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Comment by lambdasquirrel | Hacker News Reader

Everything about the base specs are just good enough. I’m not defending it per se, but if you spec’ed the machine for any given purpose, whether software dev, or rendering, it’d probably raise the cost by at least $1-2k, and then you’d have the “real” machine. So, the reason the price looks egregious is because most of it is just base cost.

This is a computer made for the engineers who’ve already “made it,” who are making that $500k a year and are looking for a Porsche over a Corvette.

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It's designed to be useful for more than one kind of "Pro". The old Mac Pro, for instance, seemed to completely forget about music studios and their professional requirements for Macs. This new machine may seem like overkill to software developers, but as an audio engineer, it's perfect.

I don't even want a 1TB SSD in it, the 256 is perfect to hold the OS, a few DAWs, and all the plugins I could ever want. Everything else gets saved to drives in a toaster anyway. A rackmountable unit with a ton of PCI slots for HDX/Dante cards was on my Christmas list, and I'm not alone- there's a reason they made a point of showing how many HDX cards it can fit in their presentation.

It also looks like an amazing workstation for video editors. I really don't think it's designed for software engineers who make 500k a year.

256 is not enough for a serious main drive in a DAW. Sample libraries should all be on the fastest drive. There are single instruments that take up 50GB. And consider that most studios are recording in 24 or 32 bits at higher frequencies than 44.1Khz. 1TB is probably enough for a music production system although I'd personally prefer larger so that I don't have to be swapping things around all the time.

I don't know anyone that keeps their samples / data on their main drive. Most have external thunderbolt enclosures.

Maybe you haven’t looked around in a while; the toasters are Thunderbolt-attached now, and they take (en-cartridged) NVMe SSDs. There’s nothing slow or high-latency about that. Copy your assets over to your project disk from your NAS at the start of a new project, and then forget about it.

Alternatively, forget hotswap and use a Thunderbolt DAS with RAID6. Burn your projects from your DAS to a portable SSD when you want to pass them over. Only takes a minute or two.

In addition to computing I also dabble in woodworking, where there are tools in the 'corvette or porsche' classification that everyone drools over, and those guys can spend way more money on tools at a lower salary than I do for 'fancy' Macbooks. Of course, their tools last 3x longer if taken care of, but the outlay can still be breathtaking.

"A good craftsman doesn't blame his tools" isn't a warning against complaining. It's a warning about picking bad tools in the first place and scapegoating them instead of accepting that it was your decision all along.

Who and/or how many engineers are making $500k a year!?

https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer

Sort by comp

Download and install the app "Blind" to be shamefully informed of how many there are. Seemingly there is either a very large amount, or there are lots of SWEs who like to lie. Lots of it seem like stock options from FAANG and Uber.

I've been on the internet. I know people lie. The OKCupid blog found that "There are consistently 4x the number of people making $100K a year than there should be" [1]. They also lie about their height, and what they look like.

What reason should I have for trusting anonymous self-reported data in a category where people are known to exaggerate?

[1]: https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-big-lies-people-tell-in-onli...

Yeah, so... plenty of software engineers are making $500k a year. That is total compensation; you should expect half of that to come from non-salary things like stock options and bonuses.

Maybe some people are lying, but that seems about right to me for actual senior people (leading projects, maybe managing people).

My last year at Google, my W2 income was in the area of $300,000. I was a "level 5" with good performance reviews, and the scale goes up to 9. I sold all my stock the second it was issued ("autosale"), so the W2 income is pretty close to the amount of cash I got.

Programmers focused on the right task are worth their weight in gold. There are very few fields where an hour of time put in can save society as a whole thousands of hours. Software engineering is one of those, and we get to skim off a little bit of that value we created in the form of cash.

Unfortunately, the 'right' tasks for high TC are too often things like Google+

There is also much software that is complete garbage. If the ones with $500k TC are writing decent software, then those making $100k may be writing the garbage.

Depends a lot on where they're working. I know more than one person that had 15+ years experience that was making around 100k/year, then moved to a FAANG and hit > 500k total compensation in just a 2-3 years.

For OkCupid there's a clear motivation for exaggerating things like height, looks, and income. What motivation does one have for anonymously posting an exaggerated income? Are there really that many trolls who want to depress those making less than $500k/yr?

People like in anonymous communities all the time. One motivation would be to impress other (perceived-to-be) successful members so to be asked for stories to tell, for advice, etc.

I don’t know why people are like that, but anonymity thins out the middle group of semi-/socially-truthful people by providing an opportunity to be much more honest or much less honest than is normally possible.

$500k is achievable total compensation at a few companies for some people, though.

s/SWEs/Anonymous chat participants/

Some Senior/Most Staff SWE and above at FAANG, Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, Dropbox, LinkedIn, etc.

Any FANG company

> This is a computer made for the engineers who’ve already “made it,” who are making that $500k a year and are looking for a Porsche over a Corvette.

Is this what "Pro" means now?

Yes. Move to Vermont or Michigan, get 3 of those new monitors, plus this machine, and bask in the glory as they warm your room in the winter with the heat turned off.

> This is a computer made for the engineers who’ve already “made it,” who are making that $500k a year and are looking for a Porsche over a Corvette.

What about an EV such as a Tesla?

I was tempted to make a joke about the Porsche or Corvette being luxury vehicles but I've noticed we spend way too much time nitpicking after fine details. It deflects from the thesis to do so and I'm not a fan. I can understand GP's point just fine without getting into quibbles over that.

Instead I took umbrage with the idea that a $3000 laptop which is our primary tool is a luxury item. I think it's one of many signs that we're a bunch of cheapskates. Other industries have different perspectives on this.

While I tend towards being a cheapskate on many physical things I also understand diminishing returns, and to me once you hop to the other side of the price-performance curve I define that as a luxury. For me, I get a lot more value out of a laptop and accompanying software ecosystem that helps me be more productive for my typical development cycle, and a lot of the stuff at the OS and above is pretty darn subjective and context-sensitive to the kind of development cycle.

From an overall productivity standpoint, because the biggest bottleneck to programmer productivity is mental and physical health, data would imply that I should spend more on exercise equipment, a better chair that keeps me from getting injured than on a laptop that gets maybe another 10% faster compile of already less than 30 seconds (incremental compilation anyone?) for the $1k difference between a 15" Macbook Pro and a 13" Macbook Air. No amount of money I dump into any hardware or software will make AWS provision its resources everything faster either, and that's what I sit and wait on the most for feedback rather than direct code compiles. And a fat CI / CD server is not run on my laptop unless I'm running Jenkins locally or Concourse.

Am I really a cheapskate if I can do my job just as well on a $1k machine as on a $6k one? The new Mac Pro is overkill for many development workflows.

For a great craftsman, I expect them to get something out of any tool that a lesser person could accomplish. They can make a good tool do things I wouldn't think of, but can also work around the limitations of a lesser tool.

So if you couldn't get anything out of a better tool, I'd start asking uncomfortable questions about you.

Do I think I as a developer could leverage a Mac Pro to speed up my code-build-test cycle? If the whole team had them, then I'd absolutely tune our tools to use the extra cores, monitors, etc. We are better at troubleshooting when the feedback loop is shorter.

But to me the Mac Pro is more of a tool for designers. If a designer is turning in the same work on a 1k machine I would ask about our process first, the designer second, and the tool third.

They run a network of containerized linux machines.

On a serious note: why doesn't Apple do any modern container/virtualization?

For example, why can't you set up containers for different versions of xcode and build your code in the appropriate one? or farm it out?

Then they're waiting for a Taycan.

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