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. 😂
In life it’s generally safe assumption that the vast majority of things we worry about never happen or if they do it won’t be as bad as we thought.
I do see where you’re coming from and appreciate your optimism. I have ADHD and I’m prone to catastrophism haha.
But I feel like there’s actually substance and credibility to how much the very near future is gonna suck. :( I’m trying to stay optimistic though!
The future doesn’t look too bright at the moment, but what’s the alternative? You’ve just got to play the hand you’ve been dealt. In Buddhism, they call it “the second arrow” when you’re in a bad situation but make it worse by overthinking it. Looking back on my life, I can think of countless times I worried about something that never even happened. I’d essentially tortured myself mentally for no reason - and that seems counterproductive.
I try to live in a way where I don’t contribute to making things worse, and wherever I can, I try to nudge things in the right direction. Beyond that, I avoid worrying any more than I already do, because intellectually, I know it’s probably wasted effort and a form of self-harm.
The “playing the cards you have been dealt” metaphor for life is my favourite, it helps me understand what I can control and shifts focus from blaming circumstances to what you can do to improve the situation
If it makes you feel any better, the times you were hopeful about the future were as much a matter of perspective as it is now. Pick any time you think things were going well and I can tell you how many numerous awful things happened at the same time.
I’d recommend placing a lot less weight on national politics in general. Your state government and local governments affect your life far more day to day. Your immediate family and friends also do in a different way.
Basically if you think on a large enough scale you can always find bad and good, there really is no “trend”. Youll find meaningful trends on a much more micro level in my opinion.
iran and germany say lololol
Good takeaway my dude.
Tell that to the women in texas.
So, because you can point to one example where the worst-case scenario happened, we should live our lives constantly fearing the worst? Is that really what you’re arguing for here?
No, I’m not suggesting anyone live in fear.
I work in tech, and have interviewed with companies that have texas offices. I won’t accept an offer if they expect I’ll relocate there.
If someone were to ask me if they should buy a car, or a house, or change careers, or go back to school, or make an life decision of any consequence, I’d say it’s worth considering project 2025 and the news since the election.
Some form of tariffs will probably happen. It’s worth considering how you might mitigate or avoid the cost if it’s substantial for you. This isn’t rocket science.
The people that have been put in charge have literally said that things are going to get worse and more expensive. Why not believe them?
My comment clearly states that it’s about life in general. Not everything is about the U.S.
Hopefully the rest of the world will benefit from the lack of US buying
The tariffs will have to be paid by someone, and distributors will not take a hit on account of the idiot pumpkin, so it will be shifted to the end user.
Right now is a pretty good time to upgrade. Both Intel and AMD have shown their hands in the CPU market and I can personally attest to the performance of AMD’s X3D CPUs. Older models with the AM4 socket will become cheaper, and AM4 motherboards are plentiful.
Regardless of whether or not the tariff increases happen, Black Friday sales are going on right now, and depending on what stores are near you (namely Micro Center), you could find some good deals. Just make sure you check price history on anything you’re looking at (if you’re able) to ensure it’s actually a deal.
This is the biggest one. I use Keepa for things, and I’ve heard other people suggest camelcamelcamel. Always check the pricing history first, don’t get sucked into the “Save money!” trap. You’re not saving anything if you wouldn’t have bought the item in the first place.
Where would your new purchases come from? If its Mexico or Canada (or probably China), expect prices to rise very soon and get purchases in before 1/20. If the items come from other countries, you probably can wait a bit but if you know you will need something you may want to buy it now, just in case.
Used stuff always exists and good investments would probably beat the return on buying better stuff now
used stuff always exists
True, but if you are expecting scarcity it’s better to buy new now.
I don’t know where you’re from, but here the used car market still hasn’t recovered after the covid chip shortage made new cars impossible to buy. Used cars still cost nearly as much as new ones.
It’s worth getting familiar with how tarrifs impact the economy in general. This is a good overview in my opinion.
I appreciate the recommend! Added to my short-list. :)
In addition to electronics going up, there’s also the looming End of Life for a lot of older computers because of Windows 10 going end of life/support, and windows 11 having some strict security hardware requirements.
This is going to impact businesses. They are going to gobble up the market. The threat of tariffs has already started some panic buying.
We’re going to see computer prices go up in 2025-2026.
Heh maybe this will push Microsoft to extend support. No one can afford new computers.
I bet they start a trail run of windows 12 subscriptions or something for low end/discount models, rebrand windows s mode. Or they’ll find another way to squeeze more ads into the desktop.
Better switch to Linux sooner than later.
