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Comment by airstrike | Hacker News Reader

You mean I get to save AND have fun building my own PC?

Not to mention if you build your own PC you can upgrade the parts as and when, unlike with the new Mac where you'll eventually just be replacing the whole thing.

Since the context here is using these machines for work, a mid-level engineer will easily cost an extra $1000* in his own time to put that together :)

EDIT: I’m quite confident this is not at all an exaggeration. Unless you have put together PCs for a living. $100/h (total employment cost, not just salary), 1-2 hours of actual build & setup, 8 more hours of speccing out parts, buying, taking delivery, installing stuff and messing around with windows/Linux (I’ve probably spent 40 hours+ in the past couple years just fixing stuff in my windows gaming pc. At least 1 of those looking for a cabled keyboard so I could boot it up the first time, ended up having a friend drive over with his :D)

1000 bucks for 45 mins work? Maybe 1.5hrs tops? I didn't realise their wage was >500 an hour?

To be fair here, there is more to it than just assembly.

You have to spec out the parts, ensuring compatibility. Manage multiple orders and deliveries. Assemble it. Install drivers/configuration specific packages.

All of these things are easier today than ten or twenty years ago - but assigning it to a random mid-level engineer and I'd set my project management gamble on half a day for the busiest, most focused engineers least likely to take the time to fuss over specs, or one day for the majority.

ofc. to get to $1000 for that they'd still have to be on $230k to $460k.

PC part picker will do the heavy lifting for you. There are also management tools that will let you install software bundles easily, no real extra time investment.

Just knowing about services like PC Part Picker and the management tools you mention requires time and expertise that people generally do not have before they build a computer, so "no real extra time investment" may only be true for someone who can amortize those upfront costs across many builds.

In my case I have built a couple PCs before, but it was so long ago that I'd have to re-learn which retailers are trustworthy, what the new connection standards are these days, etc. It's just not worth it to me to spend a dozen hours learning, specing, ordering, assembling, installing, configuring, etc to save a few hundred bucks.

Given that the last time I put together a PC computer was 2006, it'd probably take me DAYS to spec out a machine because of all the rabbit holes I'd be exploring, esp with all the advances in computer tech.

It's a lot closer than you might think.

A senior engineer in the Bay can easily pull down $400k/year in total comp, which is $200/hour. The rule of thumb I've always heard is that a fully-loaded engineer costs roughly 2x their comp in taxes/insurance/facilities/etc.

When someone costs the company north of $3k/day, it's cheaper all round to just plonk a brand new $6k MacBook Pro on their desk if they have a hardware issue.

It would take me over 1.5 hours just to figure out what parts I need to buy.

I believed that until I realized I couldn't individually upgrade my CPU or RAM because I have a mobo with LGA1150 socket and only supports DDR3 (and it's only 6 years old).

So eventually you still have to "replace everything" to upgrade a PC.

AMD has never disappointed me in this regard.

Zen 4 will being using a new socket, I wouldn’t go buying a Zen 3 with plans to upgrade the CPU down the road.

This is already known for a long time already. You would have to actively choose to not listen to AMD news to not know.

I understand just making sure no one jumps on Zen 3 now with a promise of forwards compatibility.

8 years isn't a bad run for a CPU socket.

Well, you should still get one last upgrade out of an AM4 socket in the form of the upcoming 5800X3D ( https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-7-5800x3d )

You were unlucky to buy ddr3 near its end of life then (like someone buying ddr4 now), but you could still upgrade stuff like your GPU or drives independently. My first SSD (a 240gb Samsung 840) is still in service after 9 years with its smart metrics indicating only 50% of its expected lifetime cycles have been used, for example.

You could also put a 4790k, 16gb of ddr3 and a modern gpu in that system to get a perfectly functional gaming system that will do most titles on 1080p high. Though admittedly we've passed the point where that's financially sensible vs upgrading to a 12400 or something as both devil's canyon CPUs and ddr3 are climbing back up in price as supplies diminish

Right now not many DDR5 boards. In fact none for AMD

> I believed that until I realized I couldn't individually upgrade my CPU or RAM because I have a mobo with LGA1150 socket and only supports DDR3 (and it's only 6 years old).

DDR4 was released in 2014, which would suggest you purchased your mobo two full years after DDR3 was already deemed legacy technology and being phased out.

Also LGA1150 was succeeded by LGA1151 in 2015, which means you bought your mobo one full year after it was already legacy hardware.

Yes, they entered the market around those years, but what does that change? DDR3 and LGA1150 were not deemed "legacy" the day DDR4 and LGA1151 motherboards entered the market. They were 2-3x the price, and DDR3 dominated RAM sales until at least 2017. In fact, the reason DDR4 took so long to enter the market was incompatibility with existing hardware, and higher costs to upgrade. [1] I didn't go out of my way to buy "legacy hardware" because they weren't, at the time.

Point being, PC-building makes it easier to replace and repair individual components, but in time, upgrading to newer generations means spending over 50% of the original cost on motherboard, CPU, PSU, RAM. Not too different than dropping $3K on a new Mac.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20101219085440/http://www.xbitla...

> Yes, they entered the market around those years, but what does that change?

It means the hardware was purchased after it started to be discontinued.

It's hardly a reasonable take, and makes little sense, to complain how you can't upgrade hardware that was already being discontinued before you bought it.

> DDR3 and LGA1150 were not deemed "legacy" the day DDR4 and LGA1151 motherboards entered the market.

I googled for LGA1150 before I posted the message, and one of the first search results is a post on Linux tech tips dating way back to 2015 on whether LGA1150 was already dead.

And you purchased the Mobo one year after that.

I think you are forgetting the context of my replies. I'm not saying it's unreasonable to have to upgrade discontinued hardware, even if you have to do it all at once. My take is that it's not too different from having to replace a Mac when the new generation comes in (which is usually every ~5 years for Apple, not too far from my own system's lifetime). Being able to upgrade individual parts through generations is a pipe dream.

Also, we must have a different interpretation of "discontinued", because DDR3 and LGA1150 were still produced, sold, and dominated sales for way long after I bought that system. At the time (and for the next 1-2 years), consumer DDR4 was a luxury component that most no existing hardware supported.

You can still buy DDR3 new for not that much? 16GB is about $50 from numerous brands on Amazon at the moment. I bought some for an old laptop a couple months ago.

To do CPU upgrades you eventually have to replace the motherboard but you can keep using whatever your GPU/storage/other parts is. Sometimes that also means a RAM upgrade but it's still better than the literal nothing of modern Macs.

FSVO fun if you use Newegg

FSVO: For Some Value Of

(I've been accused of overuse of acronyms, but that one's rare!)

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