Don’t be. I’m fortunate to be able to afford it comfortably, and it’s just part of the cost of living to me. In my 40s now and been wearing glasses since I was 10yo.

I’m just happy I’ll be able to read fine print and see stuff close again without needing to take off my glasses.

I recently went for glasses and eye exam. Near sighted with astigmatism, and now I need bifocals on top of it. Bifocals with line aren’t common now so doctor suggested progressives. I’m fine with that.

I’m also a special kid who can’t wear polycarbonate lenses because I’m hypersensitive to chromatic aberration. So need Trivex lenses as well. Throw in an anti-glare coating and my cost (with insurance) is like $460.

The sad part is given my needs and how few carry Trivex in my area, I consider it a decent deal.

Face it, they can do whatever they want with your computer and you’re powerless to stop them.

Not my computer. They can’t do shit if it’s not installed.

This is why you should not trust them regarding Recall. They will not let it go. It will be forced on you eventually.

You’re not likely to do that for $150. You might be able to pull an old Dell Precision T5500 tower with a weak Xeon on eBay for cheap and refit it with more ram, better CPU and cheap non-redundant storage for $200 - $250.

For sake of power requirements though, seriously consider your use case and needs. You can get by pretty well with cheap mini-PCs like Intel NUCs or AMD minis like Beelink for pretty cheap and just cluster them with something like Proxmox to scale out instead of up when you need additional resources. This will be reasonably priced and keep the power bill and noise levels down.

Yeah, don’t accept trash from strangers.

My wife and I have somewhere around 450 hours in it (each). It’s fantastic.

Be sure to update the factory files to point it to a better external player. The built in one for Jellyfin sounds terrible.

Eh, I like Plexamp’s features, but the app is not exactly free, more “freemium.” All the compelling features that you’d want to use it for are behind the subscription paywall. DJ, track and album radio, the unique features aren’t free.

Also, at least on iOS the app feels clunky and sluggish with long delays when skipping, scrubbing, playing, and pausing. (EDIT - turns out this is specifically an issue when using Airplay, it’s fine for local playback).

My wife uses Plexamp on desktop (Mac and PC) and it seems good there. I personally tend to use the WiiM app for Wiim mini with Asset UPnP server.

If you have Plex pass there’s a built in auto leveling setting, but it’s not available on the free version.

Alternately foobar2000 or other tools can apply replaygain but you’ll need a renderer that will actually use it. I use Asset UPnP.