Oh believe me I’m already there. I just made the jump to start gaming on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed after using it primarily for art and dev, and 99% of what I care about runs beautifully. While the world around us seems in constant chaos…
… we’re living in a great age of open source for those who seek it. :)
Unless you’re in the market for old shit
Just bought “old shit” 7th gen and 8th gen intel PC’s, complete, for 350, with gtx1080 cards. These are still pretty good. My own pc is a 7th gen intel with a 1060 and it still does everything I want with ease. It never feels slow, except for, of course, the latest games. Which I can now run on the PC’s with the 1080. I wanted to bridge a gap and found these are actually very capable for anything I throw at it.
That old shit is better than my current old shit so I’m licking my shit chops ready to upgrade my shit
And used compuers price go down, maybe.
This is what I was hoping for, exactly! Some kinda nice used hardware trade.
…Except with how things usually work I’m worried that’ll just skyrocket the price/demand of used stuff…
When I’m on the lookout I target 5 year old stuff, because companies usually upgrade after 5 years throwing away totally fine things IMO. The only new thing I bought in ages is a big SSD and a low power GPU.
One benefit of buying stuff companies throw out is that the early breakdowns has been weeded out and the stuff is kind of sure to work.
Oh yeah there’s going to be a lot of used computers on the market. If you’re Linux-curious you’ll be able to find some good stuff soon.
I have too many already 😅
I thrift for a fair number of things so, I’m not that affected. 86% of the things in my apartment are through thrifting. The only things I know I’m going to probably wrestle with at times is groceries and newer things I would actually need like some appliance or something breaks down. It depends.
People were already complaining about thrifting being gentrified, what’s going to happen when everyone has to do it?
I determined that it would be an issue and upgraded. I’ve needed to anyway
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.
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.
Yeah, but the new market’s process could be warped so much from tariffs that it affects the used market.
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?
Tis computes
I say upgrade. The tariffs he’s most likely to back off on are food and oil. High tech from Asia is last on the list.
If you were thinking about upgrading anyway, I say do it right now. I personally just bought a new PC and projector/home theater because the ones I had were already old and on the way out. I also plan on buying a new washer/dryer set and brakes for my car, all before 1/20/25, but again, all those things needed replacing anyway.
Shout out to Rockauto for your brakes. Also avoid Samsung for the washer and dryer for the love of god.
I am not in the US, and I have no idea of how Trumps tariffs will work, but in general I would suggest that you look at what would get you the best bang for the buck now so you can power through the next four years.
Here is a bit of an unusual suggestion, if your computer fails and you are low on funds, look into getting a Raspberry pi 4, then you have a computer you can connect to a monitor, keyboard and mouse, so you can browse the internet and do some work at least.
Yeah that’s what I’m thinking, although tech is a “depreciating asset”, the work I can do with it is (potentially) valuable. I have a decent fleet of computers at the moment, old laptops with Linux, an old server, and my and my wife’s main rigs.
Thing is I’m a 3D artist, so I wonder if even the current setup I’m blessed with could see me behind the curve in a few years time :(.
I skimmed the thread to try and see if you mentioned any specs of your current machine, but didn’t find any.
If you are looking to build a new machine before the tariffs hit, there are two ways of doing it.
Go bleeding edge now or get a decent machine that you can upgrade further later.
I tend to go for the latter, as an IT guy I value stability of older components over the bleeding edge any day.
I built my computer back in August 2021, it has a Ryzen 5600x CPU Kingston DDR4 ram, a Samsung 980 Pro NVMe SSD for booting and a B550 motherboard to tie it all together.
It is a solid machine and I picked components that had been out for a year or so to try and get passed the most bugs snd lower the cost.
This is not the build I would recommend you, you should look into the current AM5 CPUs, Intel has had some reliabillity issues with the latest gen chips, so I’d go AMD at this point. The AM5 plattform supports the new DDR5 memory standard which will enable you to keep upgrading for longer.
Hey friend! Yeah I forgot that. I added it to the original post but here it is:
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 don’t wanna sound desperate or anything because I know I’m blessed here. I only upgrade like once every 5+ years.
Prospectively I’m not looking at a brand new build, just a CPU/RAM/Mobo to maybe move to DDR5.
The current setup (minus the GPU) would be moved over to my server which is still running like…an i5-4460 on 16GB of DDR3. Not terrible but it’s had to thrash on occasion. 😬 Haha.
Thanks for the heads up about Intel stability issues! I’ll have to keep an eye out about AM5s.
I probably can’t justify it before everything hits the fan, but y’know, it’s good to keep my eyes out. :)
In videocards, nV 3060 likely doubled the output nV 1060 had, and CPUs albeit slower rise in numbers too. New hardware can probably last you a good ten years or more if nothing like an entirely new demanding software happens, like if we’d start to train our AIs locally en masse. Years before the war I bought myself all new components and they are still good at digital art and video rendering, even though I know a bit more modern setup can do it 2-4x quicker. It’s just obligatory smoking breaks that I don’t really mind.
