I ditched reCaptcha and switched to Cloudflare Turnstile recently. It’s been a lot more effective. Not sure about this but I won’t be switching back for the time being.
It's just insane that a gift card redemption can trigger this. What's the rationale? It would make more sense if they just locked the person out of redeeming gift cards or something, not the entire account.
But reading horror stories like this is is why I only use the very bare minimum of any of these cloud services. Keep local copies of everything. For developer accounts, I always create them under a separate email so they're not tied to my personal. At least it can minimize the damage somewhat.
It sucks that I have to take all these extra precautions though. It's definitely made me develop a do not trust any big corp mindset.
Even if you are buying at the low end, hardware simply doesn't age that quickly nowadays. Comparing against of the M series chips, I'd be surprised if anyone found an M1 Air unbearably slow in a blind test. In contrast, there was a huge leap in going from say the Pentium 4 to a Core 2 Duo.
I actually find M1 Air class performance still more acceptable for all my usual dev tasks. I might only need a beefier machine for the extra RAM if I'm spinning up a lot of VMs. Otherwise though, the raw CPU performance is still quite fine.
I haven’t had any issues. I sometimes run two VMs at a time on my 13” MBP with 16GB RAM and although the memory usage is almost maxed most of the time it’s been running fine.