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solon_kittenSomething that's starting to annoy me slightly with YouTubers talking about vintage machines is this idea that, if it can't do the modern web, it's not really a "useable" machine. They don't say it's that way for most people, or even for themselves. They say it as a blanket statement like it's just a mater of fact.
The problem is, that's like saying a 486 is "unusable" because it can't play Minecraft. The idea isn't even fair in the slightest, since it's often a miracle to get Minecraft running well on a modern non-gaming rig, and it's not uncommon for the modern web to make even gaming rigs become chugging puddles of overheated sadness. YouTube—one of the favored tests for many YouTubers—has made my modern Core-i7 machine with 32GB of DDR4 memory and GeForce 1660 Super get toasty just watching 1080p video. Not because of the video itself, but because the JavaScript running on the page is so horrible that it makes the OS start thrashing the CPU and GPU.
If I use Project VORAPIS to render the page, and yt-dlp with something like mpv or VLC to play the video, even my 2009 Core2Duo iMac with 6GB of DDR3 handles 1080p video like a champ. Hell, downloading an playing the 1080p video natively in Quicktime Player does nothing to the CPU or GPU. It's the website that's the problem, and not even a good browser can save it from that.
It's not even that big of a deal, since I usually ignore those comments anyway, but it can get on my nerves when someone tries to take something like a low-end machine and shove it through hell like it's a modern gaming rig, then judge it based on that alone. Like, get some benchmarks, look at how well it can handle things that make sense for a machine of its era, talk about workarounds you can do (like what I do with my iMac and MacBook Pro). Just don't make unfair judgements based on running terrible code, even if it is something a lot of us put up with.
