I don't know how everyone arrives at that conclusion when the cost of the subscription services is also going up (as evidenced by the very article we're talking about). People who are renting are feeling this immediately, whereas people who bought their computers can wait the price hikes out for a couple years before they really need an upgrade.

For Christmas I got an alarm clock that basically doesn’t function without a $50/year subscription. For an alarm clock (Hatch.co).

Consumers need to get better at understanding TCO when buying things. Or maybe the government should be slapping those “annual cost” stickers like they do on washing machines to understand how much electricity they use.

> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services?

The supply chains for high-end chips are brittle enough that it's a very real possibility we end up with a severe supply crunch such that neither clouds nor individual users can access new chips at anything approaching reasonable prices.

TSMC owns 60% of the foundry market. So if China decides to invade Taiwan, that would likely mean ~60% of CPU and GPU manufacturing capacity permanently destroyed at once. That would be "iPhones are no longer for sale this year, and PCs now cost $5000 if you're lucky enough to get ahold of one" kind of territory.

> Game publishers have already publicly floated the idea of not selling their games but charging per hour. Imagine how that impact Call of Duty or GTA.

MMORPGs have had monthly subscription fees for a long time.

For a lot of games if they charged by the hour would probably see less revenue...people buy tons of games and then barely ever play them.

This has been theorized as Technofeudalism: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technofeudalism

>home computers are replaced by thin clients

Ah, but that's the genius of this circuit around the tech cycle. You need a "thick client" to access those subscription services, as running the (web) interface requires shameful amounts of RAM and CPU resources.

Valve changed its Steam Store's ToS, so officially it means Steam users no longer own the content they purchased in it, they merely bought a subscription to rent it for a while, until the game publisher decides to revoke the online content at any time they choose.

TakeTwo Interactive (2K Games, the makers of popular games series Borderlands) changed its ToS to allow it to spy on and capture anything on the user's machine, including browser behaviors (websites visited, bookmarks saved, etc.), payment information (credit card details, etc.), programs installed & usage, etc.

Gaming industry has moved on to become evil, by default. Most AAA games these days cannot even be played without an internet connection. And most AAA games demand intrusive DRMs, and same games demand the dangerous kernel-level DRMs like Denuvo which cannot be monitored by major antimalware.

It’s possible. Either way, many people literally sleep in a monthly subscription model — rent.

| Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and | all the power lies in subscription services?

arguably, we are already there. The majority of people don't use a computer anymore, they use their phone. The phone itself is just an interface to the cloud. If I lost my phone today, and got a new one, the only inconvenience would be the time it takes me to set up the new phone, and the cost of the new phone. I wouldn't lose anything because everything is on the cloud

Its a market signal; we’re going to see a massive boom in investment (mostly from China, but still) in capacity expansion. Eventually the prices will stabilize.

> You don't need storage space, use our cloud subscription

This is here already. A long time ago, maybe even before covid, I asked a table of iPhone-owning friends who pays Apple a monthly sub for storage, and every hand went up.

I know you mention home computers, but most of my friends don't have one. Their iPhone is their computer.

The answer lies in one of your questions:

> Grocery stores closed to visitors, all shopping done online and delivered to your door

In the UK at least, and I'm sure in a lot of other places, a solid proportion of groceries are now delivered to the door. But, that doesn't mean that supermarkets have closed; if anything, they seem to be busier than ever.

Instead, we have a hybrid market where convenience for the consumer is the ruling factor. The same is going to be true for most of the other situations you mention.

From a resource allocation perspective, this doesn't feel particularly undesirable, at least in terms of certain assets like vehicles. The current system of ownership is quite wasteful. I own a high end GPU that I use maybe 4 hours a week for gaming.

> home computers are replaced by thin clients

phones have 128GB storage and are vastly more powerful than the workstation i did my grad thesis on. Now that electron has exhausted the last major avenue for application bloat, i don't see why thin would mean anything.

> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services?

Always have been. Ever since the SaaS revolution of the early 2000s high-growth software businesses have been motivated to chase subscription revenue over one-time sales because you get a better multiple.

From an economic perspective The Market would like the average person to spend all their money on rents, and the only option is how you allocate your spending to different rentals. Transportation, housing, food, entertainment (which is most of computing) are just different fiefs to be carved up by industry monopolists.

Arguably a lot of non-techie personal computing has moved there.

