AITB for telling a friend he bought a literal brick after he ignored all my technical advice

I have been working in systems administration for over eight years and my friends treat me like a walking encyclopedia for anything with a power button. Usually i do not mind giving a quick sugest or checking a link but things went south with a guy from my local hiking group last week. Let us call him Greg. Greg is one of those people who wants top tier performance but has the budget of a high schooler and refuses to understand that those two things do not mix.

He spent three weeks bugging me about buying a new laptop because he wanted to start doing some light video editing for his drone footage. I actually sat down and sent him a detailed list of three differrent options. I made sure they had enough ram and a decent dedicated gpu so he would not be staring at a loading screen all day. I even found him some refurbished deals that were well within his price range. I did the legwork for him for free because I thought we were cool.

Yesterday he shows up to our meeting point with a brand new box and a huge grin on his face. I took one look at the specs on the side and my heart sank. It was a bottom tier budget model with four gigs of ram and a processor that belongs in a smart fridge from 2015. He told me he saw it on sale at a big box store and figured it was just as good as the ones I sent him but eighty bucks cheaper. I told him straight up that he bought a literal brick and it was going to struggle to open a web browser let alone edit 4k drone footage.

Greg did not like that. He started getting defensive saying that technology is all the same now and that I am just a tech snob who likes overpaying for brands. I told him he was free to believe that until he tried to actually use it. Fast forward to last night and he is blowing up the group chat because the laptop froze three times while he was just trying to install his editing software. He actually had the nerve to say that it was my fault because I did not warn him enough about how bad the cheap models are.

I finally snapped and told him that if he is too cheap to follow professional advice then he deserves to deal with the lag. I told him he wasted his own money and my time. Now a couple of the other guys in the hiking group are saying I was too harsh and that Greg is just "tech challenged" and I should have been more patient. I think that if you ask for an experts opinion and then do the exact opposite you lose the right to complain when things go wrong.

I am currently sitting here looking at another notification from him asking if I can "optimize" it for him. There is no optimizing a potato Greg. I am not going to spend my Sunday trying to squeeze performance out of a piece of plastic that is already obsolete. I guess I am the elitist jerk now because I understand how hardware works. It is just so exhausting dealing with people who want a ferrari for the price of a tricycle and then get mad at the mechanic .