The recent rise in prices for flash memory spurred by unchecked proliferation and growth of the AI bubble has got me thinking again. This is nothing new as soaring prices of solid state storage has predicted this turn of events, but its still disappointing to see big companies abandon the regular consumer.

My business has been on hold for a while now due to many factors, both global and local economies slowing down being one of them. The prices of components, both used and new have soared, and even at razor thin margins there's nothing I can do when nobody has money to buy anything even if I could afford to continue building and selling computers.

A cynical part of me is feeling a little vindicated though. Big companies and rich individuals are the primary culprit of what is happening in the world right now, no doubt, but complacency of the average person has played a big part in everything that happened as well. Me included.

Decades ago, when personal computers were making a debut on your living room floor owning a computer meant knowing how to use it. You had to read official documentations and magazines and learn how to program your "breadbin" to do what you wanted it to do. Software wasn't easy to use and it was limited but people made great things despite the limitations. I subscribe to the notion that limitations bread creativity, however unpleasant that is to admit.

Soon after as the age of the Internet began, computers got easier to use. You didn't have to limit yourself to text, websites got color, pictures and shortly after videos. Computers got more powerful and much more affordable and people moved into the digital world, turning computers from an obscure nerdy hobby into the mainstream sort of thing you just did everyday, kind of like what reading the newspaper and watching TV used to be.

The continuous growth of the computer and software market saw companies compete to vow the consumers with fancier and fancier technology and prettier user interfaces. Somewhere along the way big companies figured out that people cared more about accessibility and visual appeal than they did about functionality and the market got flooded with cheap, low quality hardware. While the initial introduction of entry-level modern-day computing devices such as netbooks didn't go the way these companies hoped they did manage to set a precedent. Everything thereafter was being built for the internet.

With the fast-paced churn of the hardware market people got complacent. Every next year better hardware came out and everyone hopped on to the new fancy thing. Software developers no longer had to constrain themselves to the limitations imposed by legacy hardware and made things less and less efficient. This is where we are now. Despite the trying times consumers still keep buying e-waste, landfills overflowing with old capable devices. Big companies build their software for the new age, locking those devices out of the ecosystem on purpose, relegating massive tons of still-good hardware to be discarded or at best collected by a small group of environmentally conscious of those sick with nostalgia.

My personal PC has 32GB of fast RAM. Even with that my computer struggles to navigate the modern web the way it is at the moment. Firefox causes memory leaks on the daily, locking my entire computer up. Windows breaks my set up consistently with forced updates, modern games attempt to take over my entire PC and force me to change settings and install rootkit-like anticheat to even consider playing them..

I've done what I can to reduce my personal contribution to global e-waste problem. I learned to repair more and more devices, slowly advancing in my component-level skills. Try as I might there is little I can do until more people wake up to the issue staring them in the face. That is why that cynical part of me is happy about the recent flash storage issues. Maybe people will wise up and consider using older hardware and be more choosy with their software, even if it means they will be forced to do it by their wallet.

Deuces.