Ask HN: Best work-related purchase under $1000?
Especially interested in things that turned out to be surprisingly worth the purchase.
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Things I've purchased that were absolutely worth it:
CalDigit TS3 Plus
A VESA monitor mount (even though the monitor came with a stand, it still made a huge difference having the flexible arm, and a clean desk underneath it).
The Sony XM4s are fantastic, I wish the mic would be video-call worthy, but it isn't.
The Awair air quality monitor (although I am hearing a lot of terrible things about the company and their misguided crypto sidequest).
An USB3 HDMI frame grabber off Amazon. I use this to plug in any kind of external device (incl. laptops with other operating systems on it) when I am teaching and need to share a workflow off a Windows PC or vice-versa.
A Magsafe puck (I was hell-bent never to buy one), combined with a desk-stand that houses it. It is actually insanely nice to just drop the phone onto this and pick it up and never worry about plugging in/out.
A super long (4-5m?, ~15 feet) USB-C cable. I bring this anywhere I go, it's so nice to plug in and not have to sit by the wall waiting for a charge-up.
Edit: Herman Miller Aeron. Even though I sometimes feel a bit annoyed by the chair forcing me how to sit a certain way when I want to sit in another way, I have sat on every single office chair I came across and within seconds realised that they're inferior to the Aeron.
Things I felt were okay, but didn't live up to my expectations:
Logitech Brio 4k (camera seems ok, software is a disaster and as soon as you go for manual exposure, the frame rate drops to about a frame a second).
Yubikey (this will cause some drama here), I should have bought two, only got one to try it out, but have never used it after setting it up. I worry too much (still) that I mess up and I lose access to important stuff. Still looking for a good top-tier use-case for it (not into crypto).
Sketchapp. This is a while back, but they kept pumping out new versions so quickly, I felt like it would've been better to go straight to Figma or similar at the time.
A medium-sized brightness/color-temp adjustable battery-operated light panel off Amazon for video calls. Wearing glasses, it's impossible to use as a direct light, so best I can do is illuminate a nearby white wall and use it as an indirect light. Battery life went from several hours to half an hour in less about a year, so not particularly happy with it.
Samsung Frame TV: This was mostly for my home, but I was hoping to use it for work occasionally. It's amazing to me just how poor the TV experience still is, in 2022. Crashes often, minimal configurability, the ambient/digital picture frame feature is so gimmicky, it's a joke, switching TV channels takes a good solid second of redrawing the screen, etc. etc.
Tile tags. I loved the concept, I felt bad when Apple almost literally ran them over recently, but I kept replacing batteries literally all the time and the app kept telling me within a few short weeks or months to replace the battery yet again. It's been more of a fleet-like-management issue than the concept itself.