kamen

General purpose computers have been fast enough and had enough memory for a decade now. I bought a quad core (8 threads) laptop with 16 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD, 2 GB VRAM twelve years ago. Around the same time I built a NAS with an HP Gen8 microserver, also with 16 GB of RAM for ZFS. That one I recently upgraded with a better CPU for 20 €. Both of these machines still perform really well for most tasks. I haven’t upgraded my phone in 5 years, and my tablet in 8 years. These start to show their age because of the small amount of RAM built in. Last week I bought high end EIZO monitors from 8 years ago for 50 €. These are fine!

Ask yourself, are you even doing things that are limited by your hardware? If you are limited by hardware, could buying a last generation high end machine fill your needs? If you need vast amounts of computing power, renting cloud computing might be a solution as well.

Yeah, I generally agree with your points. I dislike the push to planned obsolescence with everything. I’m also trying to maximise the life out of things I have and I buy a little less often even if under normal market conditions I can afford new things whenever I want.

I’m a hobbyist photographer (so almost everything I throw at the hobby is out of pocket) and recently made a jump to higher megapixel cameras (the megapixel increase wasn’t a requirement, more of a side effect). I have a pretty adequate AM4 PC, but suddenly the 32 gigs of RAM that it has don’t quite cut it. Could’ve maybe bought 64 back then, but opted not to. It’s still a workable situation, just not ideal. Had to replace a dead SSD recently (the Phison controller ordeal), swallowed the increased prices on these as well (because the old one was “luckily” just a few months out of warranty). As for the RAM, before the price boom I could’ve gotten a decent 64 or even a 96 GiB DDR5 kit for 500-ish EUR (to add to a new CPU and mobo) - and now both cost 1500+. Upgrading the existing also wouldn’t be exactly easy because when I built it I hunted a very specific combination of frequency and timings - just buying anything would cost as much as it did when it was brand new. Should’ve jumped to AM5 last year, I could’ve even sold the current things at a profit now, but who would’ve known… At this point it’s a market crisis after another market crisis - maybe we should buy and never look back at the prices the next day.

Glad I’m stocked on memory cards that should last me for a while.

There is, however, a bigger problem that’s not addressed - manufacturers seemingly only playing nice to big corporations while screwing the end customer.