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editing win.ini and config.ini and config.sys and autoexec bat and running memmaker all in a desperate hope


Of course, people using the (equally under-powered) Macs of the day never had to do that. So there is an existence proof that modern-day bloat is not required in order to make things easier, cleaner, better, and more efficient.

(I know, I know, non-multi-tasking Macs made us deal with extreme weirdnesses like "Switcher" and "Desk Accessories" and you could hack around with RegEdit to tweak things. But you didn't have to do it, like you did on Paleolithic era PCs. And yes, under the hood Macs were nearly as ugly as PCs. Remember the days when some system calls took "Pascal Strings" and others took "C Strings" for no clear apparent reason?)

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I see nothing wrong with an operating system that takes up a gigabyte or more of space, when a gigabyte of hard drive costs less than a megabyte did just a few years back. That much storage costs me less than a can of soda now.


Again, my issue is not the negligible cost of storage or cycles. With size comes complexity. That's totally fine when you need the complexity. But when you don't need it... then for no reason you are biting off greater risk of instability, viruses, and perhaps increased learning curve time. And with hardware and storage asymptotically approaching free, the real cost is how much time I have to invest in learning something new, different, and whizzy when old, simple, and boring would have worked just as well.
But then, I'm a minimalist at heart.

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Are you going to get rid of your TI scientific calculator and replace it with an abacus because you never ever use logarithms of trignometric functions?


No way, Dude!
I want numeric integration of complex variables and entry of matrices even if all I'm going to do is balance my checkbook. Then again, I already paid the learning cost for that when I needed it. But I'm sure as heck not going to go out and buy a newer calculator with better 3-D graphing technology just to keep balancing my checkbook.

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I have so much transparent power at my fingertips now at a small fraction of what it used to cost, I'd never go back.


Sometimes it's fun to crack walnuts using a fusion-powered jackhammer, and other times it's equally as fun to just whack them with a hammer.

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the savings that could be realized by producing a lesser computer that more nearly matched my needs/abilities would be minuscule at best.


I think that's the heart of the matter.
Most PC's are relatively low margin (for the box-maker -- not for Intel or Microsoft), so there is no real incentive to make an even lower-margin product. Especially if it might cannibalize sales of the somewhat larger margin products.