Realistically, the consumer market for PC components existed because there was a business market for desktop computers as employee workstations. That's mostly dead now. Businesses mostly buy laptops or mini PCs for employee workstations, they have less and less need for desktop hardware because most of the computing tasks have moved to SaaS platforms. The consumer PC hardware market isn't that profitable on its own, it exists on the margins of production for business purchasing, and it's been coasting on momentum built up in the 2010s.

Processor architectures are changing to support machine learning tasks, GPU production is shifting toward ML-specialization, and everyone in the design field is trying to remove the barriers between the CPU and the RAM, which means shortening the path, which means getting rid of the socket and end-user upgradability in favor of soldered components. With SaaS taking over everything in the business world, we're trending back toward the mainframe computing model and away from powerful local hardware.

I'm not saying there won't be a consumer PC market in the future, I'm just saying that it will be different. There won't be enough demand for common desktop components to keep the custom PC build market alive as it was five years ago.

[–] vanillama@programming.dev 2 points 19 hours ago

I think it depends on what happens in countries like China, as they develop more productive capacity in sectors like memory and graphic cards the prices will eventually go down, I hope they keep the components separate for non-datacenter customers but I guess time will tell, and sadly you might be right