Repair goes mega mainstream with the launch of Lenovo’s new T-series business laptops, which earned our highest honor with a 10/10 repairability score.
When buying a laptop in 2026, you really need to consider how easy it’s going to be to keep it running with parts you’ve scavenged from other road-warriors.
Once the bubble pops, assuming it doesn’t take economies with it, none of the product will be compatible with consumer devices. Manufacturing will have to be reoriented back to consumer products, then those parts will need to be manufactured, then the rush of people trying to get the parts will have to pass. THEN maybe prices will come down.
I suspect the datacenters will just pivot and repurposed to rent consumers “cloud compute” and cloud subscription services and continue to fuck the entire consumer market for years to come.
But then again I now hate everything so maybe I’m just pessimistic.
none of the product will be compatible with consumer devices.
…why would it need to be?
I suspect the datacenters will just pivot and repurposed to rent consumers “cloud compute” and cloud subscription services and continue to fuck the entire consumer market for years to come.
I mean they already have been and will continue to be, yes.
It doesn’t need to, but if it were that would be the only reason I’d say prices might drop anytime soon. A glut of used consumer-compatible parts would push prices down. That or maybe if the rising Chinese suppliers manage to ramp up and find a way to enter the western market.
The price is currently high and is rising because resources and manufacturing capacity are limited. Those who own the capacity have found that providing for a small number of companies that are flush with cash and will throw money around just to ensure their competitors don’t gain an advantage is far more lucrative than providing for consumers or businesses that integrate parts into consumer devices. The entire market segment is shifting away from consumer and focusing on datacenter hardware.
The longer this goes on, the further the major players will be from being able to pivot back to consumer products… and there are only major players in the memory and NAND industry. You can’t just form a new memory or NAND company and start manufacturing this stuff. It takes years and a lot of investment to build the facilities and the kind of capacity we’re used to.
Edit: I’ve also seen a number of non-tech folks excited for cheap used datacenter memory and gpus to flood the market after the bubble pops, as if the parts were at all compatible with consumer devices. I wanted to make sure that was not part of your calculation.
Oh stop it. Plenty of used computers are perfectly fine. There isn’t a single thing you need done that can’t be done with a 15 year old PC. You don’t need “agentic AI” to generate horse slop in your home, you don’t need terabytes of pirated content you can’t watch anyway, you don’t need video games.
We live in the golden era of thrifting PCs and disconnecting from the slop and nonsense of modern computing.
My apologies! I didn’t realize you were the arbiter of what I do and don’t need. I feel so relieved that I can just ignore all of the demands on my life and just hand over such authority to some opinionated jackass I met on lemmy.
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Just in time for RAM, SSD, and HDD prices to skyrocket and make personal computers unaffordable.
I guess if you can afford one now, at least you’ll be able to repair it.
When buying a laptop in 2026, you really need to consider how easy it’s going to be to keep it running with parts you’ve scavenged from other road-warriors.
Old off-lease ThinkPads from corporate fleets as always.
Schools are a huge customer for these types of Thinkpads. Kids are rough on laptops. They’ll be bought in large quantities regardless.
You could buy an anemic one now, and then upgrade the RAM & storage once prices come down.
They will come down after the AI bubble inevitably pops. Maybe not back to where they were before but they will come back down.
Once the bubble pops, assuming it doesn’t take economies with it, none of the product will be compatible with consumer devices. Manufacturing will have to be reoriented back to consumer products, then those parts will need to be manufactured, then the rush of people trying to get the parts will have to pass. THEN maybe prices will come down.
I suspect the datacenters will just pivot and repurposed to rent consumers “cloud compute” and cloud subscription services and continue to fuck the entire consumer market for years to come.
But then again I now hate everything so maybe I’m just pessimistic.
…why would it need to be?
I mean they already have been and will continue to be, yes.
It doesn’t need to, but if it were that would be the only reason I’d say prices might drop anytime soon. A glut of used consumer-compatible parts would push prices down. That or maybe if the rising Chinese suppliers manage to ramp up and find a way to enter the western market.
The price is currently high and is rising because resources and manufacturing capacity are limited. Those who own the capacity have found that providing for a small number of companies that are flush with cash and will throw money around just to ensure their competitors don’t gain an advantage is far more lucrative than providing for consumers or businesses that integrate parts into consumer devices. The entire market segment is shifting away from consumer and focusing on datacenter hardware.
The longer this goes on, the further the major players will be from being able to pivot back to consumer products… and there are only major players in the memory and NAND industry. You can’t just form a new memory or NAND company and start manufacturing this stuff. It takes years and a lot of investment to build the facilities and the kind of capacity we’re used to.
Edit: I’ve also seen a number of non-tech folks excited for cheap used datacenter memory and gpus to flood the market after the bubble pops, as if the parts were at all compatible with consumer devices. I wanted to make sure that was not part of your calculation.
…how about cratering demand? Basically the opposite of what we have now? That’s not enough?
I feel like you didn’t read what I wrote. If the bubble pops today, how long do you think it will take for prices to drop?
Oh stop it. Plenty of used computers are perfectly fine. There isn’t a single thing you need done that can’t be done with a 15 year old PC. You don’t need “agentic AI” to generate horse slop in your home, you don’t need terabytes of pirated content you can’t watch anyway, you don’t need video games.
We live in the golden era of thrifting PCs and disconnecting from the slop and nonsense of modern computing.
My apologies! I didn’t realize you were the arbiter of what I do and don’t need. I feel so relieved that I can just ignore all of the demands on my life and just hand over such authority to some opinionated jackass I met on lemmy.