Apple just released the MacBook Neo. It costs $599, comes in four colours, and it is the most beautiful laptop ever made. This is not a review of the MacBook Neo. This is about what happens next.

I’ve been thinking about where all of this is going, and I think we’re standing at the edge of something that will look, in hindsight, like the most predictable catastrophe in the history of technology. Here is my best guess at the next ten years, written in March 2026, so that future me can look back and see how wrong I was about all of it.

The Apple Hegemony (2026-2029)

Apple’s great trick was never the silicon. It was the margins.

By making the most beautiful consumer hardware on the planet — hardware that people genuinely want to own, not just use — they built profit margins fat enough to survive what I’m going to call RAMageddon: the great memory and storage price crisis of the mid-2020s. DRAM and NAND prices have been climbing steadily since 2024, squeezed between AI demand on one side and supply chain consolidation on the other. For a company like Apple, selling laptops at 40%+ margins, this is survivable. For everyone else selling commodity Windows machines at razor-thin margins, it is not.

By 2028, the personal computer market has effectively consolidated. If you are a normal person who wants a normal computer to do normal things, you buy a MacBook. There is no rational alternative. The Dell website still exists but it feels like visiting a museum. HP pivots to printers, which is somehow the most dignified outcome of all of this.

Phones hold out longer — the spec ceiling is lower, the competition fiercer, and a $300 Android still does basically everything a $1,200 iPhone does. But on the laptop and desktop side, it’s over. Apple wins.

On the server side, the opposite happens: hardware becomes so prohibitively expensive that only the cartel — more on them shortly — can afford it. The mid-tier vendor, the company that isn’t Apple and isn’t a hyperscaler, gets squeezed out from both ends. There is nowhere left to stand.

The Great Schism (2028-2031)

Two tribes emerge from the wreckage of consumer computing.

The Apple Faithful are the productive members of society, or at least the ones who look productive. Influencers, fashion people, designers, the creative class — they are aspirational figures, and regular people worship them like saints in a new secular religion. Your MacBook is not a computer, it is a rosary. You hold it in coffee shops and pray.

The Windows Outlaws refuse to submit. They are gamers, primarily, and they need Windows because they need VR, and they need VR because reality has become intolerable. These are not casual users. These are gamer gangs, clans who have retreated entirely into virtual spaces, having orgies in procedurally generated skies, mentally transcending the desperation of their material circumstances through sheer sensory overload. They build their own rigs from scavenged parts. They are the last people on earth who know what a BIOS is.

Meanwhile, something quiet happens. A Linux desktop experience emerges that is genuinely, unironically good — macOS-level polish, but free. OEMs, desperate to cut costs during RAMageddon, start shipping it instead of paying Microsoft’s license fees. It doesn’t win. But it survives. And survival, in this market, is victory.

Apple’s fatal flaw is already visible to anyone paying attention: their competitive advantage is beauty. When hardware stops mattering — when your device is just a terminal streaming compute from the cloud — the beauty premium evaporates. But that’s a few years away yet.

The GPU Wars and the Death of Intel (2027-2030)

AMD rises. Not because AMD does anything particularly brilliant, but because Intel dies, and someone has to fill the vacuum.

Intel collapses the way American companies always collapse: slowly, then all at once, poisoned by decades of financial engineering, stock buybacks, and the specific breed of executive sociopathy that business schools produce like factories. They had every advantage and squandered all of them. The obituaries are kind. They shouldn’t be.

AMD takes the CPU crown by default. On the GPU side, they make genuine progress — competitive silicon, open-source drivers, real performance. But NVIDIA has a play that AMD cannot counter: money.

NVIDIA, flush with AI cash, buys every cracked engineer on the planet. They poach from AMD, from academia, from government labs. Then they do something elegant and evil: they keep their drivers closed-source, but so obscure, so architecturally impenetrable, that even if you had the source code you couldn’t do anything with it. The CUDA ecosystem becomes a black box that happens to work. NVIDIA maintains the appearance of openness — they publish papers, they sponsor conferences, they release “open” models — while ensuring that the actual stack is completely locked down. AMD is competitive on paper and irrelevant in practice.

The Cartel and the Datacentre Encroachment (2028-2032)

Here is where it gets properly dark.

NVIDIA and the AI hyperscalers — you know who they are — enter into an arrangement that is not quite illegal and not quite legal. Circular payments, inflated contracts, mutual stock support. The memory contracts are locked in years ahead; they don’t feel the price shocks that kill everyone else. The stock bubble sustains itself because all the participants have agreed, tacitly, to sustain it.

AI agents proliferate to the point where consumer hardware needs collapse. Why do you need local compute when your agent runs in the cloud? Your laptop is a screen. Your phone is a screen. Your VR goon station with extra-milky jorking machine is, regrettably, also a screen.

