Yes, you'll probably have difficulty walking into a STORE to buy PC components, but only because online shopping has been killing local shops for decades now. You'll find it easy to get that stuff online, for better prices.

PCs, since the very start, have been going through a process of being ever more integrated each generation. Not too many people install sound cards, IDE controllers, etc., anymore. CPUs, GPUs, and RAM are about the only holdouts not integrated on the motherboard these days. It's possible that could change, if CPUs and GPUs becomes fast enough for 99% of people, and RAM gets cheap enough that manufacturers can put more on-board than 99% of people will need. And while you might not be happy about that kind of integration, it comes with big price reductions that help everyone. But we're not there yet, and I can't say how long down the road that might be.

Mouse replacement on a weekend coz old one broke same story (button smashed in and not usable at all any longer). Online not cheaper, no same day available at any price, Amazon delivery without Prime no next day either. Local chain store had it for immediate pickup and I was gaming again in 30 minutes.

Of course, you have Newegg and other online stores.

Actually, his experience is the standard PC enthusiast experience for the vast majority of DIY'ers in many nations. And is now subject to threat if businesses catering to consumers shut-down.

I have to genuinely question this. I haven't heard of anyone I know buying PC components at a physical store in like 20 years, and I know people from various nations.

You have to take into account that same day delivery from amazon and the likes is only a real thing in the USA. Most other markets do not have the same service, even with accounts such as Amazon Prime. There is only one online store I know that is providing same day delivery in my area in Spain and it is a physical (and rather expensive) chain, El Corte Inglés.

And it is available in other countries.

Even normal folks upgrade RAM. My aunt did so last year for her old desktop PC. PC components are available in the local computer hardware market of any nation. (Though admittedly, most people buy parts online nowadays and local hardware markets are shutting down)

No. I'm a PC enthusiast myself, as are most of those people I know. I run an online (PC) gaming community.

> (Though admittedly most people nowadays just buy online and local hardware markets are shutting down)

Literally what I was saying.

I'd love to see more market-style parts locations a la Huaqiang or Akiahabara

Which is why they shut down - the addressable market of people having an emergency need for an item from a limited selection of electronics isn't that big, and that's becoming the only market.

It's not your fault that you don't want to pay over the odds for everything when you're not in a rush, and it's not their fault they need to pay commercial rent, utilities, payroll, insurance and all the other overheads.

But the outcome is simply that staffed local physical shops have a lower efficiency ceiling in terms of getting items to customers.

That MicroCenter continues to exist tells me that there's at least enough people shopping for parts in meatspace that there's net revenue to be had.

Yes, Microcenter "exists", but primarily through selective cultivation of their locations. From a pure market footprint perspective, they are outclassed by a candle company, and many other niche businesses.

At no point was I entirely denying that some people go to physical stores to buy components. I was just countering the idea that a majority of people do so, as opposed to ordering online.

30 years ago you would buy what was available locally, possibly you could obtain from the shop owner that he orders a part from his distributor's catalog and that was it. And we weren't giving it much second thought.

Now when we know we can obtain any brand or any model online we are much more picky about our component choices. I know for me it is the same in other areas I am knowledgeable like bicycle parts. Regardless of the price more often than not the local bike shop doesn't have the exact tire model I want so if I am not in a hurry I order online. I wasn't unhappy buying whatever was available back in the days as it was just not a possibility and I had less knowledge about what was available, even when receiving magazines every month. Ignorance is bliss sometimes.

When I was an undergrad at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo 20 years ago, I relied heavily on Newegg, since there were no large electronics stores in San Luis Obispo back then for computer enthusiasts. Best Buy today has come a long way and is now a great place for PC enthusiasts, but this wasn't the case 20 years ago; it had much more of a consumer electronics focus back then. Four years ago I was visiting Cal Poly friends in Santa Maria; we were building my PC together. I bought the wrong power supply online, and so we ended up going to Best Buy in Santa Maria, where I was able to find the correct power supply for a good price!

Even with Best Buy's improved selection, nothing beats Micro Center in either Silicon Valley or Irvine, but if you're in neither location and Best Buy doesn't stock what you need, then you have to order online.

