Is the DIY PC Era Over? – DTNS Weekend

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2:21Welcome to DTNS edition. I'm Roger Chang, your host for today. Today's topic is a very important one, and the one I'll be wrestling with, with Patrick Norton, my co-host podcast mate. The topic is the death of the DIY PC. And I know from literally from sitting next to him in the office that Patrick Norton has put more hours piecing together PCs than he has his own personal wardrobe. But before I get any further, I would like to say that none of this would be possible without the support of our patrons and listeners just like you. Thank you to one and all. But back to Patrick and his PC wardrobe.

3:04Do you believe that DIY PCs are sort of on their last leg? I mean, the high prices of RAM, the high prices of storage. The high prices of everything with memory. Okay, let's pause here for a second, right? Because in our history, you and I have been building PCs near each other for a really long time. So long that I'm afraid to say it out loud, lest we turn into dust and collapse like some sort of weird, you know, artifact. Indiana Jones village. Exactly. We were both in the same place with that one. You know, so, yeah, I'm going to say this. Every hobby that involves anything with memory, the cost of Raspberry Pis right now or almost any single board computer other than the most basic ones is painful.

4:03Anything with memory, PC builds, consoles, various and sundry consumer electronics. Roger, you mentioned storage. You know, SSD storage is hurting so badly because of the cost of memory. It's actually grossly impacted regular hard drive storage prices. You know, a lot of the what I will affectionately call electronics hobbies of the modern age, you know, since somebody once made fun of me for wanting to build a crystal radio, are just being hammered by the cost of memory. So when you go to sleep at night, you're thinking about how slow your PC is and how painful an upgrade will be. Remember to blame OpenAI and Sam Altman.

4:48So I will also say the main reason, you know, the other thing is like the PC building thing has always been kind of a nerdly thing with occasional gusts into gamers or people who were like building PCs for aesthetics. But, you know, the main reason to build a PC, no matter how expensive or cheap it is, you know, is as solid as always. And that's because you get exactly what you want in your PC build. I mean, it's really hard to kind of stress that because if people were able to build their personal car the way they build the PC, I mean, you would have very, very boutique pieces of rolling stock on the road because people would be saying, well, no, I want the super engine in my Toyota pickup, right?

5:40I want the inline six from back from 94 in this 2001 Tundra body or Tacoma body. Probably more of a Tacoma. But it's like I remember being that persnickety about it. Like really like, oh, I want a diamond 3D. I want the diamond version of the Voodoo 3D accelerator. I want a Pentium this, not a Pentium that. I want this power supply because I heard really good things about Corsair or I heard really good things about Seasonic. And there was also, I mean, go ahead. Sorry. Oh, no. I was about to say a lot of that was based on sort of the marketing spiel that I absorbed. But there was also satisfaction that you were getting what you wanted.

6:30You know, I will also say, you know, as somebody who was, you know, benchmarking components and discussing reliability with a lot of people back in the day, back when I was working on magazines, which was many, many years ago, you know, it used to be that when you bought a motherboard for an Intel, you know, sort of like an Intel or an Intel compatible processor or some of the AMD processors that were around back then, The motherboard manufacturer did the bulk of the engineering and design on that motherboard. And you would often get detectable performance differences between different vendors because of decisions they made and how they built the motherboard.

7:09Later on, Intel and AMD, for that matter, sat down like, this is the motherboard. And you can make these decisions, but we're going to – because Intel doesn't want people to think their processor is slower because they bought a cruddy motherboard. or because the manufacturers made choices in spots where they could maybe trim little expense that maybe impacted the reliability of the processor. So, you know, pretty much every, it doesn't really matter if it's a laptop or desktop, the motherboard manufacturer in some ways matters a lot less than it used to. Power supplies, you know, there's a, before the advertising market disintegrated and it became impossible to make any money on a website, there were a lot of websites that did things like testing CPU coolers.

7:55And the CPU cooler tests were amazing because it turned out there were$20,$30 CPU coolers that spanked$100,$150 CPU coolers in a standard test environment. This room is set to 72 degrees. We do this test on this processor. And they would literally do that with thermal paste. They would do that with CPU coolers. And it was hysterical when you started to realize that somebody's$67 a gram CPU thermal paste was being outperformed by something that cost$8 a gram. You know, there was especially in the mid to late 90s, there was a very large cottage industry around DIY PC enthusiasts, so much so that there were a lot of young guys who are very interested in kind of getting their toe into that sort of review space.

