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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

I did this with every high end pro Mac since I was about eight years old. I still have the B&W G3/Cinema Display posters in storage, though I never actually had one.

A couple years ago, I finally got to a place where I could do that and then click Buy. My main workstation is a big black 18 core iMac Pro with an asston of ram, and I love it dearly. It was $15k or so, and I used it to earn well over 20x that during the year I bought it—it was a relatively small expense.

Shake it if you got it.

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What on earth do you do that made you $300,000 and required that kind of hardware? nobody I know outside Hollywood makes that kind of money in media/graphics work.

Nothing I do requires that level of hardware; 100% of what I do could be done on a Raspberry Pi, it would just take a lot longer and be a lot more frustrating. A $300 beater (or even a $3000 reliable used car) and an $80k BMW will both get you from A to B.

I provide security, software/architecture design, and product consulting to small businesses; I have been making and breaking web and web-adjacent applications for 20 years.

It’s super nice not waiting (as much) on one’s computer. The additional RAM is the most important part.

That would count as a requirement in my book - reclaiming as much time as possible from my local development process so that I can spend it doing other things.

I bought an entry-level trash can Mac Pro on launch and it's my daily driver to this day. It's still great but is outclassed by the new MacBook Pros in every way except noise levels. I'm sad that there is no $3000 base model like there was previously, because I really enjoy having development workstations.

I agree wholeheartedly; my time is my only truly nonrenewable resource. I trade money for more time whenever and wherever possible.

That's full time work with 2 weeks vacation at $150/hour, which is a typical mid-high freelancer rate in my experience.

are freelancers typically fully employed? you have lots of downtime and chasing the next client, writing RFPs.

IOW, yes $150/hr full-time == $300k, but $150/hr as a freelancer != $300k.

I only have an 8 core iMac Pro worth 6k and to be frank, it crashes sometimes, it sometimes shows the beach ball and overall it's ok but I would have thought I'd get more for the price (compared to the MacBooks etc. I had over the last 15 years).

50x ROI would seem more impressive.

Shake it, if you got it

Well, I got another year and a half (and counting) out of it after the year in which I bought it, and eBay says it’s still worth at least 50% of what I paid for it, so I think the final ROI is TBD.

Didn't shake it obviously, too bad

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