Well, in the case of my friend who bought the iMac for $300, my advice was "don't buy that computer its not worth $300”. It was solid advice. He just hadn't got

Well, in the case of my friend who bought the iMac for $300, my advice was "don't buy that computer its not worth $300”. It was solid advice. He just hadn't gotten over the beautiful allure of the thing to see through to its desperate software and hardware situation. The expectation of effortlessness is all tied up in the marketing. The marketing promises a kind of magic, which I feel is bullshit, a fantasy world where you don't have to think about the clothes, they just appear on your shelf, when in reality, they're actually made by a person, whether that person is your Amish grandmother, a friend, a kid in an Indonesian factory, or you yourself. And someone is going to have to wash them when they're dirty, and fix them when they have holes or do the work of recycling them... Computers require effort and attention and energy to maintain no matter what, even Macs (especially macs...). If not up front, then somewhere down the line. It's fascinating to live in a time when it's arguably easier to install Linux on a given computer than Mac OS or even Windows. This is new. My advice to people is that learning some user friendly Linux is a good investment of technical energy. It's like buying a used car instead of a brand new one. You could spend $10000 rebuilding that used car before you made a dent in the cost of a new one. For a lot of people, the time it takes to keep a used car working well is worth the trade-off.. BTW, I've had a lot of success hooking people up with old (2011) i5 Thinkpads running Linux and/or Windows. They run great and people really like them. Mine has 16GB of ram in it goes real smooth. I use lots of tabs. Too many tabs. And Bitwig. Bitwig works great on an old thinkpad with Arch!