8:52The one you just mentioned about, you know, coolers, but they also did storage RAM and all that. And they would out of their own pockets do a lot of these reviews. It's Shimpy, right? That was how he started. And it was a very kind of fortuitous time because you had a confluence of a lot of events. You had Windows and Intel essentially just being the 500-pound gorilla. Yeah, I mean, Ryan Shrout over at PCPer, Ryan Shrout wrote some benchmarks that changed how people reviewed GPUs not too long before he moved on the manufacturer side of things. But not to get too deep down this hole, right? You could literally be like, I want this GPU because it has a better warranty.

9:42I want this particular hard drive because, you know, reliability tests suggest that it's going to last longer. Or, you know, I want to make sure the memory is the configuration I want. I want to make sure I have these features on the motherboard. Or it could be as simply as, like, every manufacturer's case sucks. I want this really pretty case that I can pick up at, you know, whatever your favorite computer parts store or website is. I mean, yeah. I mean, psychologically, there was sort of a fulfillment where a fulfilling kind of not prophecy, but sort of the thing where you felt like you accomplished something.

10:22Like, I built this PC. It runs. And for a lot of people, I remember we were doing screen series. You used to get a lot of email from folks who would say like, oh, Patrick, Leo, you guys are the best. I would have never built my – I built my first PC watching your show. And for a lot of people, that was sort of a confidence exercise in which they helped them springboard into maybe a career in IT or maybe into some adjacent field. Well, it's very mysterious. You know what I mean? Like, oh, I can't fix my toaster. There's a tag on the bottom that says no user serviceable parts inside. I mean, you know, I was recently teaching somebody how to change their oil because they're like, man, the company, the place where I get my oil changed, once it's$80 for it, I'm like, dude, you're using$20 worth of oil, you know, and a$7 filter.

11:13He's like, what? You know, so I taught him how to change the oil in his truck. He doesn't even have to jack it up, right? There's enough space underneath that he can slide to capture the drain pad under there. And it's an introduction. Now he wants to learn how to do brake pads. It's funny to watch. It was very much for a long time building a PC was a gateway. Like, oh, I'm a real nerd now. I built a PC. I mean, there's other reasons, right? I have recycled parts across PCs for years. A friend of mine a few years ago got me buying whatever delete expletive power supply came with a 10-year warranty because generally speaking, they didn't use the cheap components and they didn't under-engineer those power supplies.

12:00Because if it's a solid, reputable company, they don't want to be on the hook for repairing a bad power supply for a decade. I have at least one or two power supplies that have gone through two or three builds. In fact, one, I think, is on its third PC because I bought it for something, you know, rebuilt that machine into something else with a new motherboard and power processor. And then when the power supply went out in my son's manufacturer-built PC with manufacturer's power supply, I swapped it into that. So, you know, I've recycled cases. Anybody who's seen me build a PC, like occasionally I will see a case and I'll be like, it is beautiful and it will be mine.

12:41But most of the time, I'm like, oh, look, somebody left an ATX case on the side of the road for recycling day, and I take that home and gut it and rebuild it. But when you're looking right now at the cost of 32 gigabytes of DDR5, my local micro center has pretty good deals, but it's still way over$400 for 32 gigs of memory. um you know i can reuse the ddr4 and the gpu in my current machine get a 50 boost in cpu performance you know for like 300 bucks uh you know for for a newer amd ryzen 7 like a 5800 uh x3d uh you know i think it'll cost me another 75 for a motherboard and i will get a huge bump in performance out of out of you know a bunch of parts that i already have which is probably as close as i'm going to get to a new PC for a long time.

13:34I mean, recycling parts is something I've been doing forever. Until recently, because a number of blackouts in my neighborhood eventually killed it. You don't run an uninterrupted... Oh, wow. Oh, no. It killed that. It's done it so many times. It literally fired the AVR, the automatic voltage regulator. And I never understood what was happening to my PC. I didn't understand what was happening to my PC. and this is about four years ago, but it was just acting really wonky. It's like, wait a minute, hold on. And I traced it to the power supply because as soon as I replaced it, it was fine. But at some point, and this is where I'm going to be the other silverback who's going to run in and disarray.

