Pricier devices, weirder ways of working and an exploitative data economy - all of these await us.
Microsoft is betting on efficiency by moving processing power from the cloud to the device in your backpack.
John Press, Microsoft Surface business unit head at Core, frames the modern laptop enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) as a three-in-one value proposition. "It's an education tool. It's a business tool. And it's quite frankly an entertainment tool all wrapped into one," he says.
But although Press paints a picture of seamless productivity driven by a device's neural processing unit (NPU), the reality of 2026 is biting back. For the average South African consumer and chief information officer (CIO), this dependency is arriving at the worst possible time, as the physical hardware required to run these AI tools is entering a crisis of scarcity.
A global shortage of memory chips, driven by manufacturers pivoting to build high-margin AI server chips, has sent prices skyrocketing. In late 2025, consumer solid state drive (SSD) prices rose 50% and RAM prices effectively doubled.
"You actually have guys who built gaming PCs this year stripping out and selling their GPUs and DDR5 memory for higher prices than they paid for it months ago," said a store clerk at Computer Mania, referring to the graphics processing units...
