> it's nice to have computers that "just work" with modern software
Yeah I never understood people who work with computers all day economizing on their computers. Even from scalpers you’ll pay ~$6500 for top of the line parts and peripherals, which is about the cost of a high school student’s violin.
Yes, but it's also thanks to this mentality that a simple text editor occupies 1 gig of ram and two cpu cores nowadays. If the dev's machine is infinitely fast and has storage as fast as other people's ram, they stop caring about performance issues, because they never encounter them in the first place. And I'm not talking about working on hand written assembly for a week to get the last bit of performance. I've repeatedly found silly things like O(n) code calculating something that could be expressed as O(1), hilariously complicated xpath expressions that in the end just retrieved an immediate child and whatnot.
At one of my first jobs, when my boss got annoyed by some software being slow, je always said that developers should get the fastest hardware available, but as soon as they start testing or using their own software, the machine needs to magically turn into a 386 with your home directory on an NFS share. Granted, that was 20 years ago so 386 didn't sound as hilarious as it does now, but it was still a little extreme. But that idea stuck with me, and to this day I do test software on slow machines every now and then, looking for obvious performance left on the table.
I use a Raspberry Pi as my daily driver. I like it because the hardware is cheap and easy to replace. It sips electricity, which matters to me. It doesn't support Intel or AMD. And as a developer, I can more acutely feel differences in performance based on the algorithms I choose. If I can make it run acceptably on a Pi, it should work okay on a non-flagship phone or a 4+ year old office PC.
Wow that’s pricy. I played 1st section violin through college and only have a $2k one. My friend played first chair 1st violin section through college and had a $4k violin and it sounded amazing. Maybe we got lucky and found a really good instrument shop? Another friend had a cello that costed well over $15k though so there’s that.
At least you're engaging with the premise. You could also get a $980 with tax M1 MacBook Air. A Dell prebuilt - even the Alienware, which does not have to pay scalper prices and comes with a 3070 - is $2,611. These are all comparable options. In the instrument world, a $6,500 computer is more like a $30,000-150,000 violin and bow. Like the stuff professionals use.
1. In many countries $6500 is enough to start a business. I'd rather do that than pay for an overpriced piece of aluminum with a piece of fruit etched on one of the sides. What if I'm not the business type? That's fine. It's still probably better to save that money.
2. Modern computing is turning into a dumpster fire. It will be pretty soon that the Intel platform will work in the same way as the above-mentioned fruitty platform and you won't be able to run whatever software you want on it. While I agree OP is probably making his life extra miserable [1], I admire people like him, since their efforts will give us the next free/fun computing platform.
[1] I too run a Raspberry Pi at home, but I've long given up on turning it into a desktop machine. There is an easier way to run modern software on cheap hardware with a fraction of the hassle.
Easy, not everyone lives in countries where giving ~$6500 is a possibility, and if they have access to such money they wouldn't be spending it on computer parts most likely.
Yeah I never understood people who work with computers all day economizing on their computers. Even from scalpers you’ll pay ~$6500 for top of the line parts and peripherals, which is about the cost of a high school student’s violin.