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Does a 1.2 GHz 64-bit CPU with 1 GB of RAM really qualify as low end these days?

No, it is a very low end machine.

Those specs would have been mainstream 15 years ago, when I had to replace my first thinkpad in 2007 the Acer I brought had a GB of ram and that was a budget machine. Worked very well after I upgraded the OS from Vista to XP.

The Vista to XP 'upgrade' was such a good move.

> Worked very well after I upgraded the OS from Vista to XP.

LOL

Well probably yes if you consider that is possible for the regular consumer to get a 24c/48t Ryzen machine with 64gb ram, running steadily at 4+ ghz

While true, it just doesn’t really seem like a challenge to run Node and Redis and do a bit of web scraping on that. So nothing against Raspberry Pi but I interpreted the spirit of the question as asking about the really long tail of low end systems. NetBSD, for example, runs on Motorola 68K based Mac systems like the Mac Classic II which only supports up to 10 MB of RAM and has a 16 MHz CPU. The top comment talks about adapting a toy with a tiny screen and 32 MB of RAM which is great.

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