<i>That’s fine, nobody said you’re wrong, but you are increasingly a minority, and the economics of scale are not working in your favour.</i><p>This is not backed up by any facts. First of all, the graph shows desktop PC shipments. Laptop shipments haven&#x27;t drastically changed:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;272595&#x2F;global-shipments-forecast-for-tablets-laptops-and-desktop-pcs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.statista.com&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;272595&#x2F;global-shipments-f...</a><p>Secondly, the other logical explanation is that most machines of the last five years are still fast enough for general purpose operating systems. So, people are simply upgrading far less often.<p><i>The other outcome is the developer PC continues to exist, in an increasingly rarified (and expensive) form as workstations migrate to the economies of scale that drive server chip sets.</i><p>Or the same cheap processors that run embedded devices simply become fast enough to handle normal desktop workloads. So, why would they be more expensive? The Raspberry Pi will probably be good enough as a modest development workstation in a couple of iterations at 30 Euro. Heck, some people do their work on Chromebooks running Crouton.<p>I don&#x27;t think hardware is the problem. Every kid will be able to afford some device to start tinkering. More worrisome is the move away from general purpose operating systems to walled gardens, plus reliance on proprietary web applications. For this reason, we need a flourishing Linux&#x2F;BSD&#x2F;FLOSS ecosystem.