In practice, the way the poor live is to always look for a used, refurbished, or pre-owned option. So while if you buy new you can't get very much computer, if

In practice, the way the poor live is to always look for a used, refurbished, or pre-owned option. So while if you buy new you can't get very much computer, if you buy a bunch of junkers, you can get enough to get by. But they have to be in a sweet spot of "old enough" to have depressed price and "new enough" to not be useless for current applications. This was actually a problem during the 2010's long reign of Intel, because they didn't add a lot of generational performance improvement, so old systems retained their price for longer. Since other architectures have caught up on leading performance, pricing has finally started discounting these older CPUs again. Still, it's not a 300-fold difference and the bottommost price brackets tend to need a DIY approach. But it's definitely more feasible than 1997.