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Comment by touristtam | Hacker News Reader

How do you justify this kind of recurring purchases, even with selling your old device? I don't get the behaviour or the driving decision factor past the obvious "I need the latest shiny toy" (I can't find the exact words to describe it, so apologies for the reductive description).

I have either assembled my own desktop computers or purchased ex corporate Lenovo over the years with a mix of Windows (for gaming obviously) and Linux and only recently (4 years ago) been given a MBP by work as they (IT) cannot manage Linux machines like they do with MacOS and Windows.

I have moved from an intel i5 MBP to a M3 Pro (?) and it makes me want to throw away my dependable ThinkPad/Fedora machine I still uses for personal projects.

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It's really very easy, honestly.

My laptop is my work life and my personal life.

I spend easily 100 hours a week using it not-as-balanced-as-it-should-be between the two.

I don't buy them because I need something new, I buy them because in the G4/Intel era, the iterations were massive and even a 20 or 30% increase in speed (which could be memory, CPU, disk -- they all make things faster) results in me being more productive. It's worth it for me to upgrade immediately when apple releases something new, as long as I have issues with my current device and the upgrade is enough of a delta.

M1 -> M2 wasn't much of a delta and my M1 was fine. M1 -> M3 was a decent delta, but, my M1 was still fine. M1 -> M4 is a huge delta (almost double) and my screen is dented to where it's annoying to sit outside and use the laptop (bright sun makes the defect worse), so, I'm upgrading. If I hadn't dented the screen the choice would be /a lot/ harder.

I love ThinkPads too. Really can take a beating and keep on going. The post-IBM era ones are even better in some regards too. I keep one around running Debian for Linux-emergencies.

There are 2 things I was always spending money on, if I felt is not the almost best achievable: my bed and my laptop. Even the phone can be 4 years old iPhone, but the laptop must be best and fast. My sleep is also pretty important. Everything else is just "eco".

In my country you can buy a device and write off in 2 years, VAT reimbursed, then scrap it from the books and you sell it to people without tax payed to people who otherwise would pay a pretty hefty VAT. This decreases your loss of value to like half.

I don't think tax evasion is something one should recommend people do.

It's tax avoidance, not evasion. If it's fully legal then I don't know why wouldn't you recommend it. If you are against it, you can easily pay more in taxes than required yourself.

Consuming... for some people, is done for it's own sake.

Apple has a pretty good trade-in program. If you have an Apple card, it's even better (e.g. the trade-in value is deducted immediately, zero interest, etc.).

Could you get more money by selling it? Sure. But it's hard to be the convenience. They ship you a box. You seal up the old device and drop it off at UPS.

I also build my desktop computers with a mix of Windows and Linux. But those are upgraded over the years, not regularly.

You’re better off taking it to the Apple Store for trade-in. There are a lot of easy-to-miss reasons the mail-in one might reject it.

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