I mean, as a frontline underpaid rural IT employee with no way to move outward from where I currently live, show me where I’m gonna put $5k a year into this budget out of my barren $55k/year salary. (And, mind you - this apparently is “more” than the local average by only around $10-15k.)
I’m struggling to buy hardware already as it is, and all these prices have basically fucked me out of everything. I’m riding rigs with 8 and 16GB of RAM and I have no way to go up from here. The AI boom has basically forced me out of the entire industry at this point. I can’t get hardware to learn, subscriptions to use, anything.
Big Tech has made it unaffordable for everyone.
The bright side is the bust is going to make a glut of cheap used parts.
8GB or 16GB of RAM is absolutely a usable machine for many software development and IT tasks, especially if you set up compressed swap to stretch it further. Of course you need to run something other than Windows or macOS. It's only very niche use cases such as media production or running local LLM's that will absolutely require more RAM.