The machine you posted is pretty typical of PC gamers according to the steam user survey (https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=combined). 8GB+ of RAM only got to 50% of users a couple of years ago. I suspect most non-pc gamers machines to be even worse, the firefox survey has 30% of people still on 4GB: https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware .

> I can tell you from experience that Windows 10 isn't a fun experience on anything other than a fast SSD.

Agreed, I think MS are dogfooding exclusively on surface books.

>The machine you posted is pretty typical of PC gamers according to the steam user survey

The linked laptop still has an ancient 1366 x 768 screen which is only 12.62% of all players that have taken the survey.

Something similar happened to a designer I was working with: The guy had his Apple Retina display Super-duper whatever, which he used to design.

At some point, he went to a developer screen to see how his designs were looking once implemented in code, and his first comment was "Why are the colors looking so bad?" ... Well, apparently the colors he chose looked great on his retina display but did not look that good on the average hardware.

After that day, we had to give him a second "normal" monitor so that he tested his designs for the layman user.

You know what's really funny, we had this exact same issue with developers.

Yeah, your UI runs fast against a local copy of that API with a local ElasticSearch instance backing it with 0% load on a $3000 Macbook, now test that bitch on a $100 dollar Android running on 2G against AWS.

Windows certainly doesn't a good job to run well on lower end systems. It got fast and reliable if you hit a baseline. Still they're hardly a competition for linux if you don't care about gaming.

Hardware retailers are just grabbing cash from average users. You cannot proof how well a system is performing so you just make up numbers and fancy words. Product series merely exists to nudge prices, they guy who buys the cheapest stuff is the biggest looser.

Cosumers would be served better if they used linux on their cheap systems. You only need a browser anyway. I used an early asus Eee PC netbook for some time with ubuntu. Yes it wasn't really snappy but it was on par with what my parents used to use. But more reliable in log term and 3 times cheaper.

But like linus said, linux won't take over the desktop market unless it is widely sold with machines out of the box.

The cheap androids aren't so shabby these days. A Moto G5 play is a quad core 1.4GHz with 2GB of ram. No speed demon, but is reasonable. $109.99 on Amazon, unlocked.

Javascript/web performance on Android is universally bad but truly awful on the low end. A Moto G5 pulls ~14 on speedometer 2.0 which puts it in line with an iPhone 5/5s (5-6 year old devices). An iPhone XS scores around 123 in this benchmark for comparison, ~9 times faster.

I concur, having just purchased a Nokia 5 (for €105) and being surprised it felt so much slower than my iPhone SE. I guess it's a sign that speed/$ is flattening out. The good part about it is devices will stay competitive longer.

> I can tell you from experience that Windows 10 isn't a fun experience on anything other than a fast SSD.

Indeed, I've spent £40 on upgrading a whole load of friends' laptops to SSDs (fast SSDs are pretty cheap these days!), and the difference is night and day on windows 10.

If I want something to run fast I do all of the testing on ancient hardware or artificially constrained VMs.

I'm on 4gb ram with a spinning hard drive and I develop on it. I'd like something a bit faster but it's not a huge deal to use visual studio code, webpack etc.