As much as I love Micro Center, though, nothing beats Yodobashi Camera in Akihabara, Tokyo. That store is electronics heaven, at least for new components. For used components, I peruse Akihabara's alleys, which are filled with small shops specializing in used and retro gear.

The one that my first PC came from (in 1988) was open for something like 20 years. Another that still remains has been there for 33 years.

Plus, I mean: Best Buy stocks some PC parts. So does Wal-Mart. They're not "local," but they're nearby and they have stuff.

I have complete confidence that I could leave the house in the morning with nothing but some cash, and come home with enough parts to build a performant and modern PC from ~scratch in about an hour or two -- including travel.

And that's Ohio -- it's flyover country, full of corn fields and cowpies.

But after I drive to Microcenter and shop there and drive back, I'm fuckin' tired. I won't want to build a PC when I get home. I'll want to think about either getting a pizza or going to bed, and the bed will probably win.

So usually, I don't shop at Microcenter at all. I adore that place (and yeah, I'm impressionable: Keeping Raspberry Pi Zero W's in stock at every checkout register and selling them for $5 made an impression on me), but it's just too far away from where I live.

What usually happens instead, despite still having much more local alternatives, is this: I order the stuff. It shows up on my porch a day or two later. I build it at my leisure.

There's a Vietnamese place right next to Microcenter on bethel that has some killer BBQ pork fried rice though. That's usually my excuse to go.

The Greek place that stands out so favorably in my memory is Lashish the Greek. It's right across Bethel from Microcenter, in the strip mall behind the McDonald's. Looks like it's still running. I should stop in there again sometime.

Last time I was there it was empty except for us and the owner. Friendly dude. He stopped at our table after we had some time to finish eating and we chatted about food, food quality, and the Gipsy Kings album that he was playing.

So many great ethnic restaurants in between Henderson and Bethel.

Lots of memories, and all of them are good.

(Including that one time when a buddy and I bought a used 3D printer out of the trunk of a fellow geek's sedan, in cash, in the Microcenter parking lot. We actually went to Microcenter looking to buy a resin printer, and we definitely succeeded -- just not in the manner in which we had expected to succeed. That's been a solid little machine for a few years now and was precisely as it was described.)

- Went online, ordered everything for pickup (didn't pay yet)

- Drove there, they had it all bagged and ready

- I showed them online prices for some of the parts

- For the ones they could verify (I think it was all of them) by going to the website and checking, they matched the prices

- Then I paid and took my stuff home

I also got my M1 MBP there (it was 25% off when the M2 models came out).

Please, if you have a Microcenter near you, give them your business. I don't want them to go away. Once all this memory madness dies down, I'm going to go there to build a new gaming rig.

I walked into a Central Computers the other day and was flabbergasted. I had never seen a Threadripper PRO or a 10G switch in a store before!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xjj6uIIUT_0 gives a good idea of how it is now

But, I guess, if you need a mouse right now and don't insist on the absolute best price, they're still there, yeah.

In practice, I live two streets away from there and yet I do all my shopping online (not that I buy that many parts anymore).

Brick and mortar stores are as useless as they've always been. Even now they're selling old hardware (couple of generations old or older) for more than it was ever worth. For example, one such store not far from me has been trying to offload a 12-year old LCD monitor for several years now, for two times of its original price. I wonder why.

People have been tinkering with electronic/electric modules for decades:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathkit

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiKey

Rather: very commonly the local shops don't stock the parts that I would like to buy, and it is often hard to find out beforehand which kind of very specialized parts the local shop does or doesn't stock.

True story concerning electronic components: I went to some electronic store and wanted to buy a very specialized IC, which they didn't stock. But since the sales clerk could see my passion for tinkering with electronica, he covertly wrote down an address of a different, very small electronics store including instructions which tram line to take to get there (I was rather new to the city), which stocks a lock more stuff that tinkerers love. I guess the sales clerk was as disappointed with the range of goods that his employer has decided to concentrate on as I was. :-)

On the other hand, lots of former stores for PC component now have whole lots of shelf rows with mobile phone cases instead. I get that these have high sales margins, but no thanks ...

Thus, in my opinion it is not online shopping that killed local shops, but the fact that local shops simply don't offer and stock the products that I want to buy.

