In my curiosity, I bought a Nook Simple Touch off eBay for 15 dollars a few months ago. It actually works really great for reading EPUBs off Overdrive and OpenLibrary, and it definitely makes night reading a hell of a lot more comfortable, lasts quite long on battery, even as a cheap second hand device.
bbmb
Name is Brent, pals screwing around. Pal takes Mr. Krabs quote, "sponge boy bob", puts name in, "brent boy bob." Abbreviates to bbmb, "m" is pronoun.
I use a near-base model 2020 M1 Air, 512GB SSD and still 8GB RAM. One thing I can confirm is that this thing very rarely slows down. That being said, I'm a software developer that doesn't do anything THAT rigorous, but I've been able to smoothly do tasks in the background during compiling, and goes through it quickly. I have some friends that do heavy work with Logic Pro, and their base M1s have no problem as well.
So all in all, whilst it ultimately depends on the type of work and intent to be done with it, $3000 is still probably overkill, even with a Mac.
I just started using kbin.social after not really feeling satisfied with Mastodon personally, wanting something more topical like Lemmy, but I still wanted some Mastodon compatibility due to most of my mutuals on the Fediverse using Mastodon. Landed myself here, so far so good!
I tried out Mastodon once, never really got into it. Fast forward to Twitter's acquisition, shit hit the fan, you know the story, but I wasn't really convinced until some of the decisions lately. Tried out Mastodon again, and whilst it was nice, it wasn't really for me. I figured I'd try looking for another instance, and I ended up landing myself on Kbin as it has Lemmy support for topical discussions, as well as microblogging capabilities for who I keep track of on Mastodon. I don't post that actively, but it's been great so far!