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Comment by damagednoob | Hacker News Reader

> Why is buying something 10x more powerful than you'd need at 2x the price "good value"?

I would argue in the same way that buying an expensive pair of boots that last longer than a cheap pair to be good value.

> You should have a look at Windows' desktop market share and get back to us. They still own the space.

What is the trend line and how much is that space growing by relative to other devices like mobile phones and tablets?

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> The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

> I would argue in the same way that buying an expensive pair of boots that last longer than a cheap pair to be good value.

While a fair argument, I think its also fair to counter that the conditions in which you may use your boots don't arbitrarily change and get less efficient and more difficult over time. Sure maybe sometimes you'll be hiking through mud but that will dry out and get back to normal, whereas software might turn into quicksand as hardware gets older. Future proofing your hardware is effective, but only to a point.

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