This is one of the reasons why I think it's important we look to re-using computers, build computers with interchangeable components, and look towards designing p2p networks that replicate data around. Start designing software for newer protocols to run on low-powered machines. There are so many computers in the world it's incredible and yet they're practically built to be disposable. I don't think they can continue to increase in price forever when the network of supplies to manufacture them is so weak. And especially when climate events will be able to destroy vast quantities of them quickly.
It's surprising how much computing power is stuffed into consumer laptops these days and how people keep buying new ones when their existing ones work fine.
> It's surprising how much computing power is stuffed into consumer laptops these days and how people keep buying new ones when their existing ones work fine.
This is contrary to my experience. Year to year these fancy webgl responsive webpages get slower and slower to load. I need an 8650U with at least 8 GB of RAM to surf the web and load some pages under 5 sec. The development of basically a new uniform os within the existing os's is just crazy.
Indeed. My primary machine at home right now is a 13 year old Dell laptop. It has some added RAM and an SSD drive. I can barely scroll the Twitter home page on it. I can barely use the Zulip web client (no "native" client for 32bit architectures... would be slow as molasses anyway) -- and that's just to chat with other developers working on Lean.
I've been using eww in emacs to browse the web and... surprise it's fast. And less annoying.
Zulip has a terminal client that's right now alpha software, but being actively worked on! You might want to give it a spin. https://github.com/zulip/zulip-terminal
It's surprising how much computing power is stuffed into consumer laptops these days and how people keep buying new ones when their existing ones work fine.