Increasingly, what we have are mobile terminals - possibly with a dock for monitor connections - for remote big iron. And the continuous push from governments for more control - seemingly synchronous demands for age gating (i.e. requiring IDs) and chat snooping - males me think this remote hardware won't really be yours before long.

Windows, caught up in the LLM mania, is to be left by the wayside too.

Number one, you become a recurring subscription instead of a one and done deal, making it incredibly profitable for industry

And number two, the government can more easily snoop on your data when it's all in the cloud versus a HDD box in your closet.

Granted, I think we're far away from that future, but I do feel that's the future the powers that be desire and they can use various mechanism to force that behavior, like convenience, and pricing, like for example making PC parts too expensive for consumers and subsidizing cloud and mobile devices to accelerate the move, and once enough consumers only know how to use Apple or Google devices they'll be less inclined to spend more money to build a PC and learn what a Linux is.

But the first one? I'm less convinced. I think the underlying assumption is that companies look to make the most money off consumers. I can get behind that.

But just the other day I was looking at a new GPU and considered running a local LLM. I was looking at spending no more than 1000 €. That would get a me 5070 TI 16 GB. Not enough to reasonably run anything interesting. I'm not looking to "tinker with things", I want to actually use them, mostly for coding. A JetBrains subscription would run less than 10 € per month [0], and keep me up to date with the evolution of things. My 5070 would be stuck at its mostly useless level forever, since I don't see requirements going down any time soon. If prices didn't change, I'd need more than 100 months, or 8 years, to break even. And during these 8 years, I'd never have a decent LLM experience by buying it outright.

Sure, this would be a capable GPU for other uses. But in my case, it would just sit around under my desk heating up my room.

---

[0] You'd get a 20 € discount if paying for a whole year upfront (10/month, 100/year). I'm also excluding VAT, since I'd buy this for work and have a VAT registered company.

When computers go obsolete in 2 years nobody wants them on their balance sheets, when they last 6 sales go down and you get more years of profit from owning them. This hasn’t been an instantaneous transition, but a low shift in how the industry operates.

The CPU is more expensive than the workstation blackwell card. 8x 96GB DIMMs - 96GB was at a corner in the price per GB, 128GB was more expensive per GB - is also more expensive now than the GPU. In fact the prices for that kind of package on ebay seem to be approaching the price of the entire box.

Give citizens computers and they have encryption. This alone gives them a fighting chance against police, judges, three letter agencies, militaries.

Give citizens computers and they can wipe out entire sectors of the economy via the sheer power of unrestricted copying.

The future is bleak. Computer freedom is dying. Everything then word "hacker" ever stood for is dying. Soon we will no longer have our own systems, we will have no control, we will be mere users of corporation and government systems. Hacking will go extinct, like phreaking.

This fact brings me a profound sadness, like something beautiful is about to perish from this earth. We used to be free...

But low end iGPUs don't need a lot of memory bandwidth (again witness Apple's entry level CPUs) and integrating high end GPUs makes you thermally limited. There is a reason that Apple's fastest (integrated) GPUs are slower than Nvidia and AMD's fastest consumer discrete GPUs.

And even if you are going to integrate all the memory, as might be more justifiable if you're using HBM or GDDR, that only makes it easier to not integrate the CPU itself. Because now your socket needs fewer pins since you're not running memory channels through it.

Alternatively, there is some value in doing both. Suppose you have a consumer CPU socket with the usual pair of memory channels through it. Now the entry level CPU uses that for its memory. The midrange CPU has 8GB of HBM on the package and the high end one has 32GB, which it can use as the system's only RAM or as an L4 cache while the memory slots let you add more (less expensive, ordinary) RAM on top of that, all while using the same socket as the entry level CPU.

And let's apply some business logic to this: Who wants soldered RAM? Only the device OEMs, who want to save eleven cents worth of slots and, more importantly, overcharge for RAM and force you to buy a new device when all you want is a RAM upgrade. The consumer and, more than that, the memory manufacturers prefer slots, because they want you to be able to upgrade (i.e. to give them your money). So the only time you get soldered RAM is when either the device manufacturer has you by the short hairs (i.e. Apple if you want a Mac) or the consumers who aren't paying attention and accidentally buy a laptop with soldered RAM when their competitors are offering similar ones for similar prices but with upgradable slots.

