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Comment by macNchz | Hacker News Reader

What is the actual return on that investment, though? This is self indulgence justified as « investment ». I built a pretty beefy PC in 2020 and have made a couple of upgrades since (Ryzen 5950x, 64GB RAM, Radeon 6900XT, a few TB of NVMe) for like $2k all-in. Less than $40/month over that time. It was game changing upgrade from an aging laptop for my purposes of being able to run multiple VMs and a complex dev environment, but I really don’t know what I would have gotten out of replacing it every year since. It’s still blazing fast.

Even recreating it entirely with newer parts every single year would have cost less than $250/mo. Honestly it would probably be negative ROI just dealing with the logistics of replacing it that many times.

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> This is self indulgence justified as « investment ».

Exactly that. There's zero way that level of spending is paying for itself in increased productivity, considering they'll still be 99% as productive spending something like a tenth of that.

It's their luxury spending. Fine. Just don't pretend it's something else, or tell others they ought to be doing the same, right?

I think my point was lost, then. I agree with you there is a HUGE falloff in productivity ROI above maybe $2k/year.

My point is that the extreme right end of the slider, where you go from “diminishing returns” to “no return whatsoever”, still costs less than leasing a Kia. It costs less than my minsicule shabby office in the sketchy part of town. Compared to serious computer business revenues, it isn’t even worth spending the time to talk about. I spend more on housekeepers or car insurance.

Given that, why not just smash the slider to the right and stop worrying about it? For serious computer professionals the difference between a $2k/year hardware budget and a $7k/year hardware budget does not matter.

Every hardware update for me involves hours or sometimes days of faffing with drivers and config and working round new bugs.

Nobody is paying for that time.

And whilst it is 'training', my training time is better spent elsewhere than battling with why cuda won't work on my GPU upgrade.

Therefore, I avoid hardware and software changes merely because a tiny bit more speed isn't worth the hours I'll put in.

My main workstation is similar, basically a top-end AM4 build. I recently bumped from a 6600 XT to a 9070 XT to get more frames in Arc Raiders, but looking at what the cost would be to go to the current-gen platform (AM5 mobo + CPU + DDR5 RAM) I find myself having very little appetite for that upgrade.

The logistics of upgrading a Mac are:

1) rsync home directory over to new machine

2) generate new SE keys in secretive

3) push new authorized_keys out to all servers and test (scripted)

4) start using new machine

5) wipe old machine

It takes a few hours and most of it is waiting on 10GE rsync which only goes at like 3000Mbit and you can still use the source machine while it runs.

Disclosing that you spend half the median income on top-spec Apple hardware every year is a confession, dude. There's no justifying that spend, past, "I like having the newest toys." Happy for you and whatever sales rep whose performance review you're making a slam dunk. It's still not good advice for the vast majority of people who use their computers for work.

You're an economic elite living in what is commonly known as a "bubble"; consider the response to your initial post a momentary popping of it.

I don’t spend anywhere near that. It resells for 60-80% when I replace it a year or two later. That offsets the cost drastically.

Spending $700 per month on your work tools (where that represents 2-3% of revenue) is not unreasonable. My minuscule office space in the shitty part of town costs as much.

I think anyone running their small business that depends on high performance computers should have an annual budget of at least 1% of revenue for hardware.

It's still thousands in unnecessary spend. You've likely thrown away a few years of post-retirement funds, and at least a few months of runway in the case of a crisis or emegency. It doesn't matter if it seems like a reasonable expense as a percentage of revenue, because the marginal improvement in productivity, for the vast majority of people, is going to be insignificant.

You can justify it to yourself however you like, but outside of your bubble, it's a poor allocation of money.

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