Hello again. I’m Blunty, and this one’s a bit of an off-the-cuff rant about how the AI boom is kneecapping gaming—without even touching the whole “AI in games” debate. I’m talking about the boring, brutal reality: memory and storage. AI companies are hoovering up HBM, LPDDR, and anything that looks like bandwidth, and that demand is cannibalizing the consumer supply chain. The result is RAMageddon: DDR5 kits jumping 200% to 400%, SSD pricing getting uglier, and suddenly the stuff that made PC gaming accessible—cheap upgrades, budget builds, and reasonably priced handhelds—is getting torpedoed. I run through recent examples like Orange Pi’s Neo handheld getting put on ice, Qualcomm backing away from handheld chip announcements, and companies like Retroid and AYN either killing higher-RAM models or bumping prices because they simply can’t make the numbers work. Then it spreads outward: Gartner predicting sub-$500 PCs disappearing, entry-level laptops becoming financially unviable, and console/handheld pricing pressure hitting everything from Steam Deck to Switch 2 and even the PS6 timeline. The dystopian endgame I’m worried about is “dumb terminals” and cloud subscriptions—someone else’s computer, rented back to you—while you pay extra for the privilege of being harvested. The only silver lining? If nobody can afford constant upgrades, maybe devs calm down and start targeting sane mid-range hardware again.