A lot of people are phone+tablet only, no desktop or laptop. As a result they are already living in a thin-ish client with fat server for storage/app/etc from their ecosystem of choice.

Not great!

> How long before car ownership is replaced with autonomous vehicle car pools?

Click here to subscribe for an activation of your seat heater.

They've been planning this outcome for a long time. Here's Larry Ellison in 1997: https://youtu.be/Bk1_btV3oIk?t=402

“The personal computer was designed as a standalone device. There was no Internet around 1981 when the PC was invented. There weren't a lot of local area networks and corporations and schools and government agencies [online] back in 1981. The world has changed — there are networks everywhere; around the world and offices and schools and major governments and institutions. So why not have computer networks that are similar to television networks or telephone networks?

A television network is enormously complicated; it's got satellites and microwave relay stations and cable headends and recording studios, and you have this huge professionally-managed network accessed by a very low cost and simple appliance: the television.

Anyone can learn to use a television. 97% percent of American households have televisions. 94% of American households have telephones. They can have very simple appliance attached to enormously complex professionally-managed network. Why shouldn't the computer network be just the same?”

More likely people will retain their current devices for longer and wait this whole thing out - there's less reason to upgrade than there was a decade ago.

Processing power increases have noticeably plateaued, with e.g. Nvidia GPUs steadily increasing in TDP to make up for there not being enough gains from updated process nodes. The RTX 5080 is rated at 67% higher TDP than the RTX 2080, but you don't see such an increase throughout most of the 2010s, so before the latter was released.

Computers have never been more powerful. There is less and less of a reason to do annual upgrades. I don’t follow this logic at all. The average consumer does not even need a home computer anymore. Sure if you are upgrading you gaming PC or something similar than your going to feel a bit more of a squeeze but even then it’s not a wild increase in price compared to the hours spent using.

> all the power lies in subscription services

I think NVidia already decided they have all the power when the decided to add 100h limit to their GForce Now service, with that limit getting effective for legacy plans right now. It would be bad if people like they service so much that they avoid buying overpriced hardware :D

"Moore's Law" purports that there is more computer over time.

"Sam's Law" purports that we asymptote to have a consistent amount of computer; or, we have the same amount of computer over time.

"Leslie's Law" purports that we peak and then start to decrease; or, we eventually have less computer over time.

We might be living in Sam's world or even Leslie's world.

This directly contradicts the bubble narrative.

If hyperscalers and neocloud have excess capacity and low demand, prices should be collapsing

Subscriptions have always been, and will always be, more economical and efficient than ownership.

Unless you're using a resource 100% of the time, that resource is partially wasted. A GPU can be much cheaper for you if others are allowed to use it when you're asleep.

I don't think this will ever work for gaming, as gaming has strict bandwidth and latency requirements. This means you need to colocate gaming datacenters with the people who actually use them, and people in a given timezone usually play at similar times.

LLMs are a completely different beast. The user experiences of using an LLM next door and using an LLM from across the world are basically indistinguishable. This means you can have a single datacenter with really high GPU utilization during the day.

>Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services?

Since they're thin clients anyway we could even make them small and mobile, perhaps replace mouse and keyboard with a touch screen.

> Physical media could easily be killed off. Does my iPhone need 1TB of storage or will they shrink that and force everything through iCloud?

For the mobile space, I think we are ripe for a memory inversion of sorts, where going forward a phone has 1TB or more of ram but very little non-volatile storage. The RAM would need to be fast enough to run inferences locally, whereas the storage is does the bare minimum to boot the device on the rare occasions it requires a reboot. All user-specific artifacts would be stored in the cloud.

This seems a likely future for phones and other wearables going forward.

> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients

FWIW these kinds of claims have been a cyclical thing constantly throughout my nearly 3 decades long career. We're always on the verge of thin clients replacing desktops, and then we're suddenly not and things calm down for a couple of years before, oops back again!

Every time there's arguments about saving on cost of hardware, etc. but the reality never seems to line up with the dream.

Subscriptions usually add up to the cost of buying in less than an year.

Companies hope on people being none-the-wiser, but live mostly of people that subscribe for short durations or need the internet component of the services. So, no, prices going up will make subscriptions less popular, not more.

This is different from expensive goods pools (rental cars, houses, airplanes, etc) because there's actual competition on those.

> How long before car ownership is replaced with autonomous vehicle car pools?

