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Comment by nostalgk | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, it is a bit tougher when Macs are so expensive. When my PC breaks, I have 4 other options I can count off the top of my head. When my Mac breaks, I only can afford to have one spare, and even that is more of a matter of lucky circumstance.

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Before I could afford MacBooks, I bought old ThinkPads off Craigslist and put Ubuntu on them.

I could find ways to do most things. Nowadays it's a lot easier.

Hell, a Raspberry Pi will do in a pinch... I mostly just need a terminal, I can spin up a beefy Hetzner server to work on for a few days for $1.

I think this is one of the benefits of being a programmer. Our tools and materials can be easily stored in an online-accessible way, such that a git clone can recreate your entire environment and all the code you were working on. I don't know if any non-programmers who primarily rely on their laptops do (or can do) the same, much less people who work with music or videos or photos, who often have (hundreds of) gigabytes they need to work on with no real version control, and require much more effort and financial investment to be able to backup, duplicate and restore.

Yeah, it's interesting how, when your job is making things, you manage to make things to make making other things easier, so your ability improves exponentially.

Musicians make music, so they have to rely on other people making tools for them, whereas toolmakers can just make better tools for themselves.

That is, if you can avoid reinventing the wheel, which we aren't great at.

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