This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
They are going to kill an industry and damage peoples ability to access technology.
Im kind of wondering if that isnt the real end game- there was a Bezos quote i saw the other day, where he said he wants to see personal computing die out in favor of essentially cloud based, where users own minimal hardware and just rent compute time for everything.
It kind of feels like they dont actually need ai to succeed- its already achieving the goal of denying components to end users. If they maintain that scarcity long enough, they can kill the pc/ laptop status quo. (Especially if chip makers abandon those fabs for data center tailored units for a whole generation, until theres nothing viable left on the market)
The good thing is that we have a few giants with vested interests in resisting that. PC OEMs like Dell and HP, Clevo, Intel/AMD who still have huge consumer sales, and the big one:
Apple.
Apple is all-in on personal compute, and they have the muscle to resist the anticompetitive plays, hopefully.
Apple can make Chrome book equivalents, they want you to rent compute power not computers.
Natively you'd be able to run VLC on a good day if you're lucky, but everything else will be online with a subscription attached.
Apple likes being able to distribute apps and have users pay subscriptions to run them locally. This is what they already do; even 3rd party apps get a cut to Apple.
And its why iPhones are so powerful, other than their meager RAM capacity.
Tangential, but ironically the only used laptops (e: for repair) you can buy right now that haven't been gutted for RAM and NVME are macbooks and similar that have everything soldered onto the motherboard.
Such crazy logic from Bezos, personal computers are now more powerful and capable than ever, fulfilling the average users needs easily. Hey let’s just get rid of that and make them use our servers. He tries to frame it as the logical conclusion but the only conclusion I can see is he wants more money.
Summary created by Smart Answers AI
chuckles
Micron reported a revenue of $37.38 billion for fiscal year 2025. Nvidia reported a revenue of $57 billion for just its latest quarter. AI is hot. Meanwhile, inflation and interest rates continue to depress consumer spending power here in the U.S., which is reflected abroad as well. AI has also torched jobs—it’s fueled thousands of layoffs already.
Torched jobs, the environment, and climate.
Sure, in the grand scheme of things, the fevered pace of tech often has led to good outcomes in the end.
Only when it's well-planned and well executed, with people and our habitat treated well.
But that doesn’t change the individual impact of incomes lost, plans destroyed, security evaporated. So when a company makes a play for my agreement through emotion, I always wonder: Who benefits from this vision?
weird emotional appeals
“I think we’ve done a lot of damage lately with very well-respected people who have painted a doomer narrative, end of the world narrative, science fiction narrative. […] It’s not helpful to people, it’s not helpful to the industry, it’s not helpful to society, it’s not helpful to the governments.”
“Our viewpoint is that we are trying to help consumers around the world. We’re just doing it through different channels. […] What’s going on right now is that the TAM [ed: Total Addressable Market] and data center is growing just absolutely tremendously. And we want to make sure that, as a company, we help fulfill that TAM as well.”
