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Comment by steveBK123 | Hacker News Reader

It is bizarre but more uncommon than you think for very high paid and wealthy software guys to for whatever reason be very stingy with their personal hardware. Living in a $3M condo but running a 5 year old PC for their daily driver, etc.

I always have an extra machine around the house in the event either my machine or my wife's machine fails. I've setup an account for her on my machine as backup for her to work with my machine if hers fails, etc.

After years of being remote/hybrid, we now have spare keyboards and mice around as well for when one inevitably breaks as well.

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> running a 5 year old PC

Maybe, just maybe, they consider it wasteful to throw away a working machine. The hardware is not exactly green to make, so sure, lets everyone buy a new laptop every year.

You don't throw away MacBooks, you sell them since they are valuable.

But my time has value too, and upgrading from Intel to the new M series did cut compilation times in half for a particular project I was working on. I'm not willing to sacrifice that much time to just keep on using an old machine. Then there's the problem of reliability. Even if I have a spare MacBook lying around there's a non zero chance my work machine will die at a very inconvenient time (like on site at a customer or when working against a short deadline). After 5 years the bathtub curve starts going up and I don't want to depend on old hardware, even when it's working.

Hand down to parents, children, donate, trade-in or resell.

There's a wide gulf between "singularly dependent on a 5 year old PC" and "just throw it out every year".

Hey until recently I was still rocking my 10 year old Ivy Bridge machine because it was still good enough.

Yeah that.

It's usually the same people who will pay $2500 a year for routine service on their car without saying something but bitch about $500 repair on the principal income generator they have (their macbook).

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