That is very much a future I look forward to living in. Not requiring to own a car but sharing it efficiently with folks in the neighborhood, would save quite some parking space for unused vehicles in front of homes, and centralize maintenance to the companies operating the vehicle fleet.

All the more reason to self host some part of your life at least. If there’s a market, someone will figure out how to service it, but if everyone gives up totally then all we’ll have is massive, cold, immovable corporations holding all our data.

  Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services?

If you don't own your computer, wouldn't you be more exposed to price increases?

* - GPU prices rising - RAM prices rising *

How else is grok going to generate semi-naked images of minors?

> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services?

It's the thin/thick client cycle, I've already been through it 1.5 times and I'm not that old.

This assumes everyone’s sitting on a fast fiber connection which is hardly the case. Even metropolitan areas in most cities don’t have universal fiber connection.

Or we rewrite everything in Rust and stop using JS on websites and watch how the computational efficiency and lack of bloat impacts the market?

I hope we go back into old days up to the late 1990's, and current generation of developers learn to target the computers users can afford.

On the flip side, if the rumored AI crashdepressionapocalyspe does in fact materialize, those things will become super cheap.

I remember the dialup times when you had to pay for internet usage per minute. I hope we won’t revert back to that.

> Imagine how that impact Call of Duty or GTA

By killing the golden goose...

Game pass isn't doing well for developers and they know it.

> - GPU prices rising - RAM prices rising - hard drive prices rising

They tell me the economy is booming

Don't forget the end of Home Onwership.

> Are we looking at a future where home computers are replaced by thin clients and all the power lies in subscription services?

I've been hearing this since 2010s when Microsoft introduced UEFI iirc and I've heard it for a while. I honestly thought in my teens in the mid to late 2010s that by now I'd have a few Petabyte hard drives. Shame.

I've said it many times, everyone wants AI but nobody wants to foot the real bill for AI. The cost is too high. Once the bubble bursts, whoever is left standing might charge reasonable prices that are profitable, until it becomes more cost effective.

Yes and no.

I think what'll happen here is that these computing price increases will be what finally makes certain ML startups un-economical. That's what will precipitate the AI bubble burst. The whole thing runs on investor capital, so it keeps going until some investors lose their capital. Once the bubble bursts, you're going to get some really cheap GPUs, RAM, and hard drives (as well as cloud computing prices), as many of the more marginal data centers go out of business and liquidate their hardware.

It's going to be a rough couple years for hobbyist computer aficionados though. In the near future I'd try to wait this one out and get a job at an AI startup instead.

You will own nothing and be happy.

Also check the agenda 2030. The European digital wallet. The cyberscore.

All those elements together makes a digital Europe (and more) where there's no cash anymore, where your website has to be compliant to be working with EU's ID and payments systems.

It's going to be all centralised and about subscriptions, no matter if it's about your electricity bill or your groceries.

The future is we all gonna go to war when there's no more juice to squeeze by the billionaires.

The future is coming in hot. Just look at what's happening lately.

Your PC has been viewed as an appliance now since 2017. The goal, to get you on as many service subscriptions as possible.

Assuming you are a capitalist that is in it to maximize shareholder value then yes, that is the direction you will push the world in. Why sell me a car once if you can charge me a rent forever?

I think a better or at least adjacent question might be: do consumers want to pay full price for an object that isn’t subsidized by services? Do we actually want physical objects?

Even the things that aren’t technically subscription feel like they are. I have a Kenmore fridge I bought in 2020. The extended warranty just ran out and the thing died. I called a tech. $400 to replace a series of motors. I looked into doing it myself and it’s outside of my time or ability. I have a basement beer fridge that is admittedly less efficient but it’s still kicking and it’s from the mid 80s. I realized I’m effectively ON a subscription plan for a fridge. $900-$1,200 for five years.

How much is a smartphone that lasts (do they even) and is NOT subsidized by cloud services? I have a 128gb iPhone and though I barely use any apps I’m constantly maxing my space because I take a lot of photos.

I hate to sound like a graduate student writing a thesis on capitalism but like water flow, it just feels like companies will always default to maximum profits. Didn’t instant pot and tupper ware just go out of business because they made a product everyone needed but only once? There’s no long term profit growth in any model where we’re not sucking off the teet of some company.

Also, even if/when the AI bubble pops (whether it exists is irrelevant to my point), all the companies who have been hoarding the hardware can naturally progress into selling this new "stream everything through a subscription" service, further delaying (possibly forever if it's successful) price normalization.