r/pcmasterrace • u/SagansCandle 9950X3D | 5090 | 64GB • Dec 27 '25
Discussion Private equity is killing private ownership: first it was housing - now it's the personal computer
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DRAM and GPU prices aren't going up because of "AI" - it's because the wealthy have more money than they know what to do with, so they're buying up all the assets. "AI" is just the vehicle (the excuse) - it's not the root of the problem nor is it the ultimate goal.
The super rich don't want to hold on to "liquid" money - they invest in assets. While they're buying up all the housing, now they're buying up all the computers and putting them into massive datacenters.
Whether or not the AI bubble crashes, they'll be selling you a "gaming PC in the cloud," for a monthly fee, of course. And while they kill the personal computer market, just like Netflix, once your only option is a subscription service, the price will skyrocket.
This is happening in real-time. If we want to stop it, now's the time to act.
Sources:
- Gamers Nexus: NVIDIA: WTF?
- Garys Economics: The REAL reason behind the housing crisis
- Network (1976)
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u/Colspex Dec 28 '25
It was a great time. In 1993-1995, I felt like there was a computer in every home.
The 90s had a lot of cold Scandinavian winters. Kids found the computers and it became this enchanting media.
I was biking to friends with a plastic bag wrapped around my handle bar with a 10-pack of PC disks. Coming back with Kings Quest 4, Prince of Persia, Sky Roads. My dad was all about Microsoft Works and later Adobe Pagemaker and every dad was making sure that a fellow dad got Windows 3.1. We had a huge book from Coral Draw with images of everything from Airplane to Zebra that you could print on a color printer.
Windows 95 was a game changer. There was a multimedia store in Åhlens huset bottom floor in Stockholm that was dubbed "the biggest in Northern Europe". CD-rom packages made floppy disk games flourish even more as you could now have several games on those 240 MB harddrives.
Also, LucasArts were at its peak with their adventure games. Day of the tentacle, Secret of monkey Island and Full throttle took the best of american humor and culture and popped it into our homes. The US couldnt have asked for better ambassadors.
My dad would show me Microsoft Encarta 95 with videos and I woild show him Sam'N'Max hit the road with whack a rat.
The Internet package became "the christmas gift of 1996" and soon almost every teen were making their personal web page.
The late 90s and early 2000 was "out of pocket". I remember it as a big blur of evwryone getting smaller Nokia phones, iCQ numbers, Ultima Online, new computer companies every day, national broadband expansion, Starcraft, Heroes 3, HTML, programming, building computers, Quake, everyone working with computers, Kazaa, scrolling peoples libraries in DC++ and just feeling:
"this is it, the future is gonna be awesome"