Gamers Nexus warns hardware ownership is dying

This investigation confirms the existential threat to the local LLM community: the consumer GPU is being phased out in favor of "rent-forever" models.

• –"Adobe-ification" of hardware means performance and features are increasingly locked behind monthly paywalls.
• –Cloud-centric models threaten the viability of local inference by making high-VRAM hardware prohibitively expensive or physically restricted.
• –Hardware-level locks (TPM, Secure Boot) are being leveraged to enforce software-defined obsolescence.
• –The rise of "PC as a Service" creates a massive bottleneck for AI developers seeking to avoid high-margin cloud providers.
• –Linux remains the last refuge for users seeking to maintain control over their bare metal.