I am a software engineer and inherently a technologist. For many years i've made it a point to own the most powerful computers for the sake of programming, gaming, efficiency or whatever. I bought into the inthusiast marketing of the industry and was convinced that I needed a new gpu every few years to play any new games that were coming out. I own literally thousands of dollars worth of computer hardware.
I have grown tired of the constant upgrading and frustration of dealing with the stupid design decisions of modern laptop or computer manufacturers. So i've been running a sort of experiment on myself. I guess it's actually just a mindset change but i'm trying to figure out what the minimum amount of compute I can get away with is and still be functional and efficient.
About 6 months ago I decided to gather some data on my main driver machine, a framework laptop 13 inch with like a gen 12 processor and I think 32GB of ram and a 500GB ssd running linux, my preferred operating system. So I wrote a cron job that would collect computer usage information every couple of minutes and save it to a file. after a couple of weeks I would look at the results and have a really good idea of how much of this computer's power I was actually using.
So after two weeks I opend the file and looked through it. Turns out I wasn't using more than maybe 2% of the cpu at any given time and rarely if ever more than 8GB of ram. actually after seeing this I tried to run a stress test to figure out what my maximum load could possibly be. So I opened firefox and about 15 tabs on youtube and twitch and started streaming. then I opened a project in vscode and discord and then I started streaming a game using the steam remote play feature. This isn't realistic but this is the aggregation of all my heaviest hitting programs at the same time. And still my cpu utilization never broke 10%
This trial mostly confirms my suspicions, that most PCs and ultrabooks are far more powerful than most people need. Most people, including myself, a "power user", pay way too much for machines that are too powerful. And for what? So our websites can chew through more javascript trash? So companies sell new laptops and make money?
Now i'm in a position where I already own all this powerful hardware and while I could try to offload it to recoup all the money, I can't really unpurchase these machines. But I want to put forth an idea for anyone reading this. Buy old machines (and put linux on them if you can). As part of this experiment I purchased an "old" I think 2018 refubished lenovo enterprise thinkpad off of amazon and loaded it up with debian and I couldn't be happier. It's still got 16GB of ram and a quad core intel cpu and it's still pleny fast enough to do anything I ask it to. My framework is in the basement running as a home server and I don't plan to upgrade it until it stops working, maybe a decade or so.
The thinkpad cost me 400$ I would dare say it's better than almost any new machine you could buy for 400$ and I saved a computer from going to the landfill.
I have proven to myself that I can get away with less power and this idea is what i'm calling the race to the bottom. You don't need the newest, or the most powerful laptop or smartphone. The stuff we have can already do everything we need. Next time you want or need to get a new device, consider getting a refurbished one.
And if you're worried about reliability consider this. My framework laptop cost damn near 1600$ when all was said in done and I got tired of it after about 2 years. If one of these refurbs breaks I could buy 4 of them for the same price. The laptop i'm writing this on right now, is 1/4th the cost of a decked out framework or God forbid an overpriced 3000$ macbook. The amount of money you would save with this kind of change could be used for a whole host of other things.
You could buy a "new" laptop or smart phone every year with this mindset and still save a lot of money.
The price premium comes from being on the bleeding edge, being at the very peak.
Most of the mountain is below the peak, so race to the bottom.
That's where all the people are anyway.
