Cries in PC gamer I’m glad I already have a good setup and shouldn’t be buying anything for a good while, but damn it. First the GPU, then RAM, now SSDs.

Next step, modular desktops as a concept will die, probably. I hope people like locked-down black boxes they can’t upgrade and can’t run their own OS on in the future, so byebye Linux and BSD in that scenario outside of niche devices.

At the same time, just expanding a device with new parts is a far cheaper way to get more performance than buying a new device - after all, whatever price problem there is with some kinds of parts, it will be the same whether they’re sold as lose parts or as part of a device. Poor working class young me in a poorer European country after getting his first PC quickly found out that to get more a more powerful machine he had to start upgrading that machine because there wasn’t money to buy a whole new one every couple of years. My point is that it might very well yield the very opposite effect of what you describe - buying whole devices to replace older models becomes too expensive so people favor more expandable devices - because those can have their performance improved with just some new parts, which are cheaper than getting a whole new device - and the market just responds to that. I think people in countries which until recently are wealthier, such as the US, are far too used to the mindset of “throw the old one out and but a new one” which is not at all the mindset of people in places were resources are constrained or require a lot bigger fraction of people’s income to buy.