14:20It's like, into this debate, it's like, I kind of see it, at some point, I just started thinking of working on my own PC as sort of a hassle. Not that I, you know, it's not that I dissuade anything. I don't want to deal with ordering the parts. I don't want to deal with putting the parts together. I don't want to deal with having to do the tech support for myself. Oh, no, totally. And this is the thing. As we all know, I like to hold on to things for an inordinate amount of time, which is like five to six years. I built the PC sitting on my desktop. It was the fastest PC I could build in roughly 2017.

14:57I'd have to look it up. I'm pretty sure I built it in 2017. It is what year? 2026. I'm on my third GPU. I think I'm still on the original power supply. And I've doubled the memory. But it's still going, man. That's why I started eyeballing. I was about to build a new PC. Memory prices went utterly unhinged. And I was like, you know. And after about six, eight months when I came to terms with the fact that memory prices aren't going to go down before 2028, then I started being like, hmm, what can I do with my 32 gigabytes of DDR4? I mean, you know, the PC I had was still running. It was running fine.

15:44But the issue I ran into is, of course, I built it in 2015. It was like a 4970K, fastest PC you could build at the time. The problem was that Gigabyte, the manufacturer's board, stopped giving out any sort of firmware or BIOS updates like four or five years after that date. And I was like, well, now I'm stuck. I also, there was no TPM module grant or TPM. Granted, you don't really need it for Windows 11, but I said, I want to be on the safe side. Third, I just wanted a laptop, right? I had a MacBook, but MacBooks went up in price. And I was like, well, I'd rather have a PC laptop. Well, everything that uses memory, especially like 16, 32 gigabytes of memory, has gone up.

16:27But I ended up getting a workstation PC because, one, I can still replace the parts of it. I can replace the keyboard, the screen, all of it. It's a lot of time. But I could do it if I wanted to. But Dell, it's a Dell Precision, still makes former up to this. This thing came out at the beginning of 2021. From a security standpoint, I'm not as worried about that kind of stuff. I feel like there's variables. One, I think especially for any non-top-tier motherboard vendor, they're probably going to give up on updates. Although, you can probably still get chipset updates from Intel if you search Intel's website, right?

17:09Because Intel is still maintaining chipsets. I mean, I was laughing because I had an all-in-one. I actually had two separate all-in-ones from two separate tier one manufacturers of PCs. And one of them, I think I got updates for three years. And then I ended up going to Intel for additional updates on the Intel or AMD. I can't remember the chip manufacturer at this point. The other one was insane because it was using an NVIDIA GPU that was essentially a laptop GPU because all-in-ones tend to have laptop motherboards in them. And if I ever updated the driver for the GPU, it basically created a glitch that caused the mouse and keyboard to basically stop for a fraction of a second, like every five seconds.

18:14So you'd be typing and then it would stop. And then, you know, and that was that was crazy making because they advertised this all as one as being it's a gaming all in one. And it had a decent at the time it had a decent GPU, except that literally you could never update the GPU drivers. and GPU drivers are often the source of unhinged improvements in gaming performance. But it was stuck with a two-, three-, four-year-old GPU. So it was immensely frustrating. So I'm with you for a lot of stuff, especially if it's on the business side of a manufacturer like Dell or Lenovo or HP. The updates keep coming for years and years.

19:01But sometimes they don't. Well, you know, and this sort of speaks to what you just mentioned before, right, between top tier and sort of mid-tier vendors, is that because it's a Dell Precision, it's a workstation, when they come out, they're like$3 ,000 to$5 ,000 out the door. And I picked it up for under$600, a little over$600 after tax and shipping. But it is a top-flight machine, and because it's designed to go into laboratories, research centers, or people just working on CAD CAM software or CNC stuff. Roger Chang, laboratory manufacturer. It's meant to have a lot of grunt and a lot of expandability.

19:46For a notebook of its size, it has three M.2 slots. and if I wanted to and I put this in air quotes if I wanted to because I don't I could actually swap out the GPU because it's an MXM format there's a lot of asterisks and things that go on with that but it is upgradable to a point but what I do like about it is that their support is there and everything in it just works I know it sounds like such a like such a convenient noob thing to say but at some point well you get to a point where you have like you have children you have like i have to work on a car or your commute suddenly becomes 90 minutes each way and your priorities change and that's okay you know as emotionally traumatizing as the concept is you know and it's interesting because it's become less of a hobby and more of like it needs to work for work, right?

