Now they can get better hardware, but should they? They take seriously the low tech part, and part of being low tech is fighting against consumerism culture and keeping with what they have, which is wotking fine
No need to be defensive about your ideas like that. The ai craziness came from generative models that create synthetic data. Good old machine learning models have been used a lot to solve many problems and are a perfectly fine tool, that usually doesn't even need so much hardware resources
Which brands have you seen shipping with ubuntu? I've seen vaio, samsung, asus and acer shipping with weird distros. They come like that even from the official stores.
Meanwhile, my dammed dj dropping lots of suicidal thoughts