this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2026
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It’s never taken off because of relatively inexpensive and abundant hardware. But these will be attractive to people who need something now and want something inexpensive.
Grandparents are the immediate target but eventually if they force the hardware supply shortages soon some people will need something.
Imagine students with low budget.
The next 5 years are going to be really interesting.
It must be noted that Big Tech is currently engaged in artificially forcing hardware prices upward, and that's going on while Microsoft continues their generations-long quest to deprecate old hardware by forcing new versions of their OS out of compatibility with it.
There are so many ways they're actively screwing their customers by making things tangibly worse, and then conveniently showing up to "help" by selling us more of their shit.
Plus laws going after alternative OSes, no doubt lobbied for by MS to eliminate competition for Windows, are starting to creep in now, see Cali and Colorado.
Next step will be mandating SecureBoot and limiting OS selection to a short list of approved options.
And the end game will be thin clients connected to the cloud.
I would be surprised if this WASN’T a conspiracy among all the billionaires in their secret clubs.
Grandparents don't want to rent shit. They want to buy it and be done. Source: this old fuck right here.
Fair. But what if they completely eliminate the ability to buy hardware? like only selling to the AI fucks? Do grandparents not get phone plans for example?
In general, we try to avoid recurring payments, whether debt, rent, or what have you. When we can't, we can't. But we'll buy used, we'll do whatever we can to avoid this shit — generally. So in my opinion which is undoubtedly a bit self-serving and should be taken with a grain of salt, grandparents aren't going to just roll over and accept computer as a service. The market for own your own computer will always be there, and so someone will sell it.