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Getting a 2000 computer every 2 years is vast overkill. A 1000$ computer every 4+ years is fine for the vast majority of users and under that if you don’t need a laptop.

As to 500$ a month, many people live fairly comfortably on that in very low cost of living areas. Also, setting that money aside can add up quickly.

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Can confirm, my $1,200 i7, 16 GB Ram, SSD is four years old now. I can easily get through the year with it as well.

Saving like that on computers is a difference of about $60/month. I think most developers reading Hacker News can add more value than that with the faster hardware.

Not if your only income is a ~500$ a month side business.

The effort of upgrading hardware take quite a bit of development time. Even if hardware was free I don’t think a 2 year upgrade cycle is worth it based on how slowly hardware is improving.

As to buying 1k vs 2k computers without a gaming graphics card or the need for massive storage you hit real diminishing returns at around 1k. 500gb SSD (90$) case (30$) PSU (40$) CPU (200$) MB (100$) RAM (200$) -= 660 for the guts, buy two 22 inch 1080P monitors for 100$ and you got 140$ for an OS keyboard and mouse. Sure you could spend 4x that but it’s not going to make that much difference.

I was assuming laptop for some reason. For desktops this makes sense.

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