I don't think you can say that -- I paid about that for my 2021 M1 Max with 64GB and I'm still using it four years later as my main machine. There's an argument to be made to buy an expensive computer every 5 years or so rather than a cheaper one that you need to replace every 2 years because it's become unbearably slow.
Same here: I paid about twice as much for my 2013 Mac Pro that I’ll probably keep using until I replace it with an M5 Mac Studio at some point next year, which I’ll then plan to use for at least 5 years.
As for camera lenses, I expect my collection of manual focus F-mount Zeiss primes to have a longer useful life than their owner.
My laptop is still a 2012 MBP. Granted I don’t use a laptop as my main computer, I use a hackintosh desktop. I might finally buy a new laptop in 2026, 14 years is not bad. If my new laptop can last that long I see no problem maxing out the specs at time of purchase.
What does the purchase price have to do with it? Seems like it would entirely depend on circumstances and constraints, rather than cost, how long someone would run something
I reckon it makes some sense for Apple users. You have to be willing (and financially able) to upgrade when Apple says. Apple forcefully obsoletes their products way too quickly to be a viable option if you care about longevity[0]. I have five excellent-condition still-perfectly-working Apple products next to me, none of which have current operating system support from Apple.
[0] EDIT: for reference, my previous ThinkPad lasted me 14 years.
14 is a indeed very long. Let’s instead assume 12, it’s 2013 and you got a top specced T440 with 4th gen i7. That’s actually not bad and the build quality is like a tank as all Thinkpads. Nothing I would use as daily driver myself but having used many other thinkpads of that generation I can see why others are still getting by with it today.
Since we are talking about OS support. 4th gen Intel isn’t supported by Windows 11, so you’d have to upgrade to Linux.
That's not particularly rational given how quickly computers progress in both performance and cost, a current-gen $1k Macbook Air will run circles around your M1. You'd probably be much better off spending the same amount of money on cheaper machines with a more frequent upgrade cadence. And you can always sell your old ones on eBay or something.
There are other factors to consider such as screen size, storage and RAM, connectivity and ports, active versus passive cooling (thermal throttling), and speaker quality. Additionally, the M1 Pro GPU benchmarks still outperform the latest M4 Air.
For example if I spec out a 13" M4 MBA to match my current 14" M1 Pro MBP, which with tax came to ~$3k in 2021 (32GB RAM, 1TB storage), that $1k MBA ends up being ~$1900. Now that more frequent upgrade cadence doesn't make as much sense financially. After one purchase and one upgrade, you've exceeded the cost of the M1 Pro MBP purchase.
Overall I don't disagree with your sentiment, especially for more casual use cases, but progress will never stop. There will always be a newer laptop with better specs coming out. I personally would rather beef up a machine and then drive it until it dies or can no longer perform the tasks I need it to.
i like using computers until they break on me, i've never really felt (for the usage i give my macbook) that it is lacking in power. Even after, what, 5 years?
i think i'll be upgrading in the next 2 or maybe 3 years if apple puts OLED screens on their new machines as it is rumored.
Respectfully, this is also bullshit for my use case. For me, the M1 purchase was a step up compared to Intel; the rest is diminishing returns for now.
It’s also not true if you care about certain workloads like LLM performance. My biggest concern for example is memory size and bandwidth, and older chips compare quite favorably to new chips where “GPU VRAM size” now differentiates the premium market and becomes a further upsell, making it less cost-effective. :( I can justify $3k for “run a small LLM on my laptop for my job as ML researcher,” but I still can’t justify $10k for “run a larger model on my Mac Studio”
M2 here also, still flies for cross platform mobile development. The 250GB storage space is a bit tight without external storage but my dev environment is lean and purges caches every day so I manage easily.
Just off the top of my head in hobbies that I've been in/around that this $3k would be a nothing burger: photography, wood working, grease monkey, cycling, gun collecting, antiquing, recreational substances...
Fiberglass sailboats last forever and the hobby is dying as people age out of it. I’m in the sailing community and get offered nice free boats in usable condition every year, but already have 2 so refuse any more. This year alone I’ve turned down both a 40ft and a 23ft free boats from 80-90 year old friends that aged out. Parts are expensive, but if you can do repairs yourself, you can absolutely own a pretty nice sailboat for about what it costs for a new apple laptop. I paid $1800 at auction for my most recent sailboat and it is only 7 years old, and needed nothing. Did an overnight trip on it recently.
I want to find a way to revive the hobby by showing younger people short on money that they can get into sailing for less than they already spend on much less rewarding stuff like app subscriptions and smartphones.
Well, there’s hobbies and there’s a buying addiction that comes with a hobby.
In many areas there’s a tendency to overdo it with tools, gadgets and also to compensate for lack of skill with more gadgets. I do woodworking for example and my total spend for industrial vacuum, different types of power and hand tools, work bench, clamps, etc probably comes to around a few thousand EUR. Mine is a really good set-up for a hobby, but I still don’t have any stationary machines or fancy separate work area or room.
