> you can have a mid-range one for the price of a meal
Is that an expensive meal or a cheap CPU? A meal for a family?
My mental model for a mid-range CPU is an i3 (don't forget Pentium / Celeron), and even for those Intel recommends charging $109-119 for the i3-13100F (they had a similar range for the i3-10105F). Even if you go all the way back to the first generation of Intel Core cpus, the i3-530 had a recommended price of $117.
Even if you're buying used + several generations old off eBay, you're still probably paying at least $50. And, note that once you're looking at several generations old hardware, you're really not looking at a mid-range device anymore -- The i3-13100F scores nearly twice as high on PassMark as the i3-10100F, for instance, and higher than the i7-9700F.
It's still orders of magnitude cheaper and more powerful than anything from the 80s, certainly, but new hardware is not _that_ cheap.
Also, that said, I remember when the Macbook Air first launched -- I know some people who ran the numbers and were impressed they could fit that SSD + RAM + CPU + display + battery in that price envelope.
I don't know how things in Deep America are, but since Herr Putin started his little anschluss, a meal for two in a nice European restaurant can easily run in the 3-digits. And I'm talking nice, not Michelin-nice - for those you'll need 3 digits for each person.
Is that an expensive meal or a cheap CPU? A meal for a family?
My mental model for a mid-range CPU is an i3 (don't forget Pentium / Celeron), and even for those Intel recommends charging $109-119 for the i3-13100F (they had a similar range for the i3-10105F). Even if you go all the way back to the first generation of Intel Core cpus, the i3-530 had a recommended price of $117.
Even if you're buying used + several generations old off eBay, you're still probably paying at least $50. And, note that once you're looking at several generations old hardware, you're really not looking at a mid-range device anymore -- The i3-13100F scores nearly twice as high on PassMark as the i3-10100F, for instance, and higher than the i7-9700F.
It's still orders of magnitude cheaper and more powerful than anything from the 80s, certainly, but new hardware is not _that_ cheap.
Also, that said, I remember when the Macbook Air first launched -- I know some people who ran the numbers and were impressed they could fit that SSD + RAM + CPU + display + battery in that price envelope.