PCs arent getting any better. We have pushed our replacement schedule out to at least 5 years now. Almost everything is web based and whatever isn't an ssd and a mediocre processor can do for almost anyone that isnt in engineering or development.
There will come a time when you and me will be the old guys with a milling machine and a metal lathe in our garage wondering why people don't make things anymore.
Or perhaps like the radio Hams. :-(
Aren't we already at that point? How many people can fully explain how a modern computer works, from the transistors up?
Then tried to get into forreal modern X86... and tapped out. Like, whoa.
But the same is true for cars, airplanes, microwaves, HVAC equipment, and most complex technologies.
Now they're saying kids don't know how to type b/c their primary interface is a phone keyboard.
Next step is probably Neural Link type connections where we eventually say "people used to user their HANDS to do things??"
"You mean you have to use your hands?" "That's like a baby's toy!"
They had one, but it is something like my drill. It gets dusted off once every few years when there's no other option but otherwise sits on the shelf.
"here, do a copy... now paste... right click or use ctrl-[whatever]" boom. done.
those who don't know file structures are gonna require a little more help, but again that's not like rocket science. I could get a reasonably sharp 16 year old on that in a day or two.
It's not like driving a stick shift, in which case the noob will annihilator my transmission by not knowing; I can make the file system noobs create, delete, and move dummy files all week with no overhead.
There really isn't much you can't do on a phone, it's whether or not you can take advantage of the facilities offered by the laptop/desktop.
To be fair, the university had a very strict honor code and the amount of people that would try to plagiarize on longer writing assignments definitely led to pressure for professors to not assign essays as homework. Those were exclusively meant to be handwritten into blue books on exam day.
Like it's more a way to save money than DIY (or perhaps there are STL figures that fill a niche that corporate Warhammer is not fulfilling?).
Somebody gave me an ASUS laptop from a few years ago, probably about 2017. I wasn't expecting miracles, it was a Celeron N3350 (2016), but I wasn't expecting the i5-560 in the M4500 (2011) in the garage is about 2x as fast. Still shipped with an 5400RPM HDD as well.
The low end is still as garbage as it was in the past - barely a usable system at the time of purchase.
And that's not low end. That's still a $500-$700 computer depending on what we're doing about gpu.
And I disagree that lowend is still garbage. I picked up a used business machine from Microcenter for $250 that had Windows, a multicore processor, 8GB ram and a SSD. I'm not quite sure what you want from an emailchecker and youtube watcher but the parents are very happy with it. Maybe that's a bad example but the bottom end feels better than ever for light use.
To me the real question mark is high end. $1000 processors? $2000 graphics cards? What in the world is happening?
Real garbage tier barely has enough ram to run the OS. W11 officially requires 4 GB of RAM (which is insane), and you can find plenty of 4GB laptops on Amazon : https://www.amazon.com/Acer-A515-46-R3UB-Display-Quad-Core-P...
Now, that's shit tier (at least if you're running Windows.)
I'm watching a youtube video review of the exact model https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6GIE-bcSQg and even doing the 7 minute 4k video edit over ethernet in Adobe Premiere Pro, it stutters at full resolution but can handle basic tasks at 1/2 resolution.
Is this thing really shit?
I would consider something that only allows me to run stuff from the Microsoft store to be "garbage", but what do I know, it probably fits a lot of people's use case.
However, it is likely around double the CPU/GPU performance vs the older Celeron laptop I brought up, plus it has an NVMe. Not even the same tier in my mind.
If you could put another 4GB RAM in, it would probably be just fine for basic use. It might be an example of where budget machines "caught up" to software again.
The problem is that they were putting those in $300 and $400 Windows laptops and selling them to people who didn't know better at BestBuy. Shouldn't a new $400 laptop be able to open Outlook in less than a minute?
There used to be enough improvement over time where a budget chip would at least be comparable to a decent chip from a few years back. Now you're stuck comparing chips across most of a decade to see if performance is actually any better.
And that's the problem for Dell in the consumer space, going to best buy and picking up a new Dell is no longer the best deal, the best deals are all on used hardware that used to be 5-10x the price when new. Really the only consumers they appeal to are those that aren't technically savvy enough to buy a used computer online.
IMO, the new Mac Mini is a pretty killer deal for that use case.
At $600, you get a modern CPU that:
* sips electricity
* is whisper quiet
* supports 2 4k monitors
* comes with a pretty good SSD
The price is pretty close to what you paid if you need to install a graphics card and an SSD (although to be fair you'd probably get a lot more capacity with a 3rd party device), and the modern CPU gives it a lot more longevity than a 10 year old machine.
Of course, a potential downside is that you have to run MacOS. But I've found that it isn't that bad.
IMO, it's not nearly as big of a deal to use an external drive with a mac. But the ram thing - for sure. 8 GB seems like it should be pretty limiting.
In practice I don't find 8 GB to be very limiting - I think probably because the SSD is so fast and makes up for it. I suppose no one knows what the future has in store.
To be fair, I don't tend to run a lot of electron based apps, so I probably have less memory pressure than many people.
Funny, people said something similar decades ago but it was more like "the only consumers they appeal to are those that aren't technically savvy enough to build their own."
I bought two more for my kids at the start of COVID ($75 ea plus a $75 SSD); they're perfectly usable for all educational purposes, YouTube, light coding, and light gaming (Minecraft and the like) and way better than whatever $250-350 will buy at the low end of the new machine market.
I did check eBay for 8300's and saw there is quite a family of machines — some taking at least half0height graphics cards (for which I saw some used Radeon R5s on eBay going for $30 or so).
I've found Craigslist and FB Marketplace to be a better source, since shipping is a killer (but I'm in easy driving distance of Boston; if you're far away from a major office city, that might not work as well).
The i7-4790 Dell 9020 can't do TPM 2.0, so a few games will be locked out by anti-cheat mechanisms, but you can drop an 6650 XT or RX480/580 or cheap nVidia card into one and play the Minecraft/Fortnite/Rocket League and other light/medium games just fine, especially at only 1080p.
I probably wouldn't bother with a half-height R5. The Intel HD 630 iGPU will outperform an R5 and the Intel 4600 iGPU is 2/3 the performance of an R5 430. if you're out shopping for something new (to you) to buy, I think you can buy a computer with a better iGPU rather than buy a lesser CPU and add an R5. (If you can swing it, I'd probably target at least 8th gen CPUs at this point. Or target 4th gen if significantly cheaper in your area and plan to upgrade 3-4 years from now.)
They certainly are getting better, but the pace of improvement isn't very fast. There's not much need to replace a 5 year old computer, but for the most part, the replacement will be better or cheaper or both. If you were already buying low end machines, there's not really room for price improvement though, just a better performance floor.
Intel is still coming out of their pipeline stall, but if they get a couple years of consistent product delivery, we may have a competitive market again.
There is hardly anything that I need, although I prefer native 3D APIs it isn't as if my hobby coding skills need to match AAA ray tracing hardware, 3D Web APIs due to their hardware baselines work just fine (one of them is modern enough for WebGPU), same applies to compute coding.
Also with the way Microsoft burned everyone that actually believed into WinRT, I lost any interest into updating to Windows 11.
Same applies to smartphones, if they aren't broken or lost, I am not getting new ones.