I agree that such large-scale action is effective.

Masturbating, I’m masturbating. And so are you when you think that voting with your wallet does anything.

Indeed, you are thoroughly pacified. Your objections and moral outage quelled and your sense of significance sustained by the illusion that simply buying from a different conglomerate will have any impact.

Any suggestion that your impotent protest is inadequate must surely come from a childish fool.

I think the point is that we’re deluded to think that voting with our wallets does anything. You still work. You still buy. You still support the system. The one step you’re taking only gets you partway from the couch to the refrigerator. It doesn’t get you out the door and into a protest that would actually make a difference.

I don’t know anything about Mac hardware, but if it’s possible to put another 2gb of RAM in there and an SSD, it should be fine for web browsing.

I did something similar for a friend. I spent about $25 on hardware to put equivalent upgrades in an old laptop that had a single core celeron processor. I installed linux mint xfce. It ran firefox fine but couldn’t quite play smooth video on YouTube. It was otherwise usable. A dual core should be workable.