20:47Like I need it to make a living. And one of the things that I also noticed was with the release of Apple's M series of system on the chips for their MacBooks, Mac minis or whatever, for their Macintosh, there has been a real push into sort of consolidating that kind of openness that PCs have sort of underscored for decades into something more approaching a tablet, right? It's just a consumer electronic. No, no, no, no. You don't add stuff to it after the fact, right? You just buy a new one, which, you know, in my mind seems very wasteful. It's very irritating. Well, it's also, but it's, man, there's so many things I could say here.

21:35And I don't want to get on my iFixit soapbox and start screaming. But, you know, there's a there's when you I mean, when you do what what Apple did where you're integrating, you know, basically the entire PC on the chip and the motherboards there to, you know, give you some place to put the, you know, the storage or potentially they don't even, you know, be like might be a place to put storage or that, you know, other than that, it's just the IO. So, you know, I think most people, when they look at the performance bump that delivers, are okay with it, you know, because that's a, you know, I had a friend of mine who had a, basically what amounted to a$7 ,000, you know, workstation that was built for, that was built for video editing.

22:29and he was called me one day just sort of howling and in a in a unhinged kind of like losing his mind kind of way because his wife's airbook which had that first generation integrated processor the mac processor was rendering video faster his wife's like thousand dollar laptop was smoking his $7 ,000, you know, dedicated PC. Because essentially, what Apple did was put this gigantic, ridiculously wide bus between the CPU, the memory and everything else and to grossly oversimplify. And the performance advantages were just ridiculous at that point. I mean, they're ridiculous. And you know, they also designed it so the processor would take larger chunks of data at a time.

23:21Versus... But what's... I mean, one of the other things... Well, they had a massive bus between... Well, they have a massive bus. You can have a massive bus. Any case. I like big bus, and I don't know why. Because data boost, it's so... Sorry. But to kind of point out what you said earlier, with the high prices of GPUs, that's also whittled away your options, right? Before NVIDIA took everything in-house, you had a number of vendors you could buy an NVIDIA-based GPU from a GeForce video. Same thing with ATI and the rest. And you still can, but with the latest generation of Blackwell-based GPUs, the price is significantly higher.

24:06But it's not just the price. It's the availability. And that sort of just kind of eats into... I think availability right now, I can go out and I can buy most of the currently manufactured GPUs from Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA at my local micro center. They don't keep a lot in stock because who the, you know, delete expletive is the phrase. Who the delete expletive wants to pay, you know, the amount of money. Well, I have a friend that just, you know, he did a bunch of work for various entities and was basically paid in like, you know, NVIDIA 6 ,000 GPUs, not 5 ,900, sorry. For some reason, I want to round up 5 ,900, 6 ,000.

24:57Oh, 5 ,90s, yeah. Yeah, so he literally has this dedicated machine he just built, very DIY, that's got five 5900s in it, which essentially means it's a$75 ,000 machine because of the current retail price of those cards. and he also built it well not twice he built it once and then swapped in any case I'm getting two in the weeds but he wanted to do liquid cooling on all these to maximize their performance but you know yeah I mean I also don't want to pay$600 oh gosh now I want to look it up because I was looking at GPUs, and they had a ton of GPUs in stock, like one or two of each, because, let's see.

25:50If I go to the Micro Center website and I click on graphics cards and I wait a moment, and I will find out that a 3 ,000 GPU, like 3050s and 3060s, oh, yeah, here we go. A 3060 with 12 gigabytes is$480 right now. Wait, a 3060 with 12 gigabytes is how much? $480. Ow. Yeah. And that's a competitive price. And I do want to underscore, RTX 3060 is a card that came out in 2021, 2020. And I remember because I almost bought one. I bought a 3060 Ti. And that was pushing it because it was well over 300 bucks. It was like 360 bucks. like that. Yeah, it's crazy making right now, but it's not because the card is expensive.

