I\u2019ve been watching the hardware reviews on YouTube pretty much regularly for the last couple of years, and I see a clear trend there.<\/p>\n
Remember those commercials on TV where the host is super-excited about the set of knives he\u2019s trying to sell you, or some kitchen appliance, or some additive for automotive oil? Yeah, that\u2019s those supposedly freelance PC hardware reviewers. They are the new kitchen appliance salesmen.<\/p>\n
That doesn\u2019t say they are completely useless. If you\u2019re interested in what they are trying to sell you, they are quite informative, or otherwise I wouldn\u2019t be watching them, but never in a million years should you forget that they are basically an arm of the advertisement sector. Their revenue stream comes from generating interest for what they are presenting, and interest, for the product manufacturers, means increased sales, so there is a clear motive for the manufacturers to funnel their advertising budget to the hardware reviewers who can generate the most useful form of customer interest, which can be described as \u201centhusiasm for the product and the brand\u201d.<\/p>\n
One of the ways of creating enthusiasm for what they are trying to sell you is to create a perception that we live in a parallel universe where your current computer is slow, and you really need an upgrade. An excellent example of this is a video<\/a> I watched just now, basically saying that the new thing Apple released is so good, everything else is a steaming pile of garbage and you should get the shiny new gadget in order for your life to have meaning and purpose. Yawn.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s put things into perspective, shall we? The computers have been an absolute overkill for the last several years. Laptops and desktops with Intel Haswell CPU, released in 2013, if they are equipped with a good SSD and GPU, are blazingly fast. I have a Haswell Macbook pro 15\u201d and I use it to edit photos when I\u2019m away from home, and the stuff I\u2019m doing with it isn\u2019t trivial \u2013 some of it is creating panoramas of more than 10 RAW files from a 24MP camera in Lightroom \u2013 and guess what, it\u2019s fast and great. I have absolutely no complaints on its performance, unless we\u2019re talking about GPU. Sure, I\u2019ve seen and worked with nominally faster computers, but for the most part \u201cfast\u201d is a number in a benchmark, not something you actually feel. If you\u2019re running a task that really takes a while, such as re-indexing an entire catalog in Lightroom, it\u2019s going to take hours no matter what hardware I use. Whether it takes two or four hours is quite irrelevant, because that\u2019s an operation I do once in a few years, and when I do it I just leave the computer overnight to do its thing, and it\u2019s done in the morning. I\u2019m certainly not going to sit behind it for hours with a stopwatch, and no, upgrading hardware isn\u2019t going to make it exponentially faster, because it needs to load tens of thousands of RAW files and create JPEG previews for all of them, and that\u2019s such a massive workload it doesn\u2019t really matter if your computer is twice as fast, because it\u2019s still taking hours. In normal operation, the difference between fast and faster is measured in tenths of a second. There\u2019s no feeling of \u201cOMG this new one is so fast, my old one is garbage\u201d. It\u2019s \u201coh, nice, it\u2019s somewhat snappier, you almost kinda feel the difference if you really try\u201d. I\u2019ve seen a double blind test<\/a> of SSD speed between SATA, NVMe and the new gen-4 NVMe, where people who actually work with those things professionally all day all guessed wrong trying to guess which is which, because it\u2019s all fast enough for whatever you have to do, and a 10x difference in benchmarks is imperceptible by the user. How can that be, you might ask. Well, as I said, computers have been very good for the last ten years or so, and once you have an SSD and a GPU competent enough for the resolution and refresh rate of your monitor, you\u2019re not going to perceive any lag in normal use. Sure, the benchmarks are going to show bigger numbers, but it\u2019s like speed and acceleration \u2013 you don\u2019t perceive speed, you perceive only acceleration. It also depends on the task you\u2019re using it for. For instance, I use a Raspberry Pi 3B+ as a local backup and development server, and I don\u2019t perceive it as \u201cslow\u201d for what it does; it runs a development copy of this server, and I use it to test code before I deploy. It doesn\u2019t even have an SSD, just a microSD memory card and an USB thumb drive. Why don\u2019t I use something faster, like a Raspberry Pi 4? It uses more power, so I would be hesitant to leave it always on, so it would be worse for the purpose. The same goes for the NUC \u2013 it\u2019s faster, it\u2019s better in every conceivable way, but it doesn\u2019t matter for the intended purpose. If something is fast enough, faster doesn\u2019t mean better, it means \u201cmeh\u201d.<\/p>\n I\u2019m in a weird position where most of my computers are more than 4 years old, all the YouTube salesmen are trying to sell me expensive new and shiny hardware, and if I listened to them and replaced all my \u201cgarbage\u201d hardware, it would cost me enough to buy a car, and it would produce exactly zero perceivable difference in practical use for the things I do. One reason for that is that I actually did upgrade things that matter to me \u2013 the SSD in both my Macbook Pro and my desktop PC is a 1TB Samsung 970 EVO NVMe. If you know tech, you know how fast that thing is. I have 32 GB of RAM in the desktop, the monitor is a huge 43\u201d 4K thing, and the GPU is powerful enough to run games at the monitor\u2019s refresh rate in the native resolution; and yes, it\u2019s completely silent in normal operation. That thing is essentially un-upgradable, because whatever you change you don\u2019t really get a better result, you just waste money. The same goes for the Raspberry pi server: I have a NUC here I could replace it with, so it\u2019s not even a matter of money, it\u2019s a matter of why the fuck would I do that, because it would do the same tasks equally well. At some point, upgrading feels like changing your dishwasher just because there\u2019s a new model. No wonder the YouTube salesmen are trying so hard to create enthusiasm for the whole thing, because it\u2019s really, really hard to give even the slightest amount of fuck at this point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019ve been watching the hardware reviews on YouTube pretty much regularly for the last couple of years, and I see a clear trend there. Remember those commercials on TV where the host is super-excited about the set of knives he\u2019s … Continue reading