I bought everything over the years and I only buy brand-name. My point is, this is actually a lot of money especially if spent as lump sum and not at all a “nothing-burger”.
Knitting / crocheting / quilting / embroidering? Drawing / painting / calligraphy? Singing in a choir? Creative writing / journaling / blogging? Solving crossword puzzles? Bird watching? Day hikes? Reading? Visiting museums? Learning about history / philosophy / art / whatever? Learning a language? Taking dance classes? Playing chess or petanque or any other game that doesn’t require expensive gear? Or most sports?
Besides programming, my hobbies are writing stories, writing and recording songs, drawing, and painting. None of them needs to cost anywhere near $3000. Any of them can cost as much as you want.
Take the music hobby as an example. I have several expensive guitars now, but in the first 20 years of that hobby I probably spent under $1000 on guitars and related gear the entire time.
A lot of things are cheap to taste — a second hand bike and some $200 running shoes and you’re training for a triathlon. Or a makerspace membership and you’re now sewing or doing 3d printing.
It’s once you get “serious” and need to have your own equipment that all these things get real. Or in the case of things like social dance, you want to take time off with and travel further and further away to attend pricey exchanges and camps.
It’s perfectly possible to enjoy hobbies deeply without getting “serious” in the way you describe.
I’ve taken my 10 euro dance classes for years without feeling the necessity of pricey exchanges and camps.
My neighbour goes to the park many evenings to play petanque, doesn’t cost him anything.
A couple I’m friends with goes on day hikes where they do bird watching—maybe they bought a nice pair of binoculars once? Another couple likes to lay jigsaw puzzles together, not exactly breaking the bank!
My sister is learning Finnish because she never learned a non indo-european language. She bought a book.
I would wager most people’s hobbies are low key like this because either they don’t have disposable income to spend on them, or they don’t want too!
Absolutely yeah, and regardless of whether it ends up eventually being expensive, I think part of what I’m saying is that it is important to know how to at least start something cheaply.
I get very frustrated with the kind of people who see one tiktok about a thing and suddenly feel like they need to spend $3k to pursue whatever their new passion is.
I mean if you ranked all the hobbies in terms of cost, casually spending $3k on a laptop would be near the top of the list. But there are a small number of hobbies that are vastly more expensive.
The distribution is highly skewed. Like wealth. The 99th percentile are near the top in rank (by definition) but nowhere near the top in absolute terms.
I can not think of many hobbies which are less expensive if you are serious about them. Some hobbies around me, where $3000 wouldn't get you far: Motorcycles, cars, cycling, collecting anything, woodworking, machining, music making, traveling, horses,...
Some of those, like horses, are 1% hobbies. But many of the others can be done very affordably. Buying used equipment, learning from YouTube and online resources, starting small and scaling gradually make most of those hobbies accessible at a fraction of the cost.
I can think of dozens. Running, dance, knitting, painting, woodworking (you can go very far for much less than $3k), archery, chess, board games, drawing, painting, brewing, darts, cycling, etc. etc.
Obviously you can spend pretty much any amount of money on those if you want (if you are "serious" about it) but you don't have to and most people don't. Also he said this $3k expenditure wasn't for serious work.
I interpreted it as: if you include all hobbies and games made by humans in history, I'm pretty sure most of them involve a set of cards made of paper, some others involving wooden figurines (chess, checkers) or even drawing on dirt with a stick.
A computer is many, many orders of magnitude more complex and expensive than that.
This isn't said with the intention to demonize expensive hobbies if no one is harmed because of it.
But I do sometimes wonder if my hobbies are too dependent of a power plug. Even reading, which I do with a e-reader.
It’s a doable common hobby for middle class Americans. I grew up in a rural area with a dirt airstrip and everyone owned planes- even people that could barely afford a reliable used car. You can sometimes find something like an old Cessna for about $20k, and if you’re willing to do “experimental” planes that you fix yourself, sometimes just a few $k. Like anything, if you’re an insider in the community you can get good deals, sometimes even free from friends that age out, etc.
Many universities in rural areas have student clubs that offer lessons and rent club owned planes for cheap.
Worked hard, won a lottery, whatever. It mostly says that these are people with tens of thousands to burn on fun stuff, and such people are a rather narrow slice of the population. There's nothing bad about that, it's just a rather niche community, whose opinions may not be very relevant for the large majority of people outside that niche.
HN is that niche community though. HN is a forum targeting a niche community that skews technical no matter where someone is physically from, and that community skews relatively rich. Concern trolling that there are starving kids in Africa when there are literal billionaires posting here; I mean sure, I'm not saying we shouldn't say something for fear of their feelings. Nor am I saying that everyone here must be rich in order to comment her. Just that some members of the niche community can recognize are inordinately rich. Advertising eg the Volonaut here will likely generate a couple of sales, and if you thought a $3k laptop was a lot, definitely don't look that one up.