26:41It's because the memory on the card is worth a freaking fortune. It's the memory and the GPU and a lot of these data centers have sort of bought out the future allocation of these from these fabs. And fabs hate being over capacity because once they do, They have to kill prices. That was very fortuitous for a lot of people eight years ago. But I have to pause here for a moment. I was right. They are RTX 6 ,000, RTO Pro 6 ,000 cards. Because an RTX Pro 6 ,000 right now is on sale. Instead of being$17 ,999.99, it is$15 ,999.99. because they're running 96 gigabytes of RAM on the board, on the GPU board.

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32:14that's like a car that is more expensive than the last three cars i bought two cars two of the last three cars you didn't buy them new right for no yeah yeah uh i mean two old guys talking about cars is something everyone's heard about uh but okay let's shift gears for a second i want to point out one of the best reasons for building a gpu and you may have picked up on that at this point building a pc building a pc since we got completely sucked into the cost of memory and how it's ruined everything uh you know it's fun right uh you know and i also should point out since i was just digging through uh you know micro center's website is uh because that's like now my local pc store um it's cool it's like a mile and a half from my house i have to avoid going there although i can't really afford anything there anymore you know they do bundles right where you get memory cpu and the motherboard this used to be all ddr5 with the like one ddr4 deal now there's a fair number of ddr4 bundles along with ddr5 because the ddr4 memory is significantly less than ddr5 memory but when you are looking at that it's basically like getting the motherboard or in some cases the cpu for free and certainly the motherboard for free.

33:36So, you know, uh, where that's kind of, you know, uh, I think it's, I feel like it's, uh, I feel like it's customer service at some level. Um, when you're looking at a bundle of, you know, when you're looking at the motherboard, when you look at the memory and the CPU is worth as much as the memory that you're paying for the memory, the CPU and the motherboard. but I don't know it's not dead but like everything else that requires memory it's certainly hurting console prices, next generation console prices are going to be painful I'm not getting one I can tell you that, I'm stuck at a PS5 and that'll probably be it so let me ask you this then, final verdict do you think it's just the hobby itself, DIY PCs have sort of the pool of people engaging in it has shrunk, or perhaps that hobby has sort of shrunk, or is it just going through kind of a transformation, a shift?

34:36Well, ask me when memory prices start to drop again, right? When you look at it's nuts, right? Like Yahoo Finance just did an article because it popped up when I was searching for something a couple days ago where video game hardware sales are at a 13-year low. And it's not because people aren't gaming. It's because nobody can afford to buy a system right now, right? So like a PlayStation 5 was$399 when it launched. It is$599. a playstation 5 with a drive launched at 499 and it's currently selling for 649 the playstation 5 pro which you know launched at 699 in 2024 is now 899 dollars you know what i mean like this is you know if you know if open ai you know collapses because they can't, you know, because at some point, you know, the market decides, you know, like, you know, you hear people talking about the AI bubble, you know, like the amount of money OpenAI is committed to memory purchases is kind of insane, right?

36:06Now, obviously, I'm not Sam Altman. I'm obviously not a wheeler dealer in Silicon Valley. I'm obviously not an AI startup Maven. But when you start looking at the amount of money that's been committed to this versus the amount of revenue that's coming in, or AI buildouts as a function of percentage of gross domestic projects, it is consuming a greater percentage of our GDP than the buildout on interstates, the buildout on internets, or the buildout on railroads, which are some of the biggest, most expensive things that have ever happened in the history of the American economy. so you know the$64 ,000 question is you know will a you know will open AI starts you know are they actually consuming all this memory will they ever want to sell off some of this memory will they collapse financially not be able to fulfill their contracts and suddenly SK Hynix and Samsung will have a whole bunch of memory they were they had set aside for open AI that they will no longer I don't know.

37:11At this point What I'm hearing is basically there's a lot of things in Flux especially RAM prices and so I don't think DIY PCs are dead but I think it is a diminishing hobby from where it was back in its heyday like in the late 90s through the 2010s. I think it lasted a lot longer than that. I think it didn't really get hammered. I don't know. You and I are both smart enough to look up the numbers on certain online game sites, certain services. But I think the bigger question is,

37:58I'm making these noises that probably sound horrible on the microphone that sound like I'm like swallowing an otter or just, you know, choking to death. But, right, think about it. So PC gaming is pretty popular. It gets hammered, right? Because people were like, you know, is the Bitcoin craze going to kill off PCs, right? Because, you know, and it was, yeah, it was funny watching, you know, Jensen be like, you know, oh, Bitcoin sales have not contributed to our bottom line. It's like, don't lie, man. It's unbecoming. You hurt me emotionally, Jensen. You know what I mean? Like, don't be that guy.

