BTS: I'm a computer (stop all the downloadin)

So, I said I was gonna buy a Mac Mini, but then I Thought About It a little more. I wish Apple wasn't so committed to ruining their own products to no benefit. They make beautiful computers, i obviously respect the achievements of the M1 chip, but then they make their machines absolutely unusable to anyone who Does A Lot, for really no reason, by leaving out things that would cost them almost nothing.

As sculptures, a Macbook or Mini are beautiful, and as something to hook up to a keyboard and mouse and nothing else, I guess they're fine. As a machine for a "full-contact computer user" (how I describe myself), they're infuriating. I fill in every single port and slot on a PC, no matter how many they are, and I use every single one of them at all times.

The Mini has six ports, total. Four are USB, and only two USB A's. I currently have, I don't know, 8-10 USB ports on my home PC and all are occupied, then I have a USB hub with several more devices. I have problems constantly with things on the hub, as I always have, for 20 years.

The back of the Mac Mini is a veritable expanse of empty metal. Apple could have crammed 12 USB 2.0 ports on there without even using up an entire HSIO lane (are those still a thing?) and probably could have added 2-4 more USB 3.0 ports, but since that's not fashionable, they put two on there. So, if you have a keyboard, a mouse, *and* a USB drive or webcam to plug in, well, it's hub time.

It would take more words and vitriol than I'd like to expend or impose on you to explain why I want nothing to do with the universal #donglelife of the Mac. If I'm spending nearly a grand on a computer, I should not need a hub or dongle to plug in my absolute bare minimum, daily-driver components.

Thinking about the ports situation, and having seeing a YT video where someone was rendering a Resolve compo and getting constant crashes because it was using twice as much RAM as the machine had (albeit on an 8GB machine) I decided that I'm just too sloppy a Computer User to live with a fixed-function workstation, even temporarily. I just don't have the discipline.

So, I decided to build a PC. It costs a little more, but it'll last me much longer, and I won't have to throw as much stuff away if/when I upgrade.

I had about three paragraphs here about "So Where Am I Getting A GPU Anyway", with the initial answer being "I don't know, and I'll figure it out." My initial plan was to just run without a GPU if that's possible; spoiler, it isn't.

I set up the new machine, installed Resolve, built some layered 4k compos and it actually did surprisingly well... until I hit the export. 5.5 FPS, not a frame more. 45 minutes to export two or three minutes of footage. So yeah, you REALLY need a GPU for this, no question about that. Maybe I should do a video about it.

So my NEXT plan was to pull the RTX2070 from my personal desktop and use that at the office for a bit until I could secure another GPU which I could put in my PC at home, but then I went to Amazon and just... found one? There was a 3070 on there, sold by / shipped by Amazon, and I hit order. So... supposedly I'm good to go, and I have a complete system.

In related news: The total income from the streamathon yesterday was about $7200 before tax, around $5450 after. Combined with Patreon and whatever I might get from adsense and youtube supers, I'm probably over $10k ($7k after tax) for the month; that should cover my needs, to put it simply.

It's funny, actually, I completely forgot to figure in tax when I set the original donation goal. $2500 might have just barely garnered enough for the hardware. Whoops! Glad I didn't get just the amount I asked for, I guess!

So yeah that's where I am. I'm hoping to start shooting a new video next week, one that'll leverage the size and capabilities of the new place. Keep an eye out, and thanks for all your help!