This whole post seems founded on the shaky assumption that all PC gamers would be on a roughly 3 year rebuild cycle anyway…

Not in my experience.

Even my most PC enthusiast friends would only ever have been upgrading every ~5 years anyway. That makes the ‘40% in 3 years’ an unexpectedly high number of upgraders.

My main PC rig is closer to ten years now, and no upgrade in sight. Cost of living with kids has made expensive hobbies untenable.

When it comes to making a stand, better late than never.

Not even the GDPR?

Truth. I don’t support US tech either but their LLMs are state of the art and VERY useful… No point lying about it. I’m supporting Mistral.ai instead now. Their model is good enough for my use cases, and I’m hoping their recent reported uptick in users like myself helps fund the research and hardware to make them even more competitive.

I’m playing my part… Undoing a large part of a SaaS platform I’ve been building, to detangle it from AWS and reimplement for Scaleway/UpCloud. This is a significant practical setback for me, but I can no longer live with myself giving dollars to both Bezos AND a fascist regime every month. Not to mention the direct risk of the US fucking with my business down the track for any old batshit reason. Account closed.