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It's waste by definition. It's social signalling. It's sort of like blockchain proof of work, you show your commitment by displaying hard to fake wasted resources.

Social signalling isn't necessarily a waste, especially if you have a very high profile. When Justin Theroux shows up at an animal shelter and posts a photo of some dogs on Instagram, those dogs get adopted and it raises the profile of those animal shelters.

No, more like hard to fake abundance of resources. Whether they're wasted or not is in the eye of the beholder.

Is it a waste to make people have a better impression of you? Depends on your job I guess?

Interesting you bring up "hardware". What do you mean by that?

Presumably a Mac instead of Thinkpad ?

That was my interpretation initially - I'm guilty of judging people based on this in college. I usually perceived folks in my CS classes that had large 17 inch gaming laptops as being less competent than the folks that had Macbooks. I even recommended a few of my friends switch to Macbooks because of this (which they did).

Though in retrospect, this ended up being a pretty valid heuristic.