Re: cheap laptops

> I don't think I'm at all presumptuous in thinking that I have a good rough 
> idea of what most people need.  I'm involved in a lot of discussions among 
> Linux users and even in the more technical places like r/homelab it's rare to 
> see people compiling their own kernel.

To be fair those are all very technical groups of people.  Different
groups will have different needs.

As a random example I recently started using the excellent open source
QGIS program for land management, and once you start loading in
multi-gigabyte data sets for things like offline Google Maps satellite
views, high resolution elevation/contour maps, or government property
boundaries for a whole city, you quickly realise a fast disk, CPU and
lots of memory are mandatory, even though you're not gaming or
compiling a kernel.

Likewise a lot of younger people today want to become YouTube stars,
and if you ever see the type of set up that a successful content
creator uses for producing their videos, it's not a low end laptop and
often a full sized desktop.

So I think there are still plenty of use cases for these 'workstation'
users, which wouldn't necessarily work by having a cheap 'dumb
terminal' and servers.  I know myself when I do web development, the
IDE will easily chew up 8 GB or more memory on its own, plus 2-3 GB per
project for the NodeJS backend and React frontend.  Once you factor in
another 8-16 GB for Firefox (because you're using the Multi-Account
Containers extension so you can log in to your production, staging and
test accounts all at the same time), it's almost impossible to manage
on a machine with only 16 GB of memory, unless you're lucky enough to
work on only one small project at a time.  Heaven forbid you have to
have Zoom or Microsoft Teams open as well (or both in my employer's
case).

If anything it seems to be splitting into two extremes.  You have the
basic stuff at one end - simple office tasks and web browsing - and the
more demanding stuff at the other end.  The middle ground appears to be
less useful now as it's overkill for one group of people and not
powerful enough for the other.

> You can get a rough idea of what people want to pay for by what companies are 
> selling.

Where are you looking for this though?  If you are looking in the junk
mail in your physical letterbox or consumer electronics shops you will
only see products targeted at the low end of the market, made from cheap
parts that manufacturers can't extract much of a profit from any longer
as the technology has been superseded at the higher end of the market.
These products are aimed at people who can just about get away with
doing everything on their phone already.

If you go to Dell's website for example, they will happily sell you a
massively overpowered workstation and so enough people must be buying
them to make it worth their while to mass produce them.  But they don't
advertise that product range because that type of customer seeks them
out instead - they already know what they need.

> I wonder if the downturn in LUGs in recent years is partly due to most people 
> having systems that just work and not having to do things like compile 
> kernels.

Having recently uploaded a whole bunch of scanned Brisbug magazines
(Brisbane PC User's Group, from the 1990s) to archive.org [1], it
reminded me how complicated it used to be to use a computer.  I think
you are absolutely right that computers now are easy enough that most
people can figure it out on their own - or at least look it up online -
without having to attend a user group for advice.

Cheers,
Adam.

[1] If you're missing MS-DOS: https://archive.org/details/brisbug-significant-bits
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