I’ve been watching the hardware reviews on YouTube pretty much regularly for the last couple of years, and I see a clear trend there.

Remember those commercials on TV where the host is super-excited about the set of knives he’s trying to sell you, or some kitchen appliance, or some additive for automotive oil? Yeah, that’s those supposedly freelance PC hardware reviewers. They are the new kitchen appliance salesmen.

That doesn’t say they are completely useless. If you’re interested in what they are trying to sell you, they are quite informative, or otherwise I wouldn’t be watching them, but never in a million years should you forget that they are basically an arm of the advertisement sector. Their revenue stream comes from generating interest for what they are presenting, and interest, for the product manufacturers, means increased sales, so there is a clear motive for the manufacturers to funnel their advertising budget to the hardware reviewers who can generate the most useful form of customer interest, which can be described as “enthusiasm for the product and the brand”.

One of the ways of creating enthusiasm for what they are trying to sell you is to create a perception that we live in a parallel universe where your current computer is slow, and you really need an upgrade. An excellent example of this is a video I watched just now, basically saying that the new thing Apple released is so good, everything else is a steaming pile of garbage and you should get the shiny new gadget in order for your life to have meaning and purpose. Yawn.

Let’s put things into perspective, shall we? The computers have been an absolute overkill for the last several years. Laptops and desktops with Intel Haswell CPU, released in 2013, if they are equipped with a good SSD and GPU, are blazingly fast. I have a Haswell Macbook pro 15” and I use it to edit photos when I’m away from home, and the stuff I’m doing with it isn’t trivial – some of it is creating panoramas of more than 10 RAW files from a 24MP camera in Lightroom – and guess what, it’s fast and great. I have absolutely no complaints on its performance, unless we’re talking about GPU. Sure, I’ve seen and worked with nominally faster computers, but for the most part “fast” is a number in a benchmark, not something you actually feel. If you’re running a task that really takes a while, such as re-indexing an entire catalog in Lightroom, it’s going to take hours no matter what hardware I use. Whether it takes two or four hours is quite irrelevant, because that’s an operation I do once in a few years, and when I do it I just leave the computer overnight to do its thing, and it’s done in the morning. I’m certainly not going to sit behind it for hours with a stopwatch, and no, upgrading hardware isn’t going to make it exponentially faster, because it needs to load tens of thousands of RAW files and create JPEG previews for all of them, and that’s such a massive workload it doesn’t really matter if your computer is twice as fast, because it’s still taking hours. In normal operation, the difference between fast and faster is measured in tenths of a second. There’s no feeling of “OMG this new one is so fast, my old one is garbage”. It’s “oh, nice, it’s somewhat snappier, you almost kinda feel the difference if you really try”. I’ve seen a double blind test of SSD speed between SATA, NVMe and the new gen-4 NVMe, where people who actually work with those things professionally all day all guessed wrong trying to guess which is which, because it’s all fast enough for whatever you have to do, and a 10x difference in benchmarks is imperceptible by the user. How can that be, you might ask. Well, as I said, computers have been very good for the last ten years or so, and once you have an SSD and a GPU competent enough for the resolution and refresh rate of your monitor, you’re not going to perceive any lag in normal use. Sure, the benchmarks are going to show bigger numbers, but it’s like speed and acceleration – you don’t perceive speed, you perceive only acceleration. It also depends on the task you’re using it for. For instance, I use a Raspberry Pi 3B+ as a local backup and development server, and I don’t perceive it as “slow” for what it does; it runs a development copy of this server, and I use it to test code before I deploy. It doesn’t even have an SSD, just a microSD memory card and an USB thumb drive. Why don’t I use something faster, like a Raspberry Pi 4? It uses more power, so I would be hesitant to leave it always on, so it would be worse for the purpose. The same goes for the NUC – it’s faster, it’s better in every conceivable way, but it doesn’t matter for the intended purpose. If something is fast enough, faster doesn’t mean better, it means “meh”.

I’m in a weird position where most of my computers are more than 4 years old, all the YouTube salesmen are trying to sell me expensive new and shiny hardware, and if I listened to them and replaced all my “garbage” hardware, it would cost me enough to buy a car, and it would produce exactly zero perceivable difference in practical use for the things I do. One reason for that is that I actually did upgrade things that matter to me – the SSD in both my Macbook Pro and my desktop PC is a 1TB Samsung 970 EVO NVMe. If you know tech, you know how fast that thing is. I have 32 GB of RAM in the desktop, the monitor is a huge 43” 4K thing, and the GPU is powerful enough to run games at the monitor’s refresh rate in the native resolution; and yes, it’s completely silent in normal operation. That thing is essentially un-upgradable, because whatever you change you don’t really get a better result, you just waste money. The same goes for the Raspberry pi server: I have a NUC here I could replace it with, so it’s not even a matter of money, it’s a matter of why the fuck would I do that, because it would do the same tasks equally well. At some point, upgrading feels like changing your dishwasher just because there’s a new model. No wonder the YouTube salesmen are trying so hard to create enthusiasm for the whole thing, because it’s really, really hard to give even the slightest amount of fuck at this point.