Technology

Aaaand there we go, as predicted for the lady decade. You won't own anything and you'll like it. You will lease pur hardware and we will know everything about you.

Fuck all of this

"defeat." I think you mean "realize their evil ambitions."

What dystopian hell is this?!

Watch programmers and artists pay for lease.

Kudos to them, if i cannot install my own software anymore and don't own the hardware, it could be leased as well. /s

I was like damn you almost got me the onion

Thanks, but no.

HAH, how 'bout no!

Mkay.. just disinfect it, please. 🤓

Leasing / renting will defeat RAM prices....somehow.

I know. Typical click bait headline.

Apple is in kind of a precarious position, though, aren't they? They're pretty much a hardware-first, consumer facing company.

If the crash manifests, they'll be in a good position, though.

Any idea when the Chinese RAMs are going to flood enough of the market to lower the price?

Wow! How lucky are we?!! This also happens to coincide with Apple raising chocolate rations from 10 to 8!!!

Sounds on par with the rest of the tech oligarchy. Imagine missing a payment. You're in a business meeting and a tiny RC tow truck wheels in to haul it away.

I knew this was going to happen eventually but the fact that it's happened so soon is insane to me.

Shit like this just makes me wanna delete all the Apple compatibility stuff from my open source projects. It's not like they're fully realized (I cannot afford a Mac, not even a used one), but it just demotivates me from supporting their OSes and hardware.

🤮

I'll absolutely never touch that shit, but I am kinda curious what the pricing will look like.

How long does it take for buying to be cheaper than renting. How long before you are expected to get a new one - this is actually quite a big one, could it encourage more buying new laptops and so also improve the second hand market? Better and cheaper second hand laptops could be sweet.

Honestly, the level of doublethink on display by some Apple fans is impressive normally but this is amazing. Apple "defeats" RAM prices by making you pay for something several times over while not actually getting to own it? Fucking bootlickers.

[2028] Apple announces that they will no longer sell phones to consumers, only rent them. "Our customers love the ease of monthly rental payments that never stop and we listened!" said one Apple exec.

How is that a defeating ram prices for fucks sake. Only defeat is happening on user side. Is there any media that can’t publish pro corpo articles anymore?

While there are still cheaper DDR5 options at lower speeds, the 32GB of DDR5 @ 8000MT I bought at $579 in February is now $700 on Amazon and even more elsewhere.

At the time I was convinced that the industry was moving towards a full-leasing only model, and so I decided to invest in some future proofing. It took less than 6 months for the price to start jumping again. Whether this is deliberate, or simply an emergent quality of supply/demand of the new AI economy probably doesn’t matter. The bar for private compute power is being shoved higher and higher by data centers and the PC industry’s response is to move towards a leasing model.

I foresee that eventually that when PC hardware becomes too expensive or completely unavailable in consumer markets, your PC will become like your phone - a locked-down, remotely managed, integrated hardware system that you lease as a unit, along with a cloud services subscription. Or, a thin client with the bare minimum specs to accommodate cloud computing. Extrapolating from this - a privatized Internet hostile to client computers unauthenticated by a major company or government entity running a recognized digital fiefdom where uncontrolled local compute will be viewed as highly suspicious.

If you still have the means and the interest, I suggest investing in consumer PC hardware to:

1. Demonstrate this market is still viable.

2. Buy hardware before it jumps in price again.

3. Claw back some of the local compute power being engineered away from consumers.

Of course, the AI economic bubble is due for collapse and cheap hardware may suddenly flood the market in a few years. However, I’m betting there is enough runway and monetization left to fund the pathway to the end of common PC ownership.

MBAs solve yet another case, which other problem will they create and solve, but not really, next time?

You'll own nothing!

Mah computer subscription is a monthly payment I can't miss.

Exploit, not defeat.

Uh-oh