The "Bicycle for the Mind" is being sold for parts

For decades, the personal computer stood as the ultimate symbol of individual agency. Steve Jobs famously called it a "bicycle for the mind" a tool that empowered the individual to go further and faster than their natural abilities allowed. But today, that bicycle is being dismantled for parts. What we are currently experiencing is no longer a simple supply-chain hiccup or a temporary price spike. It is a structural shift in the very fabric of silicon production that is fundamentally altering the nature of computing. We are witnessing the end of the PC era and the beginning of the "Rental Era." The Great Memory Siphon

The primary driver of this crisis is not a mere lack of production, but a strategic reallocation of silicon. The foundations of our digital world RAM and storage are being siphoned away from the consumer and redirected toward the monolithic heights of the cloud.

Memory giants like Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron have shifted their focus from the consumer DDR5 sticks you’d find in a home desktop to High Bandwidth Memory (HBM). Why? Because HBM is the lifeblood of the AI data centres currently engaged in a global arms race. When every H100 or Blackwell GPU requires massive amounts of specialised memory to function, the humble home PC becomes a secondary priority. From Ownership to Access

As memory costs skyrocket and silicon is diverted to feed the insatiable hunger of Large Language Models, the hardware requirements for modern software are outstripping the average person's ability to own the machine.

This creates a deliberate "hollowing out" of local hardware:

• The Hardware Hurdle: High-end local computing is becoming a luxury good, priced out of reach for the casual user.
• The Rise of Thin Clients: Instead of owning the "bicycle," we are being encouraged to rent a seat on a bus. We see this in the shift toward cloud-based gaming, web-based productivity suites, and "AI PCs" that rely on remote servers for their heaviest lifting.
• The Loss of Agency: When you no longer own the memory or the processing power, you no longer own the tools of your own creativity. You are simply a subscriber to someone else's silicon.

The New Computing Hierarchy

We are moving toward a world where the power to compute to truly think at scale is being centralised. The "Personal" in Personal Computer is being replaced by a service agreement.

If memory is the "workspace" of the mind, then the current shortage is more than an economic issue; it is a shrinking of our digital horizons. As the industry prioritises the data centre over the desktop, we must ask ourselves: what happens to the "bicycle for the mind" when we can no longer afford the wheels?