I’m happy to see more pushback against consumer culture, and I’m happy this system meets the needs of the author.

Of course, the other part of this are people who use computers to do much heavier workloads.

There are a pretty large list of activities where every time you have some significant gain like ~50-300% performance gain, there may be legitimate justification to buy the new hardware.

As a person who plays games as a hobby I’m pretty much buying a new GPU/processor anytime there’s something affordable that will double my frame rate or anytime there’s a game that comes out that I can’t play or won’t play at decent settings.

My old hardware is never wasted, someone else buys it and uses it until it physically degrades too much to be used.

Computers as a hobby or working device are a heck of a lot less expensive and wasteful than a lot of other activities even if you go crazy on consumerism.

Think about the weight of your laptop and how that compares to the weight of just one gallon of gasoline. Surely a week to a month of commuting is worse for the planet than buying a brand new laptop, right? For the record, I don’t actually know for certain whether it is, but that seems like a fair guesstimation.

From a cost standpoint, $100 is damn impressive to have a working functional laptop that gets your work done, but arguably $1000 or $2000 isn’t a whole lot of monkey, either. That kind of money is roughly equivalent to one round trip ticket to Europe, renting a minivan for a week or two, a month of daycare or rent/mortgage, etc.

It’s both a lot of money and not a lot of money at the same time.