 was easy to disassemble and repair with common parts, the second from the 1990s or early 2000 had a simple break away pin to save the gear box if you overstressed it and the latest one from 2020 had a sealed gearbox where the drive shaft had bent £70 to replace. Planned obsolescence.
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@blogdiva I rely on these machines for earning my living. Still, with prices soaring I'm going into "make do and mend" mode for the foreseeable future. And turning old kit over to Linux or BSD …
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@blogdiva I rely on these machines for earning my living. Still, with prices soaring I'm going into "make do and mend" mode for the foreseeable future. And turning old kit over to Linux or BSD …
@cstross this is the way
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@blogdiva/116127740444038853
The unadmitted reason this is happening (and the AI bubble besides): Moore's Law *has ended*. The only way for hardware sales to go in future is *down* because your next PC or Mac will work just fine until it breaks or dies of old age. So by ramping prices artificially via this RAM/SSD futures bullshit, they're keeping profits high for as long as possible.
@cstross I remember getting a 4TB drive thinking it would take me ages to fill, then I filled it.
I then realised I don't need to be keeping such giant files.
Lost of videos, previously in 4K HDR, now everything is plain old 1080p and I have space again.
I only have ~250GB of music.
I do have two drives though, so if I break something there's a duplicate.
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@blogdiva/116127740444038853
The unadmitted reason this is happening (and the AI bubble besides): Moore's Law *has ended*. The only way for hardware sales to go in future is *down* because your next PC or Mac will work just fine until it breaks or dies of old age. So by ramping prices artificially via this RAM/SSD futures bullshit, they're keeping profits high for as long as possible.
@cstross I'm using a laptop that came out in 2012, I.E. 14 years ago.
I upgraded the ram to 16 gigs and threw in a 2 terabyte ssd, but otherwise bog standard quad core 2.6ghz i5, slightly wider than 720p display resolution.
You can still get them on ebay for $90. I have a spare and two dead ones in a box I could salvage parts from if that didn't come with ram and a hard drive.
The netbsd guys pointed me at https://mastodon.sdf.org/@washbear/115632856822177532 which is only 8 years old, if I want to upgrade.
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@cstross @graydon @furicle At various repair cafés over the past year I've fixed 3 Kenwood mixers, the oldest from 1950 was easy to disassemble and repair with common parts, the second from the 1990s or early 2000 had a simple break away pin to save the gear box if you overstressed it and the latest one from 2020 had a sealed gearbox where the drive shaft had bent £70 to replace. Planned obsolescence.
@ianturton @cstross @graydon @furicle
gorilla amps were usually 25 watts, if not 50 watts. they shipped with 15 watt speakers. blew 'em out. i replaced the blown speakers with ones rated for the amps. nice little second income for a year or so.
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@furicle @cstross It is not what it was and a whole lot of effort has gone into, e.g. doing things with on board computers to prevent off-brand parts. (Not, in autos, as much as in heavy machinery including farm machinery.) "Right to repair" didn't start with small electronic gadgets.
Or look at the cost of replacing a headlight; lots of effort has gone into making you buy the big assembly and not either a standard headlight or replacing a bulb.
@graydon @furicle @cstross Obama's "cash for clunkers" program was another direct attack on aftermarket parts, by eliminating working vehicles that predated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anti-circumvention provisions.
Late stage capitalism performing regulatory capture literally bought them and destroyed them en masse.
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@blogdiva/116127740444038853
The unadmitted reason this is happening (and the AI bubble besides): Moore's Law *has ended*. The only way for hardware sales to go in future is *down* because your next PC or Mac will work just fine until it breaks or dies of old age. So by ramping prices artificially via this RAM/SSD futures bullshit, they're keeping profits high for as long as possible.
That may be the outcome, but I'm 100% sure the decision is not made on those grounds.
The decision is made: "we legitimately believe we'll need X amount of compute in 2027 for our business and research. Let's prepurchase what we need so we don't fall behind."
A corporation that believes it's under future existential threat, is prepared to pay a lot more for existing capacity than a consumer who wants a new iPhone.
This is how pricing works, not a deliberate plan.
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@blogdiva I rely on these machines for earning my living. Still, with prices soaring I'm going into "make do and mend" mode for the foreseeable future. And turning old kit over to Linux or BSD …
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@cstross @furicle Back to at least to the 1970s!
The core point I'm after is that collusion across entire industries to prevent unwanted behavior (that is, not giving them maximal money) has a deep history of being found completely legal and proper and more or less working.
A combination of pricing people out of the market and pressure to make every device a managed device has been going on about personal computing hardware for at least ten years. Turning that up to 11 isn't implausible.
@graydon @cstross @furicle There's a reason I'm not too upset about a supply chain collapse. (Although I'm watching food distribution closely.)
A raspberry pi is an outright miracle of computing... by 1990s standards. It can be a media center, server, gaming, the works. The sane open source people make the same hardware do more over time.
Alas Linux stopped being sane ~10 years ago, because https://www.zdnet.com/article/graying-linux-developers-look-for-new-blood/ eventually became the "here's a nickel kid" dilbert strip unix greybeards.
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@blogdiva/116127740444038853
The unadmitted reason this is happening (and the AI bubble besides): Moore's Law *has ended*. The only way for hardware sales to go in future is *down* because your next PC or Mac will work just fine until it breaks or dies of old age. So by ramping prices artificially via this RAM/SSD futures bullshit, they're keeping profits high for as long as possible.
@cstross also they’re making your PC run like an old arthritic dog by dumping more and more code on it so you use your phone instead, which is a low-cognition consumption device that encourages you to scroll past more ads and buy crap you don’t need. Not sure how MS thinks it can make money encouraging everyone to use their Apple or android phone instead of their PC, but
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@graydon @furicle This goes back a long way, though. I remember being appalled in 1991 when the windscreen wiper on my car packed up and discovering it needed a sealed assembly with motor, gearing, and two arms to fix it—it wasn't designed to be repairable. (I shared a house with a car kitbasher, though, so he got it working again: opened it up and replaced the stripped plastic gear.)
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@cstross I am willing to entertain the "we're going to get rid of consumer computer hardware that isn't rented" scenario.
In the 1970s, there was a thriving market for making, selling, and applying custom/aftermarket car parts. The entire auto industry systematically murdered it by successively moving cars into a space where you couldn't do that. It's not like we don't know a large market can't be expunged.
The incumbents have a strong general incentive to keep people from having options.
