lol fine - 3x 2 GB 1333 modules out of a busted 1366 motherboard I found and one 4 GB 1866 module I couldn’t pair with anything, worked fine for years. the i7 got upgraded to workstation and a C2D i found by the dumpster took the server role. same drives, same debian, same docker-compose files - all good so far.

I’ve downgraded my server from 1st gen i7 10 GB RAM (don’t ask) to Core 2 Duo 4 GB with the same load and barely felt it. my entire infra including desktop, laptopS, tablet, phoneS, etc costs like a third of this “missed value”.

not shitting on your choices, but positing that the price-gouging retail market is all there is, kinda disingenuous; there’s sooo much stuff being discarded although perfectly usable.

like, I couldn’t bear the super-expensive raspberries while they were in the $50 range, let alone now. marketplaces are awash in busted laptops, with way better value and performance. discarded corpo desktops can house cheap HDD and run 24/7 for eons. etc.

way more modern CPU and chipset resulting in better power management; also faster and better graphics, but that’s not important for the use case. an undervolted i5 5250u can run with wifi and lit screen in the sub-5W range, netting you 10ish hours of continuous light use out of a decent battery and days of standby (that you can turn into weeks if you implement suspend-then-hibernate). you could make an earilier model work but the price difference should be in the $20 range, so why bother?

edit: microSD, yeah, I guess you can boot off them but why would you want the flaky and slow mess when you got a perfectly fine PCI-E SSD?

macbook air 11 2015 8gb version. just this one and no other, no 13, no 2013, no 4 gb versions, etc.

very linux friendly (once you sort out broadcom wifi drivers), sips power, tolerates undervolt. it’s useless to the apple crowd as it don’t got support for latest OS so it can be had for cheap, even more so if you wanna buy busted units and frankenstein together a new one. also, wide cross-gen parts compatibility. aliexpress got $5 USB-C to Magsafe2 adapter so you don’t gotta haul the charger around.

don’t get the 12" ones, unless they’re close to free. spectacular screen, but the keyboard is atrocious and prone to die, with no option of replacing it, SSD is integrated so can’t get the data off it if something dies, fragile display connection, it’s a shit-show.

thanks. the notification went away after login and I wasn’t able to find its text anywhere in the myriad of pages.

also I’d take this “does not” coming from them with a bag of salt.

this thing here. I’ve dramatically reduced support work at two shops I’ve set this up for. incidents went from from coupla times a month to once a year. not to mention - you don’t need no VPS no more, don’t need no database, nothing, the simplest web hosting will do and it’s very cache friendly.