> What are you doing here? The question is “how long personal computers has been a mass phenomenon”, not “how much people from the 19th century would have bought one if it existed by then”…
Oh that's where the miscommunication is.
I'm treating "so cheap it was available for the masses" as the ability to purchase. Is there a reason I shouldn't? And yes they did exist. What didn't exist was an internet to plug them into.
They became mass affordable in that period, and tens of millions of people did buy them even without online access.
The number of actual purchasers is significantly less important than the number of possible purchasers, because we're taking about price regressions on modern day computers, not actual computer use 50 years ago.
> And there's a limit in manufacturing capacities. Nobody will invest to build a additional $50B fab to satisfy a demand that pay less than the (hyperscaler-driven, in my scenario) market price.
Why not? Most of the existing fabs were built with the expectation of, let's say 50% markup over costs. And they got similar investment.
The price is now 4x higher or whatever, for 500% markup. Even if a new entrant can't get any of that hyperscaler money at all, just being able to sell RAM at 1.5x the old price to consumers would give them >100% markup. That should be able to get billions of dollars of investment shouldn't it?
Oh that's where the miscommunication is.
I'm treating "so cheap it was available for the masses" as the ability to purchase. Is there a reason I shouldn't? And yes they did exist. What didn't exist was an internet to plug them into.
They became mass affordable in that period, and tens of millions of people did buy them even without online access.
The number of actual purchasers is significantly less important than the number of possible purchasers, because we're taking about price regressions on modern day computers, not actual computer use 50 years ago.
> And there's a limit in manufacturing capacities. Nobody will invest to build a additional $50B fab to satisfy a demand that pay less than the (hyperscaler-driven, in my scenario) market price.
Why not? Most of the existing fabs were built with the expectation of, let's say 50% markup over costs. And they got similar investment.
The price is now 4x higher or whatever, for 500% markup. Even if a new entrant can't get any of that hyperscaler money at all, just being able to sell RAM at 1.5x the old price to consumers would give them >100% markup. That should be able to get billions of dollars of investment shouldn't it?