It’s not as far-fetched as it may sound to many of us who have owned our own computer hardware for years (going back to the 1980’s for me)… the price of RAM and soon the price of SSD’s are skyrocketing because of the demands of artificial intelligence, and that’s already having implications for the pricing of personal computers.
So, could Bezos and other tech leaders’ dreams of us being locked into subscription-based models for computing come true? I think there’s a good possibility, given that our society has been slow-boiled to accept subscriptions for everything from our music listening and playlists (Spotify) to software (Office, Adobe, and now Apple’s iWork Suite, etc.) to cars (want more horsepower in your Audi? That’s a subscription).
To me, it’s a far cry from my high school days, when I would pore over computer magazines to read about the latest Pentium chips and figure out how much RAM I could order for my next computer build to fit my meager budget. But we’ve long been using machines with glued-down chips and encouraging corporations to add to the immense e-waste problem with our impenetrable iPhones, MacBooks, and Thinkpads.
And let’s face it, the personal computer model has faded in importance over the last 15 years with the introduction of the iPhone and iPads and similar smartphones, as we can binge all the Netflix, TikTok, and Instagram reels (do we use personal computers for much else these days?) we want right from those devices.
Subscription computers and a return to the terminal model of VAX machines (PDF from 1987), as I used in college to check email, seem dystopian, but now that we’ve subscriptionized our art and music, it’s just a shout away.
So, what prediction did Bezos make back then, that seems particularly poignant right now? Bezos thinks that local PC hardware is antiquated, and that the future will revolve around cloud computing scenarios, where you rent your compute from companies like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.
Bezos told an anecdote about visiting a historical brewery to emphasize his point. He said that the hundreds-year old brewery had a museum celebrating its heritage, and had an exhibit for a 100-year old electric generator they used before national power grids were a thing. Bezos said he saw this generator in the same way he sees local computing solutions today — inferring on hopes that users will move away from local hardware to rented, always-online cloud-based solutions offered by Amazon and other similar companies.