Tell HN: Paul’s law”: the computer you really want is $5k | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Paul’s law”: the computer you really want is $5k

5 pointsandrewstuart9 comments

My brother Paul back in the early 1990’s once said “the computer you really want is always $5,000”.

This has held remarkably true for 35 years. Sure you can invalid it easily by saying you want a Cray XMP or a fancy Apple or whatever but fact is for consumer machines, the computer you really want - a really nice fast machine at the high end of the consumer range - has been about $5,000 for a long time, and remains true.

It was even true through the mid to late 70s and 80s.

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Paid about that for my 20Mhz 286 in 1987. With the fancy EGA card that had a 640x400 that mode nothing actually used.

This has been true for me--I have paid around that twice in the 90s. Once for an IBM PS/2 Model 77 40MB 486DX2 66MHz, NEC 5fg monitor, rare Microchannel SoundBlaster-compatible card. And again for a kitted-out Toshiba Protoge CT-320 48MB 10.4" 1024x600, dock, PC Card network + SCSI.

Before that I got a PC clone 386-33MHz 8MB with sram cache, overclocked 11MHz ISA bus, ATI graphics card to run OS/2 1.3. It was awesome and my first professional grade development machine. It wasn't all that much ~$2k.

I can't say that it's true for me now. Maybe if I included a high-end GPU for ML. Now I'd rather have multiple machines for purposes: development, gaming/VR, super portable (Surface Go).

I just built a Zen 4 ‘gaming computer’ and would say a big configuration of that could get in the $5K range.

AMD makes server chips with an insane number of cores, unlike the Ryzen 9 these are typically air cooled, not water cooled. That kind of machine loaded with GPUs will scream like a banshee and disturb people in their business meetings even a few doors away. If that was domesticated to make a powerful workstation it would go way over the limit.

Tangentially: Even though I develop code on a computer with 16 cores and 32 threads, my IDE still lags frequently. Because I develop on windows and the best C++ IDE for windows is visual studio. And it's likely that visual studio's main thread usage (GUI thread) is suboptimal.

Anyways, IMO it's not always about the 'hardware you want'. Sometimes, it's about the software you want.

I have better one: "TV always costs 1000."

In 1958 cheapest car made in Russia was 1000 and BW-TV 1000.

In 1968 Fiat Bambino was 6000 and Color-TV 1000.

In 1996 the best washing machine was 1000 and Plasma-TV 1000.

In 2023 reasonably big smart-TV is 1000€.

Monetary units have been devalued and changed. But TV always costs 1000 units regardless.

I think that John Dvorak wrote that in one of his columns long ago. Maybe he got it from your brother.

I dunno. What I want exactly isn't available (X1 Carbon w/ AMD Ryzen) but the closest things for sale are all <$2,000. A fully equipped T14s with the biggest Ryzen is $1,200 or so.

Add the RTX 4090

I'm not really into gaming much, sometimes retro stuff. So I haven't used a dedicated graphics card in a decade or longer.

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