Being mostly a Nintendo gamer, it’s been an odd time, watching the Switch’s success get put into overdrive-on-Pixie-Sticks-and-amphetamines through the pandemic. It’s been a sort of heat-check for Kyoto – “Hey, think we can get away with making Animal Crossing the marquee release for a year?”

Maybe not in years past, but plagues make people do mad things, like buy Animal Crossing in Grand Theft Auto numbers. And here we are.

Of course, every hot run comes to an end. The Switch may finally be staring mortality in the face – the PS5 shortages are ending, its sales streak has ended at 33 weeks, and it won’t be long before Steam Decks make their way into the hands of gamers, introducing a more powerful handheld option. There’s already a chip shortage. Will the lean years of the pandemic create an even greater turn toward high-end computing?

Perhaps. But it seems worth noting that when we all turned inward, it was the Switch that so many turned toward.

I ask that while typing this on a Chromebook – the other big success story of pandemic computing. When the world decided it needed at-home computing, it stopped worrying about “power usage” with Windows and Mac. The expert reviewers for traditional laptops had a habit of telling us how we needed the headroom to sort through 30 open browser tabs and 10 Adobe documents while photo editing at a professional level, but…it turns out most people aren’t power users. And it turns out that an internet browser with a few carefully chosen productivity apps more than adequately filled the gap for the vast majority of consumers.

Or, put more succinctly:

“I often say people buy too much computer for their needs…”

Dan Ackerman, CNET

Indeed. (And that’s a retrospect worth reading in full. It’s funny how an idea considered dumb a decade ago is now mainstream.)

“Moar” has long been the enemy of “more.” We buy headroom we don’t need for tasks we don’t do. Except when we’re all stuck at home and need to improvise. Then, we buy Chromebooks. Or run up the sales on a little gaming device that had built up a library of good-enough-if-not-bleeding edge software.

So, we’ve all learned, right? We have burned through the glossy image of the graphical arms race and seen the better tomorrow that isn’t at 4K and 120 fps. …right? Gaming can be as simple as trying to get Tom Nook off your back. It can be as barebones as turning on Monster Hunter Rise and going lone wolf on a Rathian. It doesn’t need some bloated AAA budget to give you an epic JRPG adventure like Bravely Default 2.

…pfft.

We just can’t quit the shiny, can we? The PS5 is going to do exactly what the PS4 did – sell on brand name and potential. We’re all going to forget the simple pleasure of curling up with a handheld and going down through the 2D depths of an alien planet in Metroid. We’re going to buy too much gaming computer for our needs, because our needs are less important than our taste.

Shiny tastes good. And it’s going to make us forget what we’ve just experienced.

Oh, and that other success story? Chromebook sales have fallen off of a cliff.

Welcome back to the technological rat race.

Hell, even I kinda missed it.