Apple recently raised prices across most of their devices, with the iPhone the only exception. The reasoning behind these hikes isn’t mysterious. Memory shortages driven by AI datacenters’ insatiable demand for DRAM have pushed manufacturers to prioritize enterprise AI over consumer hardware. A $30,000 accelerator chip simply offers better margins than a $5,000 graphics card. Currency fluctuations and import duties have also played a role, but the primary driver is the component crunch.
Yesterday, Sony announced they’re developing next-generation consoles without disc readers—no more physical media for PlayStation. Sony hasn’t confirmed a specific timeline, but rumors suggest physical game discs could be phased out by 2028. I might explore the gaming angle in a separate piece.
These developments signal something I think too few people are talking about: the age of consumer hardware appears to be ending. Compute is shifting toward subscription models, rented instances, and metered consumption.
We’ve watched this play out in IT for decades. On-premise infrastructure migrated to the cloud. You don’t own servers anymore—you rent instances from AWS or Azure and pay by the meter.
But personal computing was different. Ownership mattered. Despite predictions in the 2010s that smartphones would decimate the PC market, that never materialized. In fact, the PC market is bigger than ever.
What hardware manufacturers have learned, software companies figured out decades ago: selling once isn’t profitable. Licensing is. The average computer user buys a new machine every five years. But what if you could rent that machine on the cloud and charge for every compute cycle?
This is exactly what happened to the Office suite over the last decade. A closer analogy might be what streaming services did to physical media.
Changing this trajectory is challenging because, honestly, it’s far more convenient to rent a VPS than to buy and house a rack for serious computing. For most users, a cheap terminal to log into your cloud PC will be cheaper in the short term than buying high-end hardware.
But this convenience comes with a significant caveat: the loss of ownership.
Consider what Amazon does with Kindle. You can buy a full-priced book on Kindle or buy the paperback. With the paperback, you can read it, lend it, resell it, or gift it. With the digital copy, you can only read it. You don’t really own it. Amazon can remove it from your “library”—which is just their database—at any moment. In 2009, they remotely deleted copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from customers’ Kindles without permission. The irony was not lost on anyone. CEO Jeff Bezos later called the move “stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles.”
What prevents your cloud provider from removing your access or accessing your files through a backdoor? These are troubling scenarios. I hope regulations protecting user rights will be in place before we fully transition to this model. But given how regulatory bodies have handled AI and data privacy, I’m not optimistic.
I’ve seen enough convenience-driven adoption to believe this is our future whether I like it or not. Mostly, I don’t. But to opt out, you need to pay a premium for ownership. Some of us can. Some of us can’t.