When you spend 15 hours a day in front of a computer every day, you want the best experience for yourself. It’s the one place where I’m totally happy to be a bit extravagant rather than fancy clothes, cars, home location etc
As an adult working on my car, I get the right tools, and that sure makes for both a much easier time and getting professional results.
If you're into electronics, spending $$$ on a quality soldering iron is night and day in terms of time and money saved on the project. I discovered this because that was my side job in college, assembling circuit boards, and they gave me a pro soldering iron and what an amazing difference that was.
If your business is your video blog, getting a professional quality mike and camera is a good investment.
To the car example, I've done a moderate amount of work on my car in the past year. When I started, I had a junk set of sockets and wrenches from Walmart. I had a socket split in half when I was trying to loosen a bolt. Obviously the tools I had weren't up to the task. So I went to the hardware store and bought Crescent brand tools. They work great for a hobbyist like me. I don't do nearly enough mechanical work to require SnapOn or similar professional-grade tooling.
So I guess my critique is more, does this guy do things that require the top of the line tooling, or is he doing it just to showboat?
From other things I've read here, I'm reasonably convinced that he is probably justified in spending on the things he did. I didn't have any of that background when I read the article and made my initial comment.
If his business is video blogging, yes, he does.
Probably the main philosophical disagreement I have with the article is summed up by (and probably the rest of the article was tainted by) the opening line:
> I was searching around for a quote along the lines of you only being as good as the tools you use
I personally (fully aware it's a quirk of mine that others don't seem to share) feel that fancy tools are often a crutch for a lack of understanding.
Granted, this guy looks to have a long list of accomplishments, so good for him for wanting a fancy set up. If it brings him joy then more power to him.
That being said, if you take a software developer's CPU away what are they supposed to do - build their own foundry? Same for electrical engineers - can they really be faulted for an inability to design a modern chip without the help of extensive tooling?
(I'm certainly nowhere near being capable of implementing my own C++ compiler from scratch.)
It's not that bad. A couple months and you're good to go.
Building and using it sparks joy.
I also am irked by people who buy and use amazing things and display said amazing thing from a position of “I am amazing therefore I need amazing things” or vice versa. I dunno, it seems really inauthentic or something. I’m getting a little of that vibe from this article but OTOH I’m also getting a lot of the “Building and using great instruments sparks joy” vibe too and I think the former may just be coming across by virtue of writing a blog post to share the latter so, oh well :)