alt Hacker News> When I zoom all the way out, all of consumer computation has existed as sort of an addendum or ancillary organ to the big customers: government, large corporations, etc.
Perfectly stated. I think comments like the one above come from a mentality that the individual consumer should be the center of the computing universe and big purchasers should be forced to live with the leftovers.
What's really happening is the big companies are doing R&D at incredible rates and we're getting huge benefits by drafting along as consumers. We wouldn't have incredible GPUs in our gaming systems and even cell phones if the primary market for these things was retail entertainment purchases that people make every 5 years.
The iPhone wasn't designed or marketed to large corporations. 3dfx didn't invent the voodoo for B2B sales. IBM didn't branch out from international business machines to the personal computer for business sales. The compact disc wasn't invented for corporate storage.
Computing didn't take off until it shrank from the giant, unreliable beasts of machines owned by a small number of big corporations to the home computers of the 70s.
There's a lot more of us than them.
There's a gold rush market for GPUs and DRAM. It won't last forever, but while it does high volume sales at high margins will dominate supply. GPUs are still inflated from the crypto rush, too.