So as usual, the thing preventing you from getting screwed is competition and that's what you need to preserve if you don't want to get screwed.

Even if you have a surface area equivalent to a high end cpu and high end gpu, combined in a single die?

Separate packages get you more space, separate fans, separate power connectors, etc.

In theory you could do the split in a different way, i.e. do SMP with APUs like the MI300X, and then you have multiple sockets with multiple heatsinks but they're all APUs. But you can see the size of the heatsink on that thing, and it's really a GPU they integrated some CPU cores into rather than the other way around. The power budget is heavily disproportionately the GPU. And it's Enterprise Priced so they get to take the "nobody here cares about copper or decibels" trade offs that aren't available to mortals.

And before you bring up the “efficiency” of the Mac: I’ve done the math, and between the Mac being much slower (thus needing more time to run) and the fact that you can throttle the discrete GPUs to use 200-250W each and only lose a few percent in LLM performance, it’s the same price or cheaper to operate the discrete GPUs for the same workload.

My point was not that “it isn’t really that slow,” my point is that Macs are slower than dedicated GPUs, while being just as expensive (or more expensive, given the specific scenario) to purchase and operate.

And I did my analysis using the Mac Studio, which is faster than the equivalent MBP at load (and is also not portable). So if you’re using a MacBook, my guess is that your performance/watt numbers are worse than what I was looking at.

Ultra is about 2X of the power of a Max, but the Max itself is pretty beefy, and it has more than enough GPU power for the models that you can fit into ~48GB of RAM (what you have available if you are running with 64GB of memory).

In pretty much any other situation, using dedicated GPUs is 1) definitely faster, like 2x the speed or more depending on your use case, and 2) the same cost or possibly cheaper. That’s all I’m saying.

Very feasible but it would have to be redesigned around the cell libraries used in newer nodes since the i386 was manufactured on >1um size nodes.

Prototypes would cost around $1-2k per sq mm at 130nm and $10k per sq mm at 28nm (min order usually around 9 sq mm). Legacy nodes are surprisingly cheap, so non-recurring engineering will generally be the bulk of the cost. The i386 was originally >104 sq mm but at 1um, so you could probably fit the entirety of a i386 clone in 1-2 sq mm of a 130nm chip. Packaging it in the original footprint and the lead times on prototypes would probably be more annoying than anything.

I'm really wondering about hardware as well but today's tech is surprising in it's scale and requirements - I wouldn't be surprised if we could do mid 70's tech as hobbyist today - but further than that...

No one is saying that it's the sole culprit. But when average PCs start costing $3000+ from now on, it seems like the end of an era.

You should look into what’s happening with DIY robotics because it looks eerily similar to what I experienced in the early to mid 90s with PC hardware and software

And you can do way more than just host a bbs with robots

- Hardware

We won't have any hardware without secure boot and we won't have the signing keys. Signed firmware is required for everything x86, everything Apple, everything mobile, probably everything ARM too. Rockchip ARM could still boot without signed firmware last time I checked a few years ago, but I'm not sure about the newer CPUs.

[ Short story: I have an Asus Tinkerboard S. It came with an unprovisioned emmc onboard. Just empty. A few years ago I made the mistake of trying the official OS from Asus. It automatically set up the CPU to boot from emmc first and provisioned the emmc with boot0, boot1 and rpmb. These partitions can't be written and can't be removed. Their creation is a one-way operation according to emmc standards. Now I have to keep the emmc masked because it won't boot otherwise. So beware of any devices with emmc. ]

You can, of course, use MCUs for general computing today. ESP32 is pretty powerful - it's probably 4 times faster than a 486, certainly more powerful than an i386 or a 68000 you suggested. The big problem here is memory, graphics and software. No MMU requires a completely new OS. Linux (uclinux) could boot at some point without a MMU, but it won't fit in 540KB memory. MCUs can access external memory (PSRAM), but via slow buses and it's paged. Also there are no hi-speed buses for graphics.

