And he was right. Netbooks mostly sucked. Same with Chromebooks.
There’s nothing to be gained by racing to the bottom.
You can buy an m1 laptop for $599 at Walmart. That’s an amazing deal.
> You can buy ... for $599
pcpartpicker link?
An AMD APU paired with a microATX motherboard is the cheapest way to get reasonable computing performance. The best thing I ever did was to buy only a motherboard, CPU, and RAM. For €90, I was blown away.
See if you can salvage any parts, there's no need for a case, SSD, and PSU every time. AMD has a nice upgrade path for this. A motherboard with AM2+ socket will fit an AM3 CPU. You can then later upgrade to an AM3+ motherboard and wait for a reasonably priced AM4 CPU, and so on. My gripe with this, however, is that it used to be possible to have different (scavenged) DDR RAM parts as long as it was the same number of pins. A quick glance at the notches would tell you if it fits and that was that. Nowadays you often have to have either just one bank or a few of exactly the same part.
Sometimes it's possible to get lucky, like buying a cheaper model CPU and succesfully unlocking an extra core. And a boxed CPU may be more expensive than a loose tray, but comes with an adequate cooler that'll fit just fine.
Neither of us have any contact details in the profile, although I'm not sure if I can be of much help to you anyway.
One more tip. If you see your box increasingly use swap during normal workload, adding RAM can significantly improve performance. Even if it's lower spec RAM.
Precisely because of that they haven't caught up. They don't want to compete in the PC race to them bottom that nearly bankrupted them in the 90s before they invented the iPod.
Apple got rich by creating its own markets.
An Airbook sets me back €1000, enough to buy a used car, and AFAICT is much more difficult to get fully working Linux on than my €200 amd64 build.
Why hasn't apple caught up?