X3D is marketed as a gaming feature and benchmarks bear that out. Productivity workloads (video editing, compiling code, etc) benefit very little from the extra cache. You're better off buying a chip without it and a higher core count.
The US is the third largest country by population and disproportionately represented here on hackernews (given it's where ycombinator is based), so it doesn't seem that weird to me.
That said, I am jealous of the micro-center deals as a Canadian!
The use case is niche but there. I ride mountain bikes and off-road motorcycles and have a GoPro on my helmet. A phone is the wrong form factor and a DSLR is too heavy.
Same with surfers, or people who race cars etc. Having a physically small camera, with robust mounting and stabilization is not something a phone in a gimbal or a "real camera" can provide.
Self-contained != static compilation though. The self-contained binaries still have pretty poor startup time and are large since they contain the whole JIT.
I don't understand why people care about Electron? Evaluate the quality of the software based on its own merits IMO. VS Code, Slack, Postman, Obsidian.. I use this software every day and my only complaint is Slack's RAM usage (which honestly has no negative effect on my machine, but just seems silly for a messaging app).
Claude is a buggy mess because it's slop, not because it's electron. Heck, it runs a full Linux VM under the covers without asking.. it's insane.
Sure, but that doesn't mean it works that way everywhere or is inevitable.
Where I work, a senior would be reprimanded for such behavior. A key metric to their success is how well they can transfer knowledge and teach others, and their peers' feedback is used to determine this.
The senior that "punches down" does not go far in this case.
I didn't have a single Apple device in my house until a month ago when I bought a Neo. The last Apple devices I had before that were an iPod Nano and a PowerMac G5 many many years ago.
Apple has pretty good competition in every segment with the exception of maybe the iPad, but I'm not a tablet user.
It supports HDMI CEC, it has a built in dedicated radio for the steam controller, it ships with Steam OS, and will receive support from Valve.
If you are comfortable building a custom PC and fixated on the spec sheet sure, it's not that exciting. But there are some rough edges with PC couch gaming that are sanded off with this machine.
I used TenFourFox to extend the usefulness of my PowerMac G5 for many years, though I last used it about a decade ago. I'd imagine running the modern web on a machine that slow would be painful.
The G5 was actually the last Mac I owned until buying a Neo just for giggles.