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Comment by dangus | Hacker News Reader

We are talking about brand new latest gen hardware here. People with low budgets are always scraping and saving for deals and don’t need to buy something brand new from a pricey brand name like raspberry pi.

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.

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Have you looked at how expensive international shipping is? eBay covers just a few countries, the rest of us can't buy there because we'll be paying 10 times the cost of hardware to get it over here.

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.

> Have you looked at how expensive international shipping is?

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.

It's probably unaffordable for anyone to buy things from the US due to shipping costs, because the Trump administration has completely screwed up everything there with tariffs and mismanagement of the USPS and more. But the US is not the world. A better comparison is how much it cost to ship things from China a year ago compared to today.

> Frankenstein desktops built from heavily used 10+ year old Xeons running on suspicious motherboards made by obscure Chinese manufacturers you've never heard of.

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.

That cheap stuff from eBay that people talk about all the time seems to be available only in North America, or in the best case Western Europe.

ThinkPad T14 which generation?

Yes, 90%+ of sellers refuse to ship here (and we're not even under any sanctions and/or political pressure of any sort). I hear about these magical 100$ Thinkpads all the time; I'm yet to see anything cheaper than 300$ (add another 100$+ for shipping).

Sometimes goes the other way. I was recently looking for a specific PC case (Fractal Design Torrent Compact without a window) and it's entirely unavailable in North America.

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.

Out of curiosity, what's so special/unique about this case?

Hits Pareto optimality of minimal footprint/maximal airflow for fitting an ATX motherboard and a 168mm CPU cooler with dust filters on the air intakes.

(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.

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