38:38You know, and then finally, when they shifted, you know, mining from the GPU-based stuff to the hard drive-based stuff, suddenly GPUs were available and affordable. You know, my first couple of years in St. Louis, every Tuesday morning when they sent new GPUs to the local micro center, there'd be a line of a half dozen to two, three dozen people waiting to get in there to buy whatever GPUs they had so they could resell them or because they had their own kind of mining thing going on there. And then that line vaporized and the, you know, the, the shelves went from empty to pretty fully stocked really quickly.

39:19Once, you know, the, the coin mining made that transition, you know, so that, you know, there's a lot of things that have hammered away at, at PC gaming, but. part of it is also gaming as a pastime has become, I think, incredibly expensive, not just the hardware you need to run. You either need, you know, next, you need a current gen game console, whether you're talking about an Xbox Series X or a PS5 or, you know, a PC with, you know, GPU with a 3060 Ti or up performance. I think for a lot of people, you know, I, I'm, I'm gonna, to basically say this. I've been playing Amazon Luna, which is basically a game streaming service, and I love it.

40:08It's actually not bad. I was really worried because there are a couple of games they have that are based on how quickly you can press the button. I didn't think it would do well on that. Both of these games, it's Star Wars Outlaws and the old Shadow of the Tomb Raider. It does really well there are times where I'm I totally forget I'm playing over the internet like literally like I'm streaming the game to my laptop and what I'm kind of pointing out is that before you know to get your gaming fix either went pc or console but now we're at the point where pc consoles all run the same games and now we're slowly migrating that into the cloud and gaming did provide a lot of impetus for people to get into the diy pc hobby in the first place like oh i gotta build it out so i can play yada yada game like unreal or or pick your fps of uh you know fps or pvp player versus player shooter where you you wanted the best because you not just wanted the best eye candy but you also wanted the best frame rate so you could kill the other guy in the online tournament before they got you.

41:19I got a crazy thing for you here. Uh-oh. I pulled up a look at the 2026 Steam game user statistics.

41:33So Steam peak concurrent users over time. Okay, first of all, 132 million active users in 2025, up from 120 million the previous year, which is like a 10 % bump. When you look at peak concurrent users, the earliest record I saw was like 19 million in March 2020. And that hit like 36 ,700 ,000 in 2024, 40 ,270 ,000 in 997 in 2025, January 11, 2026, 42 ,042 ,778. the total number of users is still like 132 million like monthly active users so that's not going down now is that all pc gamers no but um you know you know you know one of the things to think about, right, is you and I were shocked for years because 1080p monitors were like the vast, by far, outstripped any other, you know, 1080p monitors outstripped any other resolution for years and years past when neither one of us could tolerate having a 1080p monitor on our desktop.

42:59um you know and you know i will say that there's a ton of gamers out there that are are not upgrading uh either because they don't feel they need to or because the costs of gpus or they need to upgrade a you know do a full system upgrade you know there was there was a pretty short time between the the the cost of gpus dropping and the cost of memory skyrocketing and so i you know i I don't think it's over. I think it gets hammered. But I mean, I can also remember people being like, yeah, PC gaming is over because nobody's ever going to be able to buy a GPU again unless they're rich. So only rich people have PC games.

43:39And there's not that many PC gamers that are rich. So, you know what I mean? I feel like we have this conversation every couple, three years for a different reason. But what I'm suggesting is the technologies here where a lot of those platforms, those stores are becoming the new platform, right? If you're talking about Steam, Valve, you have Steam Deck, you have Steam Machines, you have a way to play them. I still think those are a tiny fraction of Steam users. But I definitely do see that as sort of kind of hardware to our future, where as the stores become very important, I think the actual hardware can risk being a little more generic.

