Consumers are no longer customers, they’re competition.

I do believe this is deliberate destruction. I don’t buy that the extreme rise in PC component prices is just due to AI demand. I think that’s just the excuse to eliminate the market by excessive cost.

Large corporations, even big tech companies (perhaps most of all) have long hated that people had personal computers under their control. They’d very much like them to go away. This is all part of putting the information genie back in the lamp and resuming the unfettered dominance they had in the pre-PC era.

Probably no stopping it now, but I’ll miss it when it’s done.