This. You're paying for various forms of documentation and support. If you don't need that, there are cheaper (e.g. Orange Pi) or better (1L, thin client) options.
Maybe. Read the fine print of your contract closely. I am not familiar with that system, but my experience with boards like this is that they have "support", but often not in the mainline kernel, it is in patches that they apply to some yocto build and so you are always several years behind the latest kernel. You may also discover that the support doesn't cover some accessories and so you may not be able to upgrade if you want wifi to work. They will backport knows CVE fixes, but anything that was fixed without realizing it should be a CVE will never be back ported.
Anecdotally, it is definitely the case that an employee whose residence in the USA is contingent on an H1B or STEM OPT visa will accept worse pay and conditions. A US citizen in the same job will do 2 years and quit for better money elsewhere.
The question is whether jobs in low-margin industries would exist at all if the immigrant workers weren't there to do it. It's not cut and dried, but the research tends to suggest that cutting immigration would hurt both employers and the workforce.
My last employer (manufacturing sector) flat out refused to consider paying $100,000 for a non-resident H1B. Employers that did fork out were likely hiring top level or very scarce talent. An "immigrant dividend" paid by employers would simply restrict immigration to highly paid work.
As it is, H1B visas already go primarily to highly paid (mostly tech) workers. The problem is that most immigrants arrive in the US by different avenues. Who pays for spouses and dependents? Asylum seekers?
As for Microsoft: it is not a low-margin business. If Microsoft is suppressing labor costs to juice profits, that is the sign of a company that does not know how to use the talent it has at its disposal.
Anecdotally, lower margin industries (think manufacturing sector) employ almost exclusively immigrant tech workers because the salaries are too low to retain any but the least skilled US coders.
The naive interpretation is that these companies would pay higher wages without access to H1B workers.
Studies like TFA suggest that is not actually true. Companies in all sectors are constrained by the availability of skilled labor and to some extent are paying what they can afford.
Reducing the number of H1B visas would likely hurt employers to the extent that their workers would suffer. It is not sensible to pretend that all of those jobs would still exist if you cut the H1B program.
Really? "Estimates from the Office for National Statistics suggest that total net migration was 171,000 in 2025. This figure is lower than net migration levels during the 2010s and represents a sharp decline compared to the year ending March 2023, when net migration peaked at a historical high of 944,000 (Figure 2)."
So we're gonna treat 944000 as less than a million I guess? If we also count illegals, as we should since they exist and keep arriving, that year was probably around a million. Even if we don't count them - it's very close to a million.
The boundary is not entirely distinct, but if your facsimile is poaching 93% of the revenue of the original then it deserves some scrutiny.
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