44:21Sure. Because what you're, you know, and ideally, you know, once you commoditize these things so that, you know, you're essentially just having a tablet-sized device that sits under the TV, that'll be, I don't know how long that's going to last, but it's. Steam set a new concurrent record on the 11th, like Sunday, yesterday, October 11th, the day before we recorded this, with 43.5 million concurrent online users. As I was probably one of them then. I mean, like, I have, and I'm a big Steam user, and I've played Steam games for the past 12 years, you know, consistently. And it's a great service.

45:04I think game streaming is probably just the next evolution of that. And, you know, but I digress. My verdict is that I think DIY PC building will just basically shrink back to what it was back in the 80s. Right before. As the one of us who was here in the 80s, I feel like it was very small. I mean, I'm trying to figure out when was the first time I saw like motherboards and CPUs for sale without buying a completely pre-built system. 1990s was the first time. Like, 91, I think, was the first time I actually saw a motherboard and processor that you could buy in a store and not mail order. But do you have any parting words for our listeners before?

45:58So, I mean, I guess real quick, yay or nay? DIY PCs are here to stay or DIY PCs are slowly going off and fading into the sunset? You know, I think they're going to be around for a long time. I think they've already, I think it's, I think DIY building has always been a small percentage of the industry. You know, before there was an industry, it was DIY PCs because you had to solder them together, you know, on your desktop. They were kits. They were kits. And then there was this period where, you know, Apple and IBM kind of created the personal computer and Capro and Osborne and, and Compaq and a bunch of other companies.

46:39And then, you know, as the, the, the motherboard bus became, stopped being something that was a proprietary IBM thing. You had a ton of competition to raise. I don't think it's going away because I mean, think about it. There are millions and millions and millions of people, maybe not, you know, 130 million steam users is nothing compared to the population of, of the world right because most of the world interfaces with technology or or gaming and and the internet through their phone right um but you know i i think it's going to keep going for a while i i definitely do see it sort of sunsetting and i mainly chalk that up to generational habits like what you just said where people who were raised or at least interacted with the internet with the larger online population through a smartphone, through a tablet.

47:37I don't think they'll have that same level of fondness for DIY PCs. There might be some people might pick it up, just like crocheting and knitting. But the great age of textiles where people were buying a singer so they could sew at home isn't the same today as it was even 20 years ago. Granted, cosplaying has helped change that. Well, I mean – It's still a niche market. That's what I'm saying. It's still a niche market. Yeah. I mean, used pianos are cheap, right? But at some point around 1900 in the United States, 50 % of the homes in the United States had a piano. That's the statistics I read once.

48:15And the reason you can buy used pianos so cheap is because the maintenance to bring a used piano up to kind of like where it was when it was built originally is incredibly expensive, right? So if you don't have a particularly spectacular piano, it is financially – it is like making a 1974 Dart a Concours -grade restoration. You're doing it out of love because it's basically lighting the money on fire. Oh, no. That's definitely – I mean the number one reason why – I have a piano at home. Sure. The only reason why I know that a lot of people ditch them is because they're super expensive. Forget the maintenance.

48:59Just to move it. If you move from one place to move from one city to another, they rake your – I mean, pianos are heavy. It's made out of solid wood. You got metal cables in it. It's not a light piece of thing. Well, it's the usually cast iron frame that holds the strings. I had a complete set of piano strings in my garage we salvaged from a piano that I used for weird little projects. Those weighed about five pounds. the frame that held all of those in place weighed about 130 pounds. It looks like a heart. Yeah, I know. Yeah. It's crazy. But it's – Yeah. So let's end this here. Okay. Patrick believes still going to be a viable hobby for decades to come.

49:42Roger believes it's sunsetting because only grandpas like us are super interested in this hobby. Well – And maybe, maybe the youngins will pick it up at some point, but not nearly in the same amount that it was, I would say, even 15 years ago. But that's our opinion. Let us know. If you have any thoughts, if you think we're full of it, or you agree with me, write back to feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com and let us know what you're thinking. You have special insights into this story. I want to say thank Patrick for being with me today. That's it for this episode of DTNS Weekend Edition. learn more about the entire family of DTNS podcasts and shows at dailytechnewshow.com and of course at YouTube at youtube.com slash dailytechnewshow and if you really enjoy the show please please please consider supporting us patreon.com slash DTNS until next time you've been listening to DTNS

50:48The DT &S family of podcasts. Helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this broker.

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