More cartel news from Gamers Nexus

Published: July 30th 2026 (week 31 of 2026) in gamersnexus

One about a DRAM cartel, and one about a hard drive cartel. This is bad in and of itself. However, the old-school business fuckery combined with the new-school AI-based fuckery leads us down a sloppery slope to a very unhappy place.

Many components are getting ridiculously, maddeningly expensive. Some devices are getting downgrades. Some devices are just costly. Yet other devices may as well be unobtainium due to scalers, the scourge of the earth, and components shortage.

Of course, all of this is a fair price to pay for the privilege and pleasure of being able to have a "conversation" with a sycophantic chatbot, and looking at pictures and videos hallucinated by a machine. Please, do not pay attention to the industrial-scale copyright infringement campaign run by for profit companies, relentless onslaught of bots crawling the internet for data (for those same companies), and gleeful disregard for ordinary people. Just be happy and welcome your new AI overlords.

This is a terrible time to be in the PC hobby. From gaming to self-hosting, anything involving a personal computer is getting out of reach of the general public.

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