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18 months ago I purchased a 17" Lenovo Legion with RTX3070, R7 5800H, 1TB SSD, and 32GB ram for $1500 - brand new. It's a bit heavy, but works just fine - I use it for smaller DL projects, too. $5k for the equivalent Tensorbook seems a bit steep, no?

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It sounds amazing to me that today such a powerful machine can be had for a measly $1.5k, and also that it is considered only suitable for “smaller” projects. I remember reading about (a very expensive, no doubt) IBM System/360 that was used by NASA in 1969 (incidentally, the year UNIX was born), and also how people paid upwards of $2k (in 80s money) for an IBM PC with a 4.77 MHz 8088 chip in it.

I remember paying almost $5k for a 133 MHz Desktop computer back in 1995 - came with with Windows 95 which was just released. It was used almost exclusively for office stuff - and was woefully outdated just a couple of years later. At which point the new computer we bought "only" cost around $2k - $2.5k.

Agreed. I just purchased a Maingear Vector Pro 2 with a mobile 3080 Ti (16 GB, ~165W power) for $1700. It's the biggest purchase I've made but I can quickly prototype ML models and it make research projects so much snappier.

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