My teenage niece posted on Facebook that she got her driver's license. Those teen days of new driving stay with one in memory. Kids today as a group lack as much automobile enthusiasm as my generation had, but they have many more activities at home to pursue than did our generation. I loved, though, that pre-driving era of my life when I knew our little town's nooks and crannies in a minute, bike-and-hike way.
I listened to Linux Unplugged, a podcast I like. The show featured a good review of KAOS, an Arch-based linux distribution. The review left me with the conviction that KAOS works as a good design but fails to meet what I seek in a distro.
One thing caught my ear. The host, Chris, discussed Samsung's disappointing cell phone sales growth.That is no surprise, because competition in the Android phone market is intense, and other products are less expensive yet have satisfactory features.
Chris made a curious analogy, though. He said that it may be like desktops and laptops, in which people buy inexpensively because they do not understand how much more expensive laptops/desktops can do. I think Chris missed the point of Chromebooks.
People buy inexpensive PCs because their use cases often do not require them to render high-end video or play high-end games. I think that the planned obsolence of feature creep is all fine for commercial software and high-end hardware makers.
But most folks do fine with a solid system, some memory, some storage and a moderate CPU. I favor right-size more than biggest-size, right-speed more than highest-speed.
I think that most folks do. Internet and tech pundits so often miss that most of us have use cases less demanding in terms of hardware and software than they face. I make music, which requires for me light-middle-weight gear. I like to keep things as light as I can. I wish that manufacturers focused more on meeting what people actually use and less time on feature creep to force us to change hardware and software. I am fine with 32-bit and light software footprints.