>fixing notebook for a ~70 years old lady
>comes, pays, asks about gaming tier GPUs for her desktop
>little took back I inquire about the price range and what
games, solitaire, sudoku, puzzle games...
>nope, I play the Assasin
>Assassin's creed?
>yes, on my grandsons console, I just love Venice
>she pauses
>and killing people
The upmarket ones can advertise having new CRT monitors. By then, surely someone will have started a factory somewhere making them in artisanal quantities for well-heeled retro-gaming enthusiasts.
I mean, it would be pretty awesome to see a top-ot-the-line CRT with contemporary materials and techniques. Like, the apgee of CRT displays :-?
This is probably not really possible. Was watching something recently about how modern cassette players are super bad compared to the ones from the peak of the technology. Like they're bigger, offer less functionality, and aren't as reliable etc. Because they're not benefitting from economy of scale anymore, the old assembly lines are long gone and creating new ones that can beat the old stuff is crazy hard/expensive. So they just all use the one model available for the actual mechanism and it's trash.
So if someone made a CRT today it probably wouldn't beat the old stuff.
Worse for CRTs than that - the manufacturing process and power draw of the finished product wouldn't pass modern environmental regs. The heavy glass is leaded, because the CRT is beaming you in the face with radiation. Leaded glass is a big no-no nowadays. Even if someone got a CRT factory up and running they wouldn't likely be allowed to operate domestically in Europe/North America, and shipping 200 pound glass sealed vacuum flasks is a recipe for lost inventory.
Not to mention, even with economies of scale in play, the kind of monitors/TVs that modern CRT enthusiasts want cost thousands of dollars new in the late 90s/early '00s. The material costs wouldn't have gotten cheaper, so even if somehow Sony or whoever started producing CRTs at scale again they'd likely be $3k+ luxury products (again). Flatscreen panels, even those HDR 8K OLED ones, are simply way way cheaper to manufacture and ship.
My 32 inch Trinitron ($35 on craigslist, it was actually free but the dude agreed to $25 to drive it over and I tipped him ten bucks) cost some schmuck $999 in 2003, that's $1800 in today money. A quick amazon search shows that if you're willing to pay $2k on a TV in 2025 it buys you a 65-inch 8k 120hz Samsung display. An 85-inch 60hz 4k display also by Samsung is "only" $1200. No CRT purist niche is gonna make producing 200 pound radioactive power sucking naturally blurry chonkbeasts worthwhile for a company, even if they could theoretically get them made for as cheap as they made 'em in 2005.
Well, damn, that's sad...