The AI Hype Train Has Derailed the PC Market, and We're Paying for the Wreckage

I'm going to be honest, looking at the state of the technology industry right now makes me want to scream into a pillow. Or better yet, scream at a cloud server farm until it overheats.

We are currently living through what I can only describe as the "Great AI Enshittification," and frankly, it's fucking exhausting. Everywhere you look, some CEO in a turtleneck is waffling on about how Large Language Models are going to "revolutionise" our lives, when in reality, all they've done is make the internet worse and computer components prohibitively expensive.

It feels like we've gone from being treated as valued users to being viewed simply as wallets with a pulse. And barely even that.

The Micron/Crucial Betrayal

Let's talk about the hardware situation, because that's where this really hits home. I've been watching the prices of components lately – mostly out of morbid curiosity, since I'm sitting over here with my Mac mini M2 (more on that later) – and it is absolutely dire.

Remember when you could build a decent PC without selling a kidney? Yeah, those days are dead and buried. And who do we have to thank? The insatiable, power-hungry maw of AI data centres.

The specific thing that set me off on this rant today was thinking about Micron and Crucial. For years, Crucial was the go-to for reliable, affordable, enthusiast-grade memory. Their Ballistix line was legendary. If you were building a rig, you grabbed some Ballistix, maybe overclocked it a bit, and you were golden.

But then, Micron decided that us plebs weren't profitable enough. They killed off the Ballistix line. Just gutted it. Why? So they could pivot their fabrication capacity toward high-bandwidth memory for enterprise AI servers.

They essentially looked at the enthusiast community – the people who built their brand, the people who recommended their RAM to every mate building a PC – and said, "Cheers for the money, but NVIDIA is offering us more." It's absolute bollocks. They killed the soul of Crucial to chase the AI gold rush, leaving us with boring, JEDEC-standard sticks while they high-five each other over quarterly earnings from server farms.

And it's not just them. It's everyone. Every silicon wafer that could have been a consumer GPU or a stick of gaming RAM is now being diverted to power some chatbot that can't even tell you how many ‘r's are in the word "strawberry" without hallucinating a dissertation on fruit biology.

The Great AI Circlejerk

The absolute state of this industry is starting to look less like a revolution and more like a collective Ponzi scheme. It's a massive, self-sustaining circlejerk where billions of dollars are being funnelled into "AI" by companies whose only customer for said AI is other AI companies.

NVIDIA sells chips to Microsoft to train a model, so Microsoft can sell "AI credits" to a startup, which uses those credits to build a tool that generates "content" for a marketing firm, which then uses another AI to "analyse" that content. It's just bots talking to bots, powered by hardware we can no longer afford, all to create "value" that doesn't actually exist in the real world.

We're being told this is the future, but it feels like a hollow shell. They're burning through the planet's resources and our bank accounts to keep this house of cards standing, hoping that if they keep the hype high enough, nobody will notice that the "intelligence" they're selling is just a very expensive, very loud statistical guess.

The "Feature" Nobody Asked For

The worst part is that this expensive hardware is being pushed to power software that nobody actually wants.

Statistically, for the average person, AI is a nuisance. It's the "Clippy" of the 2020s, but with more hallucination and ethical theft. Look at Microsoft. They are trying to shove Copilot into every crevice of Windows. They wanted to screenshot your desktop every few seconds with Recall (a security nightmare so vivid it sounds like a plot from Black Mirror).

Who asked for this? I certainly didn't. My mum certainly didn't. She just wants to check her emails and look at photos of the dogs or even completing her work. She doesn't need a generative AI suggesting replies or eating up her RAM.

Yet, companies have fallen head over heels for it. They are obsessed. It's like watching a collective psychosis in the C-suite. They are burning billions of dollars on a technology that simply makes the user experience worse. Search results are filled with AI slop. Social media feeds are clogged with uncanny valley bot images. Support chats are now useless loops with LLMs that gaslight you about their own policies.

It's shite. It's proper shite.

The Pivot to AI Code (and My Own Guilt)

And look, I'm not a luddite. I'll hold my hands up: I am kind of guilty of using AI in my dev work. I use it for scaffolding, or for generating the boilerplate for non-essential projects that I just want to get off the ground quickly. It's a tool.

But there is a massive difference between using a tool to help you build, and what these corporations are doing. They aren't trying to help developers; they are trying to replace them. They want to fire the junior devs and replace them with a subscription to an LLM that spits out insecure, buggy code.

I'm yet to properly enter the workforce, and honestly? It's discouraging as hell. Am I going to be competing for an entry-level job against a hallucinating text predictor? Is the industry I've spent years learning to be a part of just going to implode because shareholders would rather save a wage than build quality software?

The View from the Walled Garden

Now, I mentioned earlier that I'm a user of a Mac mini M2. And honestly? Thank god.

I am sitting in my little Apple silicon walled garden, and for once, I'm glad for the walls. My machine works. It's powerful enough for my dev work, it runs my local servers, it handles my creative projects. It doesn't scream at me. It will last me a good long while.

But man, is it discouraging to be into the broader tech scene right now. I used to love looking at PC parts, planning hypothetical builds, seeing what the new architecture could do for gaming. Now I look at the prices of GPUs and just feel tired. I look at the power consumption of these AI-focused chips and feel gross.

It's depressing to watch a hobby I loved turn into a casino for venture capitalists.

Conclusion

I don't know when this bubble is going to burst. I hope it's soon. I hope the investors realise that burning the planet to generate bad poems isn't a sustainable business model.

I just want to go back to a time when tech was about tools for people, not extraction mechanisms for corporations. I want to buy a stick of RAM that was made for me, not a reject from a server batch.

Until then, I'll be here with my Mac mini, writing my code (with my own hands, mostly), and staying the fuck away from anything that mentions "Generative AI" as a selling point.

We deserve better than being treated like wallets. We deserve to be treated like people.

Fuck off, Copilot. I can write my own loops.