82MHz - I will never need to buy a new computer again

2025-01-12

If you’re in your early thirties or older, you remember the breakneck pace at which computers were improving in the 90s and 2000s. If you brought home a shiny new 400MHz Pentium 2 system in 1998, it was literally outdated and replaced by a faster model with higher clock speed and more RAM/bigger harddrive by the time you had set it up and gotten familiar with it. But that’s not the case anymore, and it hasn’t been the case in a long time.

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I could have written this post. My first computer had a Pentium II and a whopping 64MB of RAM. I remember these days. I played so many video games on it.

Today I no longer play video games nor I do heavy multimedia work. I mostly use a terminal, an editor and a browser. Compiling source code is the most demaning type of work and even then I don't feel I'm spending too much time waiting for my code to compile despite the good old XKCD 303.

Related, Avery Pennarun quantified how much computing power has increased in the last 20 years. That's a lot. On the flip side, I may never buy a new electronic device ever again makes the case for not buying new devices (not specifically computers) that have questionable features just for the sake of having more features sacrificing aspects like serviceability in the process.