IMHO it’s already dead.

Nobody’s made RAM actually targeting the specs in the standards for years; the sticks ship with built-in overclocking settings for one or the other proprietary system, and the boards expect the sticks to already be on their Qualified Vendor List to actually work right. The interface between the RAM and the motherboard is ceasing to be a legitimate extension point.

There’s two people who make CPUs, not to any spec but to work with their own other chips that need to already be on the board, which are then driven by firmware software basically supplied by the CPU makers. When the CPU makers update their base firmware bundles, the board makers skin and ship it. In the distant past, one could slot competing CPUs from different vendors into the same board, and they would execute BIOS software fundamentally under the control of the board makers. The interface between the CPU and the board has long since ceased to be a legitimate extension point.

The real remaining extension point is PCIe, and since its dominant use is to attach exactly one ever-widening GPU from one of two (or perhaps now three! How spoiled for choice we are!) manufacturers, each year fewer slots are provided. The target customer only needs one, and it needs as much physical clearance as humanly possible. A case will have 7 or 8 slots on the back and a board will provide two slots to plug anything in, one to actually use and one to be able to claim that there’s more than one slot. And each year there’s less stuff to put in there (who buys sound cards?) and more stuff (fast networking, wifi, fancy USB) is integrated into the board.

And all these components have started to acquire fancy molded plastic and metal casings, to the point where it’s not clear why they need a separate enclosure around them.

So the net result is you obtain one fancy shrouded box from Lenovo, or you purchase two fancy shrouded boxes and plug them together, and you call the result a “PC”. And then on the software side it’s a terminal for a Microsoft account, which you use to run a client for fetching from Steam, which you use to load client software for talking to live services. And now the people orchestrating all this are wondering why they bother actually mailing you the boxes.

This is very deeply not personal computing.

Yes, everything will be a subscription service effectively killing foss & PCs.

Soon we will be illegally trading old PC hardware amongst ourselves until it eventually fails (which is only a few decades for the newer chips), hunted & persecuted by the matacorps.