Owning a desktop computer in 1994 was like "it costs as much as a car and will be literally obsolete in a 'no longer functions at all' sense in 24 months" it just didn't feel like it took as long because you were 7 years old

This was really apparent at the school computer labs (if you were fortunate enough that your school had one). If they didn’t replace the ENTIRE lab every two years, the comps were mostly useless other than playing old games and basic typing. And so slow. SSDs have changed expectations on comp speed.

I bought my kid a Dell Chromebook for less than it cost to buy an SNES in 1992... in unadjusted dollars. What are we even doing here -- people feel bad because it hurts their pocketbook to buy a top of the line Alienware laptop? Then fucking don't! Advice I'd give for the rich and poor!

This is true (we kept a 486 for far too long, it was painful), but most people didn’t need a computer to function in society back then. Certainly not in the way phones have become almost essential now.

I think between 1998 and 2003 I went through 3 different desktops and it was literally like one what with a dot matrix printer, an HP with Windows ME, and then a gaming PC that cost...way too much money but couldn't run Crysis(Well) in 2007.

Wasn’t true of Macs though

I’ve been thinking about this phenomenon as I use my (!) 6-year old $2,500 MacBook … sure the battery is shot, but it still functions. …not like when the 486sx-33 I built for like $1500 in 1995 was unable to run windows 95revB in 1997. (Could run Slackware without X11 tho)

You also had to pay for the new operating systems when they came out and office was like $500