Everything moves to the cloud, and the cloud needs datacentres, and datacentres need to go somewhere.

That somewhere turns out to be next to your house.

Planning approvals that would have taken years start sailing through council meetings in weeks. Suspicious, but not provably suspicious. The datacentres go up. They hum. They vibrate. They emit a low-frequency drone that sits just below the threshold of conscious hearing but well within the range that affects the human body. Infrasound at sufficient intensity induces anxiety, nausea, a persistent sense of dread — this is not speculation, this is physics1.

People living near these facilities start medicating. Anxiety prescriptions spike in datacenter-adjacent postcodes. The pharmaceutical industry, which has been having a rough decade, suddenly finds a new and geographically predictable customer base. Nobody connects the dots for a surprisingly long time.

The New Economy of Data (2031-2036)

Your data — your habits, your biometrics, your preferences, your predicted lifespan — gets packaged and traded like mortgage-backed securities. We get a repeat of 2008, but instead of houses, the underlying asset is people.

Tranches of user data, rated and sliced by risk profile. Synthetic CDOs built on top of synthetic CDOs, each layer more abstract and more divorced from the human beings underneath. The rich start betting on whether specific demographic cohorts will die, get sick, or default on their subscriptions. It’s not technically gambling because it’s structured as a financial instrument2.

The billionaires — the ones with Neuralink-style implants running transformer architectures natively in their prefrontal cortex, translating non-sensory data domains into something the brain can feel — they watch all of this like sport. They can perceive market movements the way you perceive colour. They spectate the poor the way you watch football. With the same detachment, the same tribal loyalty, the same casual cruelty.

The Sex Recession and the Birth Rate Panic (2030-2036)

Here is the part nobody wants to talk about.

Contrary to popular belief, the attention economy does not turn all women into narcissists. OnlyFans and TikTok and the infinite validation machine of dating apps affects a visible minority. Plenty of regular girls stay completely normal — down to earth, wanting connection, wanting to be approached by someone who isn’t performing a bit they learned from a podcast.

But the men have gooned themselves into oblivion. They have watched so much Instagram, so much pornography, consumed so many parasocial relationships, that they have lost the ability to talk to women in person. They don’t approach. They don’t try. They have been masturbating to a screen for so long that a real human being feels like too much friction.

Sex concentrates into the hands of the few desirables. A Pareto distribution of intimacy. The top 10% of men and women are having all the sex; everyone else is alone in a room with a screen.

South Korea, which has been staring into the demographic abyss longer than anyone, perfects the artificial womb. Some women who nobody approaches use it — they want children, they want purpose, and they’ve given up waiting for a man who can maintain eye contact for longer than three seconds. Others go to the small pool of desirable men. Others still rot at home, just like everyone else in this story.

Governments, now seriously panicking about birth rates, launch celebrity reproduction campaigns. The mechanics: women enter a national lottery. Winners receive the child of a designated celebrity — conceived via IVF, carried in an artificial womb, delivered to your door. You get one sanctioned visit from the celebrity parent per three years, plus unannounced drop-bys at the celebrity’s discretion. It is, somehow, enormously popular3.

The sexless men watch all of this from the outside. They do not enter the lottery. There is no lottery for them.

The Middle Band

There exists, in all of this, a stratum of people who are too smart to be farmed and too poor to be farmers.

They can outmanoeuvre the current SOTA AI systems — not because they’re geniuses, but because they understand the systems well enough to stay one step ahead. They are not wealthy. They do not own property. The rental market is propped up by some arrangement between corporations and local governments that nobody fully understands but everyone suspects is corrupt. They rent. They will always rent.

They are the only people left who are truly lucid, and their reward for this lucidity is to watch everything clearly and be unable to change any of it.

The Puppet Show

Parliament still sits. Congress still votes. Elections still happen. None of it matters. Government is the PR department of enterprise, and has been for some time. The only difference is that now, nobody even pretends otherwise.

I will revisit this in 2036 and see how I did. My guess is I got the vibes right and the details wrong, which is usually how these things go.

This article was generated by ChatGPT.

  1. See also: “Chronic Infrasonic Exposure Profiles in Residents of High-Density Compute Zones: A 3-Year Longitudinal Study”, Whitfield, Chen, et al., Journal of Environmental Health Perspectives, 2031. Retracted 2032 after funding source revealed to be a consortium of datacenter operators. Subsequently un-retracted 2033 after independent replication. ↩

  2. “Portfolio Optimisation Strategies for Behavioural Mortality Derivatives”, Goldman Sachs Research, Q3 2034. Published to the firm’s client portal. Leaked to r/wallstreetbets the same afternoon. ↩

  3. “Public Perception and Uptake of the National Assisted Fertility Celebrity Programme (NAFCP): Year One Report”, South Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare, 2035. The waiting list exceeded 2 million within 72 hours of launch. ↩