This seems pretty important to crowdsource and talk about, so I’m gonna go ahead and risk violating the no politics rule from a few days ago, because I don’t see a better community to ask this. My defense for it not “being politics” is, I’m asking you to keep it to purchasing decisions and how the details of how the tariffs are likely to work, as opposed to who did what. This thread has the potential to save people lots of money if it gets big!
Tariffs are gonna make things more expensive for Americans; what are you planning on buying now instead of later, or stockpiling a little of?
My personal desktop machine is a Linux box I assembled from $500 worth of parts about 14 years ago. I’ve increased RAM and added about 8TB of storage for an Emby instance.
It still manages to get the job done, but it is obviously way, way, WAY overdue for replacement. We’ve been struggling financially for about 25 years.
Now I’m thinking I need to finally pull the trigger and get it done before January.
IMO there’s little need to buy new in the computer world unless you want to do something silly like have a snapdragon x laptop or have the disposable funds to go the gaming rig route.
My desktop is a retired business workstation, a HP Z420. I bought it for $250, installed a smaller SSD ($100 new) for the OS + apps, upgeaded to the “best” Xenon that fit the socket ($150 used), upgraded to 64 GB RAM ($107 used, yay ECC memory being dirt cheap on the used market), and a 1070TI ($225 used, purchased just before covid).
It’s more than fast enough for my needs still.
This was all about 4-5 years ago, so you could probably do even better with more modern hardware.