Basically title. I’m a digital artist in the USA and not rich by any stretch. In fact, somewhat in debt. (Aren’t we all.)
I also try really hard to not be a mindless consumer. I use old equipment as long as I can, repair, refurbish, etc…
All this talk of upcoming tariffs has me worried that, rather than being able to get a day-job at newly opened US manufacturing for electronics or something, I’ll instead be paying +60% more on like everything.
I know tech is a depreciating asset, but should I try to upgrade now to hold out for the next ~5 years or so?
I was considering hunting down a motherboard/cpu/RAM combo for instance.
Are worries about tariffs overblown? Trying to figure out how to prepare as best I can with my meager resources before everything just…keeps getting worse.
I am getting paid for my digital art, it’s not living money though. My spouse has a more stable income that enables me to keep trying.
Thanks in advance. <3
EDIT: Thanks a ton for all the helpful replies! I’m glad I’m not being overly paranoid.
Some of you have asked for system specs so here they are for the curious:
System Specs:
- OS: OpenSUSE Tumbleweed
- Mobo: Z590 Aorus Elite AX
- CPU: i7-10700k @ 5.1 Ghz
- GPU: Nvidia RTX 3090
- Mem: 32GB DDR4 (forget the speed…3000?)
I want to be clear: I don’t mean to sound too panicked and I’m more than happy to be content with what I have and see my blessings for what they are.
However, as I’m trying to break into being a 3D Blender artist and gamedev professionally, I’m trying to strategize whether standards will significantly increase and leave me behind in the next 5 years or so. (Game industry, not trying to do Hollywood VFX models on my home rig or anything lol)
I don’t game so much these days unfortunately. And if I do, like 5% of my library is particularly demanding. 😂
If you buy used stuff already, you won’t run into tarriffed goods for a while after they are implemented. Not sure what thats worth though.
Yeah, but the new market’s process could be warped so much from tariffs that it affects the used market.
Tis computes
Thats true but this is also happening at the same time Microsoft is bricking a ton of older hardware for their windows 11 push.
I think thats going to have a larger effect on the used market, and will push prices down.
Speaking of bricking hardware. I’m very upset that they’re just dumping Windows Mixed Reality because it isn’t making them 10,000% returns or something.
Lots of wonderful HMDs will just be paperweights without a ton of work.
“Can you release the code to us to keep em running then?”
M$: “Lol no.”
If anything, maybe we’ll see a lot of good hardware going for cheap, ripe for the taking by anybody who knows how to use a boot USB and doesn’t care about TPM. :)
Yeah I imagine most those computers will just become “linux” computers by default.
Its interesting you mention the hardware side of VR, I hadn’t considered it since my biggest gripe is that each headset plus pcvr is siloed off for a specific device. There might be enough games to sustain VR if there was a single marketplace for it, and all headsets were designed around that.
I think right now each company still thinks they can be that single marketplace, so theres too many chefs in the kitchen.
Is microsoft actually bricking their WMD headsets or just not supporting them anymore? Could you still treat it as a retro gaming console?
There’s an effort called Monado that’s making strides, but we hope there’s a sustained interest and a breakthrough of some sort. The controllers are no-go at the moment.
So they’re not literally “bricking them”, but effectively doing so. They require “Windows Mixed Reality” to run, all the drivers are proprietary, and M$ is “deprecating WMR”, at which point it will no longer be offered, and will be taken down from the Microsoft Store.
So basically you’d require an un-updated Windows 10 machine that previously had it installed, or else the device is a paperweight.
They can’t even pretend to have any kind of “environmental responsibility” when they’re actively just creating tons of e-waste as a matter of policy.
Used hardware is crazy cheap. You can get a tower with 16gb memory, 8th or 9th gen processors, ssd storage for like 200$. Workstations are also super cheap if doing 3D modeling.
I know it’s not completely rational but the one thing I don’t trust is used drives.
Honestly that’s pretty fair. Depending on the nature of the drive. You don’t know if it was sitting there spinning up and down in some mining rig (that one crypto used HDDs to store hashes) sitting on somebody’s washing machine or something LOL.
I never really trust used HDD’s with anything I care a lot about. I’m either backing it up on the cloud or storing it on an SSD. Used HDDs are still decently useful if you get them cheap and crystal disk reports they are good.
SSD’s fail much more predictable so even if its got a decent amount of run time and a couple dead sectors I have an OK amount of. Havent worked computers for a while, but if I remember, SSDs kind of burn out like a wick, bit by bit more clusters/sectors fail until the drive slowly becomes unusable.
SSDs have gotten so cheap new I’d probably just buy a new one if the old one isn’t already in tip top condition
Haha really? That’s interesting, I always heard it was the opposite. HDDs might slowly develop problems and if you’re lucky you’ll have time to move everything over before it kicks the bucket.
But SSDs will one day just fail.
Maybe the actual cause of the failure has to do with it?
HDDs are a lot more complicated with a ton of components and moving parts. You can measure and predict the wear on the disks, but not really anything else. Parts like the main motor, read head, secondary motor can fail suddenly. Theres also other stuff that wears down like springs, bearings, ribbon cables, lubricant, etc. The logic board on HDDs are also super complicated, since it has to do a lot. It has to control the brushless DC motor, which requires a complicated driver, control the read head motor, and a ton of other stuff. look online and compare the logic board of an HDD to an NVME and it’s a miracle HDDs stayed relevant for so long.
It comes down to simplicity, SSDs just have so many fewer components that can break.