I paid for adjectives

December 7, 2025

In 2020, online classes made my hand-me-down setup officially insufficient, so I bought my first real laptop. I found it on a computer shop's Facebook page, read the listing the way you read a menu in a language you don't speak, and paid for the most exciting-sounding words on it.

The first week told me everything. Programs stuttered, crashed, or refused to run together at all. I was not getting the performance I thought I paid for, because I had not actually paid for performance. I had paid for adjectives.

I told myself never again, which turned out to be a productive grudge. I spent the following months learning what the numbers underneath the adjectives meant, then started building: head halfway inside a case, seating memory, routing power cables, taking a static shock every few minutes and calling it fun.

Photo by Alexandre Debiève / Unsplash

The timing was terrible, which helped. I learned to build during the pandemic hardware drought, when a chip shortage, crypto miners, and scalpers reselling parts at twice retail had emptied the shelves. When hardware costs that much, price-to-performance stops being a hobbyist metric and becomes the whole game.

The useful part came later. Friends started forwarding me quotations from computer shops, and I started sending back cheaper part lists that performed better. The record so far is tens of thousands of pesos off a single build. Some shops here price hardware the way airports price water, and the only real defense is knowing what things cost.

I still build my own machines. It started as a grudge against one laptop. It stayed because few things are more satisfying than a machine that does exactly what you paid it to do.

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