This whole discussion is weird. For the majority of the world's population, dropping $3K on a computer is a non-starter, if even possible. Over six hundred million people cannot even afford proper food and shelter. But there are also sixty-two million millionaires in the world. So there are a large number of people who can buy a MBP without even blinking. We've just discovered income disparity. What the heck does that obvious truth have to add to a review of a MBP?
The "mac community" is even worse. I recently spend $4k on linux laptop, and I get endless criticism, that it is "too expensive" for a "windows pc". I need spec for my work, and comparable mac is 4x more expensive!
How does Haskell deal with things like memory-mapped I/O or signal handlers where the value of a variable can be changed by factors outside of the programmer's control?
Side effecting computations that depend on the "real world" go into an IO monad. The game in Haskell is shifting as much of the codebase as possible into pure functions/non-side-effecting code, because it's easier to reason about and prove correct.
IORefs usually, which can only be manipulated within the IO monad, so they tend to only get used at the top level and passed down to pure functions as parameters.
I like Evernote but it just isn’t worth $130 / year for me. Last year they had a sale for $50 (or was it $60) for a year and I paid for that. If I can’t renew at that I’ll have to figure out how to migrate to Obsidian.
Two things I suspect I'll miss from Evernote is their web clipper and their OCR.
Last time I tried the Obsidian web clipper, it was pretty rough. It would drop images or include ads. I found the Evernote clipper to be pretty much flawless.
Evernote's OCR capabilities are also great. Somehow it's able to do a better job of recognizing my handwriting than even I can do sometimes. Last I checked, Obsidian isn't very good at this which is strange because the two big platforms — Windows and MacOS — both have excellent OCR APIs they could use for free.
Wait a sec — you're saying you'll take the time and trouble to "... figure out how to migrate to Obsidian" rather than pay the $70-$80 renewal premium over what you paid last year? Let's do a thought experiment. Suppose you spend a total of 3 hours from start to finish doing the migration. That's the equivalent of being paid $25/hour in lieu of paying the Evernote full price renewal as opposed to what you paid on sale last year. I have a feeling you would not consider that close to being what your time is worth nor to what you're paid in your day job.
You might be surprised to know that I also mow my lawn, I clean home, I cook sometimes, I do laundry, I drive myself to work, and I sometimes even watch TV, spend time on HN, or play video games.
Aside from the fact that such calculations aren't necessarily applicable anyway, it is incorrect because they would most likely have continued to use and have to pay for Evernote for more than just the one year.
I'm trying to imagine a product manager calling me to say, "Hi, we just bought this product you use, we're raising prices and firing the dev team. But hahahaha, you can't quit us, I have a spreadsheet here that says your time escaping our clutches will cost you more than paying the extortion fee to cover us buying the tool and the profit we need. Tough luck, but you have no logical alternative."
I'm not sure that my relationship with tools is so bloodless that it is only driven by dollars, cents, and minutes. I'm not sure I have to clench my teeth and write that product manager a cheque.
I don't think they're tone deaf, they just know that inexpensive gaming headsets can't make them enough money. They've invested something like $100 billion into VR and "only" sold 20 million headsets The revenue generated annually is almost nothing.
I get what they are trying to say. Looking for negatives is the problem.
When I was in college I got into beer. I was brewing at home and whenever I went out I was looking for something new and tasting it like I was a beer critic. It was great fun at first, but then the more refined my palate got, the less I found myself being able to find beer I enjoyed. Like if I went to a hockey game, I'd complain about the only choices being Bud and Bud light.
So I decided to look for positives rather than negatives and my enjoyment level went back up again. No matter where I am, I can find a beer that I enjoy. And that means when I'm in the bleachers on a sunny day watching a baseball game, a Bud Light and a hot dog might be absolutely perfect.
Coffee is the same for me. I was in Toronto this summer and went to The Library Specialty Coffee and had the best pour over I think I've ever had. The next morning I was up early and popped out for a Tim Horton's coffee and it was way different, but exactly what I wanted at that time.
IMHO, being a fan is a lot more fun than being a critic.
Tell me more! I need to hear this! I'm fed up with being a critic. It feels like a trap I set myself into without realizing. I'm at the point where I can only enjoy coffee brew at home with expensive toys and I'm becoming miserable about it: Id prefer the freedom to have anything anywhere while being able to enjoy.
Applies to coffee but also other things. So yeah, pls tell us more.
I mean, I'm not advocating for snobbery or being a critic at all.
One time I was walking around Belgium in the rain, I was cold and every single restaurant or bar (some serve food) was packed and wouldn't let new patrons in.
After walking around for about 35 minutes we found a cozy bar, had a beer, and discovered that they had a big pot of spicy pasta in the back, where you could pay €1 to ladle full a plate. In my memory, that is still the best meal I've ever tasted. And I'm definitely a haute cuisine enjoyer, been to a fair bit of Michelin restaurants.
I'm not an expert, but my layman's understanding of AI was that AGI meant the ability to learn in an abstract way.
Give me a dumb robot that can learn and I should be able to teach it how to drive, argue in court, write poetry, pull weeds in a field, or fold laundry the same way I could teach a person to do those things.
reply