By https://www.windowscentral.com/author/cale-hunt
Publication Date: 2026-11-04 16:00:00
Microsoft’s big news this week is about how Windows 11 is now considerably more responsive on 8GB of RAM. A couple of weeks ago, it was the Xbox Series X|S and AMD-powered gaming handhelds getting AMD’s FSR 4.1 upscaling to help boost performance.
What do these stories have in common? To me, they’re evidence that the standard tech market model is breaking down in the face of unprecedented hardware shortages.
Laptops and desktop PCs keep rising in price, even as they’re stripped of memory and storage. Xbox consoles have never been pricier. The latest gaming handhelds, including the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+, are ballooning in price, to the point that they cost as much as a high-end gaming laptop from just a few years ago.
Consumer hardware that used to brute-force its way to acceptable performance in Windows, games, and beyond is no longer on the table for a lot of…
