I skip getting a Starbuck's latte, and avoid adding extra guac at Chipotle.
I'm kidding, that stuff has no affect on anything.
Justifiable, as in "does this make practical sense", is not the word, because it doesn't. Justifiable, as in, "does it fit within my budget?" yes that's accurate. I don't have a short answer to why my personal budget is that flexible, but I do remember there was a point in my life where I would ask the same thing as you about other people. The reality is that you either have it or you don't. That being said, nothing I had been doing for money is really going to max this kind of machine out or improve my craft. But things that used to be computationally expensive won't be anymore. Large catalogues of 24 megapixel RAWs used to be computationally expensive. Now I won't even notice, even with larger files and larger videos, and can expand what I do there along with video processing, which is all just entertainment. But I can also do that while running a bunch of docker containers and VMs... within VMs, and not think about it.
This machine, for me, is the catalyst for greater consumptive spending though. I've held off on new cameras, new NASs, new local area networking, because my current laptop and devices would chug under larger files.
Hope there was something to glean from that context. But all I can really offer is "make, or simply have, more money", not really profound.
There's also future-proofing to some degree. I'll probably get a somewhat more loaded laptop than I "need" (though nowhere near $6K) because I'll end up kicking myself if 4 years from now I'm running up against some limit I underspeced.
Yeah I forgot to mention that, its a given for me.
Like there’s the potential tax deductibility, along with being a store of value (it will probably be $2300 in a few years but thats okay), making it easier to rationalize future laptops in the future by trading this one in. But I’m not betting on any of that.
I’ve just been waiting for this specific feature set, I’m upgrading from a maxed out dual GPU 2015 MBP that I purchased in 2017.
I skipped the whole divergence and folly.
No butterfly keyboards, no tolerating usbc while the rest of the world caught up, no usbc charging, no touch bar, I held out. And now I get Apple Silicon which already had rave reviews and blew everything else out of the water in the laptop space, and now I get the version with the RAM I want.
Surprisingly little fanfare, on my end. Which is kind of funny because I remember fondly configuring expensive maxed out Apple computers on their website that I could never afford. Its definitely more monumental if you save money for one specific thing and achieve that. But now I just knew I was already going to do it if Apple released a specific kind of M1 upgrade in a specific chassis, which they did and more. So it fit within my available credit, and which I’ll pay off likely by the end of the week, and I’m also satisfied that I get the points and a spending promotion my credit card had told me about.
A few thousand dollars per year (presumably it will last more than one year) is really not much for the most important piece of equipment a knowledge worker will be using.
I mean, the Audi R8 has an MSRP > $140k and I've never been able to figure out how that is justifiable. So I guess dropping $6k on a laptop could be "justified" by not spending an extra $100k on a traveling machine?
To be clear, I'm not getting one of these, but there's clearly people that will drop extra thousands into a "performance machine" just because they like performance machines and they can do it. It doesn't really need to be justified.
Truthfully, I'm struggling to imagine the scenario where a "performance laptop" is justifiable to produce, in the sense you mean it. Surely, in most cases, a clunky desktop is sufficient and reasonably shipped when traveling, and can provide the required performance in 99% of actual high-performance-needed scenarios.
If I had money to burn, though, I'd definitely be buying a luxury performance laptop before I'd be buying an update to my jalopy. I use my car as little as I possibly can. I use my computer almost all the time.
and yet, when I commented on Apple submissions about 16GB of maximum RAM being not enough in 2021, especially at that price point, people answered to me that I was bragging and their M1 Air with 8GB of RAM was more than enough to do everything, including running a production kubernetes cluster serving thousands of customers.
When commenting on Mac hardware it is always difficult for me to separate wishful thinking, cultism and actual facts.
That's fundamental to how NAND flash memory works. For high-end PCIe Gen4 SSD product lines, the 1TB models are usually not quite as fast as the 2TB models, and 512GB models can barely use the extra bandwidth over PCIe Gen3. But 2TB is usually enough to saturate the SSD controller or host interface when using PCIe Gen4 and TLC NAND.
Not OP but ordered a maxxed out 16" with 1TB SSD (can't justify 2k more for disk space, I'll just buy an external and curb my torrenting).
My work flow is intensive yet critical:
I have at all times the following open:
ELECTRON APPS: Slack, Telegram, Teams, Discord, Git Kraken, VSCode (multiple workspaces hosting different repos all running webpack webservers with hot module reloading), Trading View.
NATIVE APPS: Firefox (10 - 32 tabs, many with live web socket connections such as stock trading sites, various web email providers, and at least one background YouTube video or twitch stream), Chrome (~6 tabs with alternate accounts using similar web socketed connections), iTerm, Torrent client (with multiple active transfers).
All of this is being displayed on two external 4k screens + the laptop.
So ya, I can justify maxxed out specs as my demands are far higher than that of an average user and that's with me actively closing things I don't need. Also my work will happily pay for it, so why not?
Perspective. It was a noise word really. Imagine instead a contractor working $100 an hour and pulling enough hours to make $200k a year. Does that change the discussion any? I don't believe so.
