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Comment by Scubabear68 | Hacker News Reader

One of the reasons Mainframes continue to be used is depreciation. I know a few companies who love their mainframes because they are fully paid for and from a budget perspective they are seen as “free”.

This can be very attractive compared to the never ending OpEx for running cloud computing.

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Most companies are actively trying to exchange capex for opex though - even if it's way more expensive over the lifetime of the equipment or service.

It's that ultra short term results focus that the stock market demands these days, sadly.

Doesn't make sense to me. I believe that IBM has found the forced upgrade path for hardware/software like Apple has perfected. You may not be able to run old versions of IBM's software and still have it be supported by them. Same for the hardware. I don't think you would commonly find and old mainframe (the hardware) in operation. At the last place I worked that had mainframes, they would upgrade to new models every 2-3 years.

I call BS on this. I never heard of upgrading mainframes every 2-3 years. It makes no sense. Mainframes are huge investments meant to last a long time, it is not a PC you replace in a few years.

Call BS all you want, I don't care. I know what I witnessed. I don't know if the mainframes were owned are leased, but they were swapped out for new ones every few years.

I’d like to hear more then. Mainframes are traditionally a big investment where you consolidate tons of load and jobs and LPARs onto one honking big machine. A very expandable machine in terms of any resource you can think of.

Why would you turn over something like that every few years? Your narrative sounds more like taking about ephemeral cloud stuff, not multi million dollar main frames.

I think in my former employer's case they leased the mainframes because they found it more favorable to have OPEX over CAPEX. Every few years IBM would pitch their latest and greatest and often times it made financial sense (lower costs) to upgrade to the newer models.

I had always heard that most companies leased their mainframes. Sort of how most airlines lease their aircraft.

Maybe a few really big organizations would buy them outright.

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