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Comment by jhbadger | Hacker News Reader

I don't think you can say that -- I paid about that for my 2021 M1 Max with 64GB and I'm still using it four years later as my main machine. There's an argument to be made to buy an expensive computer every 5 years or so rather than a cheaper one that you need to replace every 2 years because it's become unbearably slow.

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Even if you are buying at the low end, hardware simply doesn't age that quickly nowadays. Comparing against of the M series chips, I'd be surprised if anyone found an M1 Air unbearably slow in a blind test. In contrast, there was a huge leap in going from say the Pentium 4 to a Core 2 Duo.

I actually find M1 Air class performance still more acceptable for all my usual dev tasks. I might only need a beefier machine for the extra RAM if I'm spinning up a lot of VMs. Otherwise though, the raw CPU performance is still quite fine.

That's so far from my personal idea of "running it till the wheels fall off" that your comment genuinely reads like a parody of an out of touch wealthy person trying to justify their wild spending habits.

I've been using the same PC that I built in 2013 continuously since then. Every four or five years or so I'll buy one part in the $500 range to keep it updated. It's currently got a Ryzen 7800X3D, 32GB DDR5, and a Radeon RX 6700XT, so it's easily outperforming a brand new $3000 Macbook Pro in most workloads that I actually care about.

My initial investment in it was $1200. My total investment over the last 12 years has been about $3000.

Buying disposable computers simply does not make any financial sense to me.

Same here: I paid about twice as much for my 2013 Mac Pro that I’ll probably keep using until I replace it with an M5 Mac Studio at some point next year, which I’ll then plan to use for at least 5 years.

As for camera lenses, I expect my collection of manual focus F-mount Zeiss primes to have a longer useful life than their owner.

same here; I bought a M2 Max with 96GB of RAM almost 3 years ago, for €4K, but a client paid half of it for a 1 year retainer. This machine is still the best thing i've worked with, and I have zero intentions of switching this machine anytime soon (i'll probably need to replace it's battery in the future). Rather keep the same machine for 5 or 6 years than to buy a crappier one every 2 years

My laptop is still a 2012 MBP. Granted I don’t use a laptop as my main computer, I use a hackintosh desktop. I might finally buy a new laptop in 2026, 14 years is not bad. If my new laptop can last that long I see no problem maxing out the specs at time of purchase.

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