There is some hope coming from the chinese CPUs. AFAIK, they don't support secure boot at all. I'm planning on getting one as soon as their proprietary firmware/UEFI/ACPI and be replaced by uboot.

- Software

It's useless to make a i386 or 68000 today. There's nothing but old software for them. Not even linux has i386 support anymore. This is an even bigger problem than hardware. Much, much bigger. To have any hope of a minimally useful computing platform, we need a working browser on that platform. This is an absolute requirement. There's no way around this. I had to abandon Win98, then WinXP, and soon Win7 because of no working browser.

Linux is generally usable today, but as soon as Linus retires, it's going to fall into the same user-lockdown like all others. The basic infrastructure is all in place: secure boot, root login basically deprecated, access rights and security settings administered by the distro and package manager, not the user, no per-program firewall rules, automatic updates as standard, surveillance infrastructure via udev (hardware events), dbus (software events) and gtk accessibility (input events), etc. Linus fought hard to keep them outside the kernel, but he won't live forever.

To have any hope of privacy and/or freedom our personal computers we need to turn the security paradigm completely on it's head: users are not the threat - programs are. The user should login as root (or system account in Windows) and every program, including services, should run under their own limited accounts with no access to the rest of the system, especially user's files.

Of all OSs today, Gentoo portage is probably the easiest package manager to tweak into creating accounts and groups for programs instead of users and Gobo Linux has the best separation of programs in it's filesystem. I'd love to see a merger of these two.

Hobbyist computing? Ha! First get a browser working.

I'm actually a big fan of Apple hardware (when you crunch the numbers for base spec machine and when you're able to get discounts, the price/performance for the half-life you get is incredible), but I'm also planning to get back into home-brew builds a bit more over the next year: I need to build a NAS, a home lab, I might look at a gaming rig... and I'm far from alone.

So yes, it's a niche market, but a profitable one for a lot of players, and one that Micron will be glad is still available to them when the data centre bubble bursts.

I don't really believe in AGI if that's what they're going for, but hey they'll get something close to that.

Numerous as in plenty? Or basically three? Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron make up over 90% of the market share of DRAM. Micron saying goodbye to the consumer market basically leaves us with yet another duopoly.

You don't buy SK Hynix or Samsung RAM (unless you are an OEM typically.)

Consumers can still buy RAM from companies like G.Skill, TeamGroup, Corsair, Kingston, etc. Those companies can use chips from any of the big three.

Crucial winding down doesn't mean that there's less flash fabs in the world, just like there are plenty of DRAM companies that sell to the consumer market that don't have their own flash fabs (Corsair, Gskill, Geil, etc). Those consumer oriented brands bought flash from Micron (not crucial), SK (also doesn't have a consumer facing DRAM brand), and Samsung. That's just as true today as it will be post Feb 2026 when Crucial closes it's doors because Micron selling components to say, Corsair, is an Enterprise transaction from Micron's perspective (B2B), even if the ultimate end product is a consumer oriented one.

What you linked is OEM RAM. The enterprise market still uses lots of UDIMM's, even though it certainly favors RDIMMs. Yes, it's DDR UDIMM's that are compatible with consumer PC's. But it's not sold like Samsung or Crucial consumer-oriented memory is, at least in the US market. Check the availability of it compared to say Crucial or Samsung. It's virtually non-existant. Check the comments on that very site as well, note how many people are talking about getting them from pre-builts (aka OEM/SI). Note, SK selling UDIMMs to SI/OEM's for consumer products is not a "consumer transaction" to SK, that's a B2B enterprise sale to another company from SK's perspective.

So technically yes, but practically no, not in the US they don't. Elsewhere I'm unsure, but SK has been deprioritizing consumer DRAM sales for a while now, just like Micron.

This massive tide floats all boats and there will be smaller players filling the gap. With slightly worse chips at first yes, but historically DRAM had been a cyclical businesss where new manufacturing capabilities were brought online en masse after a boom.

Here is a video of Sam Aloof who now runs Atomic Semi with Jim Keller. It likely took thousands of dollars to make his own custom Z2 chip that only has 1200 transistors and its nowhere near the likes of the 68k or Intel 386. They might have more advanced stuff now at Atomic Semi but they haven't announced anything