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Last year I could cast episodes of DS9 I get from Paramount+ through Amazon Prime to my parents’ TV. This year I can’t, likely as an anti-piracy measure. So I hooked my device up via HDMI. Still couldn’t watch it on the TV. You know what? I’m gonna go complain to them before I stop subscribing.

Compared to those pain points building a modern PC should be a breeze. CPUs go in Zero Insertion Force sockets so as long as you remember to lift the little lever you won’t bend any pins. People don’t even wear static discharge wrist bands anymore (all though it couldn’t hurt) or worry about shorting things out. And power connectors only fit one way unlike the AT power connector.

Speaking of breeze your only pain point might be making sure you have enough air circulation for cooling all that gear.

But literally any PC that’s within your budget. OK maybe that’s not true, there might still be some crap WiFi cards out there with weird firmware that don’t support Linux very well. Find an older name-brand PC within your budget. Before buying it Google “[make and model] Linux WiFi” and see whether there’s tons of complaints about the WiFi. If not, go ahead and get it, put Ubuntu or Linux Mint on there, start banging out JavaScript projects, profit.

Definitely true for the iBooks before them. iMacs were hip and trendy transparent plastic colors but no one wanted that clamshell affront to aesthetics in their lap.

Yeah, Apple stuff doesn’t usually get good enough for widespread use until the 3rd generation or so. That was true for Mac OS X, iPod, iPhone, et cetera.