Not everyone earns tech bro salaries and can sustain a thousand cuts. Many hobbiests are scraping and saving money to acquire hardware. For some it very well msy be the end of their world.
You can still jump on eBay and buy all kinds of dirt cheap used pieces of hardware.
My buddy just bought a used ThinkPad T14 with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of storage for about $500. You can get by with a whole lot less.
In this context, I will also present the idea that Rasperry Pi has represented quite poor cost value for many years now.
ThinkPad T14 which generation?
Placed an order with a Polish seller on eBay, received a message that Fedex wouldn't take the package due to size, replied that they could send with any shipping company and that I'm not concerned with shipping speed, after which they cancelled the order on me.
(I'm assembling a home server/workstation on a W880 mobo for ECC support - am giving the CPU all the cooling it can reasonably take, but no GPU or non-M.2 drives, so don't need much room in the case for anything other than the mobo and CPU heatsink.)
I ended up ordering one with a window since the solid side version is effectively impossible to acquire in North America.
I already moaned about this recently, but to briefly reiterate: the only hardware that's becoming available for most people in my region are Frankenstein desktops built from heavily used 10+ year old Xeons running on suspicious motherboards made by obscure Chinese manufacturers you've never heard of. This is pushing ever more people towards smartphones and away from actual computers.
But at least we got the bullshit machine in return, that's something, I guess.
It really shocks me how bad shipping has gotten. It's nearly unaffordable to buy things on eBay from the US as a Canadian due to shipping costs, so I can only imagine just how bad it is for people from other countries.
I've heard reports that these are actually surprisingly good. I wouldn't want to use one in a production environment, but for homelab stuff they're an incredible deal.