Oddbean new post about login | logout The cost is simply so low, that there is no economic justification for not making the purchase. This could change, but it hasn't changed yet.
Making no purchase is always justified as opposed to making any purchase you don't really need. It's sad to see that most of the technology is driven by consumerism, not science.
Human evolution is driven by consumption. We are not to decide what other people's needs are.
Consumption and consumerism are different things.
Perhaps I also didn't make myself clear enough about one more aspect. Even with store-bought Speccies, people could repair them themselves. Maybe replace a chip or a capacitor or a resistor or a transistor. It was as opensource as it could get. x86 came with modularity, but the overall architecture already was much more complex _and_ individual components could not be just repaired at home anymore. Corporations took the monopoly over these things. They told people didn't need it. And now, people are being fed with monolith touchscreen bricks with zero repairability (+ all-on spyware) and they don't ask any questions why. The software side of things is even worse, but remember it started when IBM+M$ mafia took over.
I'm not the one you have to convince. I'm in embedded, my husband is a telco electrician and an EE M.Sc., my BIL is a mechatroniker, my father is a network engineer, and my son is studying Mech Eng. Our entire basement looks like an electro workshop, replete with an old washing machine, ancient cell phones and old monitors, homemade robots, soldering station, and a particle accelerator. 😂 We could open a museum. I'm just saying, don't fight the market.
Sometimes I dream that I could someday launch a zeppelin with pirate NMT and AMPS base stations to put all those ancient phones to work again (I hope you don't consider any GSM phone ancient, even Ericsson GH172 Hotline, which I have two of them... but no, I'm not that old, I got my first own GSM phone in 2005, and it was Nokia 3100 from 2003), and "Pirate Zeppelin" actually is my poet alias. I'm just saying, there should be some ways to transform this market. Even if it requires a major shakeup for people to wake up.