I don’t think there’s any pride in it, they are just going after what is the most profitable at any given time.
That’s exactly why I suspect they will choose to resurrect the Crucial name later, because given a choice between launching a new name nobody knows, or a name people recognise (even if it’s been tarred a bit) then recognised will be the winning and more profitable option.
That is, if they haven’t sold the Crucial name to someone else first.
Probably just the same brand, honestly?
News two years from now: “Crucial back in business”
I’m primarily using eBay, but I didn’t name names because the best option where other people are may vary.
The seller I bought from wasn’t actually an auction (though auctions can be great too) - it was a “buy it now” item from a business seller who does electrical “waste” recycling for office businesses.
Regardless of the platform, those kind of sellers are ideal because they have a lot of inventory and are more concerned with getting rid of it than they are with getting the highest price on any single item.
The place to get decent budget laptops is auction sites, second-hand marketplace listings, charities, and office clearance companies (many of whom are also listing on the auction sites).
For under £100 I got a i7 ThinkPad with 16GB RAM and the ‘Yoga’ fold capability, fully tricked out with touch screen, wacom pen, fingerprint reader and the rest - and even better it all works under Linux, even the fingerprint reader.
There’s a genuine reason the stereotype of weebs with programming socks and a used thinkpad exists.
New devices built to be cheap right from new can never compete for value against pre-owned business machines.
You’d have to assume so!
Honestly, I had completely the opposite experience with Dredge.
The first few days in the game feel truly scary, with your terribly slow ship, and every strange light in the darkness is terrifying. Those initial quests with the pulsating wet package are creepy, and you wonder where that’s going to lead, and what storyline will come from that.
But then, you get a few engine upgrades and there’s suddenly not a single danger in the game you can’t easily run from. You’re invincible and the whole ocean is your oyster. The pulsating package was just a bit of flavour and nothing comes of it at all - in fact the quests in the game are almost entirely plain fetch quests, totally shallow with very little real story. And while the ending gets interesting, it’s all too brief.
Now don’t get me wrong - I loved Dredge, actually! But I loved it as a cosy collect-em-all fishing sim, bombing around the ocean in your fun and zoomy boat, rather than the narrative-driven Lovecraftian horror the trailers made it out to be, which ultimately I felt it wasn’t at all.
Still fun, though!
The catchphrase doesn’t mean you should be wary of free software, it means you should be wary of free services.
If a service costs you no money to use, and yet costs the operator money to provide, you should think carefully about how the operator is financing it - because it may be via capture and sale of your data, or other undesirable means.
Amazing and benevolent free software does exist (and lots of it!) but there’s a reason FOSS and self-hosted are often said in the same breath. Giving away software for free costs nothing (aside from the generosity of the developer’s time) but hosting software as a service costs money, and that’s why if a service is free you should exercise suspicion.
Also - a shoutout to our Lemmy Admins as proof that this isn’t always true, and for hosting the fediverse for free out of their own pockets, simply because it’s a cause they believe in.