dell The Madness has begun

[MyPC8MyBrain]

There is another consequence coming out of this landscape that few vendors seem to be accounting for.

This pricing behavior fundamentally changes upgrade psychology.

For decades, the PC and workstation market relied on a simple pattern. CPUs advanced, prices were tolerable, and users chased the next generation because the platform cost made sense. Memory was an afterthought, not a gating factor.

That is no longer true.

When customers are forced to buy systems loaded with 64GB, 96GB, or 128GB of memory just to remain functional, that memory stops being expendable. It becomes the anchor. The sunk cost people protect.

The result is predictable.

Instead of chasing a new CPU with marginal gains, users will sit on older systems that are already fully populated with expensive memory. Upgrading to a new platform now means rebuying RAM at inflated prices for single-digit performance improvements.

That math does not work.

So unit sales slow. Refresh cycles stretch. The traditional excitement around new CPUs fades. The market shifts from progression to entrenchment.

Ironically, the attempt to extract more value per system accelerates the opposite outcome. Fewer systems sold. Longer lifespans. Less incentive to move forward.

In practical terms, memory pricing has become a brake on innovation.

People will not discard fully loaded, capable machines just to step into a new socket with unaffordable RAM and negligible gains. They will optimize around what they already own.

That is how a market stops moving forward not because technology stalled, but because economics made progress irrational.
 

There is a reason this kind of behavior was pushed out of civilized markets in the first place.

Pillage-and-plunder economics do not create growth. They extract value until the system stops moving. That model was understood, corrected, and regulated out of functional societies because it destroys trust faster than it creates profit.

What is happening now feels like its quiet return.

Not through force, but through leverage. Not through scarcity, but through manufactured constraints. While attention was elsewhere, the same behavior re-emerged the moment the market gave cover.

When customers are told that doubling prices on inventory already sitting in warehouses is “unavoidable,” when modularity is removed to lock in replacement cycles, when architectural inefficiencies are preserved because they are profitable, that is not innovation. It is extraction.

Markets tolerate this only briefly.

Once buyers adjust behavior, upgrades slow, alternatives are explored, and loyalty evaporates. The damage does not show up in quarterly reports at first. It shows up later, when momentum is gone and trust cannot be rebuilt on demand.

History is consistent on this point. Systems do not collapse when people complain. They collapse when people quietly stop participating.

And that is where this trajectory leads if it continues unchecked.

 

[MyPC8MyBrain]

CES is over, and look at what actually showed up.

One low-tier new Intel CPU. One mildly boosted AMD SKU. No new GPUs. No real platform shifts. No meaningful architectural progress.

For an industry supposedly in the middle of the biggest computing revolution in decades, this was a staggeringly thin showing.

If this were a classroom, you would not call it cutting edge. You would call it remedial at best. Lots of repetition, very little advancement, and an uncomfortable sense that everyone is stalling for time.

That is not because innovation suddenly got harder. It is because the market is locked into monetizing what already exists. When margins come from scarcity, price control, and segmentation, there is no urgency to move fast.

So instead of bold platforms, we get SKU shuffling. Instead of new architectures, we get minor frequency bumps. Instead of GPUs, we get silence.

This is what an industry looks like when it is more focused on managing demand than pushing capability.

 

What makes this year stand out from previous is not that the products were underwhelming. It is that there was no clear sense of direction.

Even going back to the 1980s and early 1990s, CES consistently showed forward motion. The hardware was primitive, but the trajectory was visible. New buses, new form factors, new categories, and clear signals about where platforms were heading next.

This year did not feel like that.

This felt like a strategic pause. An industry more focused on managing inventory, pricing, and segmentation than on moving the platform forward. When margins are being extracted from scarcity and control, there is little incentive to accelerate change.

So instead of architectural shifts, we get SKU reshuffles. Instead of new GPUs, we get silence. Instead of platform evolution, we get minor bumps that preserve the status quo.

That is not how CES has historically behaved, even in slower decades. There may have been weaker products in the past, but there has rarely been a show with so little visible intent to move computing forward.

And that ties directly back to everything above.

When markets are optimized for monetization over progress, innovation slows. Not because it is impossible, but because standing still has become more profitable than moving ahead.