RE: Don't buy a new computer this year.

 

In January I wrote a post saying not to buy a new computer this year. I pretty much broke my own advice immediately. About a month ago I came across a good deal on an M4 Mac Mini and decided to give it a try, because why the hell not. I had not intended to replace my old war machine with this, but after a couple of days it was so good I tried it as my main system and I never really went back. Two weeks later, the MacBook Neo was released and I thought, at $599 how bad can it be. Well, it put my 8-year-old i7 to shame and again, I didn't go back. Even with 8GB of RAM it runs beautifully. Finally, just a week after that, I broke down and replaced my 2018 Samsung Android with an iPhone 17e. Inside of a month I had changed my entire computing workflow.

So what the fuck was going on in my head? Well first off, I did have a windfall of cash, so it's not like I used my rent money for this or anything, I had the extra cash. Second, what I've been doing with my computers has significantly changed over the last 6 months. I find I am doing less and less technical things like coding and project design, moving toward more creative things like writing and building content for my D&D games. Even experiments with local AI have fallen by the wayside as I simply embraced a paid Claude account. Third, as I get older, I find my patience for screwing with computers is wearing thin. I just want these things to work from first boot until I'm tossing them in the bin 10 years later.

After almost a month in the Mac ecosystem, what do I think? Overall, I am frankly surprised it took me this long to make the transition. I really like how these three devices interact with each other and it is basically transparent to me. When I get a call on my phone, I get a notification on the Mini and the Neo, I can even answer the call from those machines, the same is true of text messages. Making Linux do this would have been a 6-month journey and I probably would have never been satisfied with the results, and god only knows if this is even possible on a Windows system.

M4 Mac Mini: This is a solid machine, it is perfect for day to day activities and has handled everything I have thrown at it without missing a beat. Its only real shortcoming was the storage — 256GB is just not enough. However, this was easily fixed with a $100 Thunderbolt dock that provided an NVMe slot. The dock also added a 2nd HDMI connector for a second monitor. Only having one was not a deal breaker, but having a 2nd is really nice. 16GB of RAM is more than enough for 99% of the world and it is more than enough for me. Honestly, this kind of made me feel silly about having 64GB of RAM on my old war machine.

MacBook Neo: I am going to be straight up honest here, this is the best laptop I have ever owned. There is a lot of criticism online about its 8GB of RAM and iPhone CPU, but you know what? Firefox with 12 tabs open, Obsidian, Thunderbird, VS Code and music playing, I felt no slowdown whatsoever. Each application worked flawlessly, switching between them was smooth, even when I was dipping into swap space on the SSD. I can tell you from personal experience, this workload would have brought an 8GB i7 laptop to its knees. While 256GB of storage is not enough for a desktop machine, for a laptop it is fine, this is why we have cloud storage. This is a well designed machine that will serve me well for a good long time.

iPhone 17e: This is the device I have the least to say about. Not because it is bad, it is fine. But because my phone is really the least important computing device I use. I'd say 90% of my use case is using it as an actual phone, text messaging and Facebook Messenger, that is pretty much it. Sure, I do light web browsing, but if I am going to do anything more complicated than a quick Google search, I am going to pull out my laptop. My old Samsung phone was fine and this iPhone is fine.

So do I regret breaking my own advice? Not even a little bit. What I didn't account for in that original post is that sometimes the timing is just right. The hardware was ready, my needs had shifted, and the money was there. If any one of those three things had been different, I'd probably still be wrestling with Linux driver updates and wondering why my Bluetooth headset only works on alternating Tuesdays. The Apple ecosystem is not perfect and it is definitely not cheap, but for where I am right now in life, it is exactly what I needed. Sometimes you just have to eat your words and move on.

AI and Piracy

 So I have spent the last couple of months playing with AI. I have gotten paid subscriptions to both ChatGPT and Claude. I have also been experimenting with Local AI and I have come to a couple of conclusions. 

Local LLM's pretty much suck, unless you are prepared to spend a lot of money. On the low price range, the models you can use are only good for task specific things like object identification in videos or audio to text conversion, stuff like that. General purpose LLM's at the low end are dumb and never meet expectations. If you are looking for truly useful general purpose LLM's with a usable token/second speeds, you need both larger models, 70 billion parameter or larger and the hardware to run them. A Raspberry Pi 5 with a AI Hat, a Jetson Nano or a graphics card with 8 GB or less of VRAM is not going to cut it. There is no cheap way to implement local LLM's as anything more than a toy. If you are looking to get into locally run AI, your starting budget needs to be in the $2000 range, either for a really good graphics card or a purpose built system.

What this means is, in the cost analysis, you can get 9-10 years of a ChatGPT or Claude subscription at $20 per month for the cost of the hardware you will need to build a reasonably useful local LLM. I understand that ChatGPT and Claude are data mining you, but honestly, everyone is and if you are giving them intimate details of your life, you are kind of getting what you deserve. So unless you have a big budget and a really good use case, just choose a subscription and run with it.

During these months of playing with local LLM's, I did purchase a Jetson Nano, it cost me about $250 and it was absolutely not worth the money for what it was intended to be used for unless all you want to do is setup a AI security cameras. What I did find it useful for though was a video streaming device. The 8 GB of shared RAM/VRAM is more than enough to run a handful of Docker containers and since it does have a GPU, it can do on the fly transcoding of video codec formats.

Before I continue, let me just say, I am not an advocate of the piracy of copyrighted media. I believe that media producers should get paid for their work, and I am very willing to pay for a good product provided at a reasonable price, I don't even mind ads and commercials. My problem is, streaming services are at a tipping point, where the cost of those services are getting to the point where they are no longer worth it. If I am paying money, I should not be seeing commercial, or if I am then they should be at the very beginning and MAYBE one in the middle. If I am seeing 4-5 minutes of commercials every 10-15 minutes of the show, that is too much for a service I am already paying for.

 What I did was, using the modified Ubuntu image that came with the Nano, I installed what is called an aar stack. For those not in the know, an *arr stack is a suite of automated media management software—commonly Radarr, Sonarr, Lidarr, and Prowlarr, used to automatically download, organize, and manage movies, TV shows, and music. Often deployed via Docker, this stack connects with download clients (like qBittorrent) and media servers (like Plex/Jellyfin) to automate the entire media acquisition process. 

The Docker compose file I used and rough instructions for building it, can be found here;

https://github.com/cjstoddard/Jetson-Nano/tree/main/aar-stack 

Now, I know what you are thinking, this is just piracy, which I sort of railed against earlier. I am not going to try and justify this, because here is the thing, there are plenty of legit uses for this setup. There is a lot of public domain content out there, there is plenty of free copyrighted content out there. In fact, there is enough free content out there that I cannot possibly watch it all in my lifetime, so fuck off about piracy.

So, to sum all this up, the Jetson Nano is nearly useless as an AI client, but is pretty great as a media server. If you are going to buy one for AI, don't, instead put that money towards a graphics card with 16+ GB of VRAM, in the long run, you will be much happier.

Don't buy a new computer this year.

 

Do not under any circumstances, buy a new computer this year. RAM and video cards are ridiculously over priced and SSD prices are following the trend. No new computer you buy this year is going to be worth the cost. Even if your computer is 10 years old, hang on to it until at least 2027, it is probably good enough. Even if your system breaks, repair it if possible and if not, buy something used to get you by, old Dell's and HP's are cheap and plentiful.

There is no new software coming out this year that is a must have. All the triple A games that will come out this year will still be available next year and they will cost you less and Microsoft certainly isn't putting out anything this year that your life will depend on.