their pricing means it is basically never worth buying and upgrading versus just buying a new laptop (seriously, run the numbers. You basically save 10 bucks over two generations of shopping at Best Buy).

Maybe so. But the big difference is, you can upgrade iteratively rather than taking the entire hit of a new device all at once. So I can buy all of the individual components of my next laptop a few hundred dollars at a time over the course of a couple of years, and use them as I get them. By the time I’ve ship-of-theseus’d the whole device, I may have spent the same amount of money on that new computer, but I paced it how I wanted it. Then I put all of the old components into an enclosure and now I can use it as a media center or whatever. Plus, if something breaks, I can fix it.

They also announced three other products (one new, two refreshes) which are still being actively developed and are fully-modular devices at low cost. If they’re “throwing away their values,” they’re not doing it very well.

For modularity: There’s also modular front I/O using the existing USB-C cards, and everything they installed uses standard connectors.

Desktops are already that, though. In order for them to distinguish themselves in the industry, they can’t just offer another modular desktop PC. They can’t offer prebuilts, or gaming towers, or small form factor units, or pre-specced you-build kits. They can’t even offer low-cost micro-desktops. All of those markets are saturated.

But they can offer a cheap Mac Studio alternative. Nobody’s cracked that nut yet. And it remains to be seen if this will be it, but it certainly seems like it’s lined up to.

In college, circa 2005, I played about three hours of WoW during a free weekend. I installed the game (from a CD!), started it up, and played for an afternoon. When I got up to go to the bathroom, I realized that I was at a crossroads: I could either make this game my life for the next indeterminate number of years, or I could leave it behind forever. Those were literally the only two options for me. My brain would accept no third option.

I deleted the game and went out to get pizza. Since then I’ve never picked it up again, and now it’s so big and unwieldy I’m not even tempted anymore. But that was a touch and go situation for those few hours.

A few games have given me similar pulls over the years, but I’ve gotten better about it. Balatro is the most recent one to grab me, since I got it only when it came to mobile. And yeah, it grabbed me pretty hard, but I also know that once I unlock all the Jokers I’m unlikely to go much further in it.

Addictive, yes, but non-extractive. There’s a big huge difference.

These idiots still write with quills, read by candlelight…

And it’s worth noting—the items they use are still technology! Muggle technology, presumably. They just decided not to advance past a medieval technology level, which is presumably the last time they were actually more advanced than non-magical people.