This is always a hilarious take. If you inflation adjust a 386 PC from the early 90s when 486's were on the market you'd find they range in excess of $3000 and the 486s are in the $5000 zone. Computers are incredibly cheap now. What isn't cheap is the bleeding edge. A place fewer and fewer people have to be at, which leads to lower demand and higher prices to compensate.
It is crazy you can buy a used laptop for $15 and do something meaningful with like writing code (meaningful as in make money)
I used to have this weird obsession of doing this, buying old chromebooks putting linux on them, with 4GB of RAM it was still useful but I realize nowadays for "ideal" computing it seems 16GB is a min for RAM
It was kind or that way in early days of high end personal computing. I remember seeing an ad in the early 90s for a 486 laptop that was $6,000. Historically prices have always gone down. You just have to wait. SoTA is always going to go for a premium.
> That irked me too. "_Bleeding edge" consumer GPUs are ...", sure, but you wait 6 months and you have it at a fraction of the cost.
That's demonstrably false. The RTX 4090 released in 2022 with an MSRP of $1,600. Today you'd be hard pressed to find one below $3K that isn't a scam.
The reality is that NVIDIA is taking advantage of their market dominance to increase their markup with every generation of products[1], even when accounting for inflation and price-to-performance. The 50 series is even more egregious, since it delivers a marginal performance increase, yet the marketing relies heavily on frame generation. The trickling supply and scalpers are doing the rest.
AMD and Intel have a more reasonable pricing strategy, but they don't compete at the higher end.
