Most expensive laptops | Hacker News Reader

Most expensive laptops

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64 pointsmahin106 comments

Expensive is relative. I'm the CTO of a small startup and we're leasing our laptops from Apple. We don't have huge budgets. I got my 16" M4 Max, 48GB, 1TB model a few months ago. Costs us 105 euro/month. That includes 3 years of extended warranty. After the lease is over (3 years), we have the option to buy the laptops at a discount typically. The new value of this thing is around 4500 euro, I think. We could have gone cheap and gotten something for 70-80 or so Euro per month. It's not worth the savings. Over 3 years that adds up to about 900 euros saved. That's nothing in the grand scheme of things.

105 euro per month is a very reasonable cost from a business point of view and not at all expensive. People think nothing of spending the same on LLM tokens, or getting a lease car for their commutes (typically spending >2-3x per month). But when it comes to laptops, people suddenly become irrationally frugal. If you use your laptop to produce things and benefit from having a fast laptop in any way for that, don't be frugal like that.

I get a lot of value out of having a fast laptop. For example, our entire integration test suite (Spring Boot) can run in under 30 seconds making use of all the CPU this thing has and running against docker containers with DB, Valkey, and Elasticsearch. That's a build that takes a lot longer on crappy CI vms or one of my old laptops. Basically, it runs almost like a small unit test suite. I can just invoke that whenever and not be blocked by it. I do this a lot. It helps me catch things early and keeps my feedback cycles short. Which helps me maintain flow state when I'm working. That is priceless.

30 seconds vs 3-4 minutes on my previous laptop (14" M1 16GB) is a big deal. It was more constrained for memory (swapping) and CPU and just ran a bit slower. Still reasonable. But a 7x improvement is massive for me. Times 10 or so per day adds up to really significant time savings. If you compile stuff, run expensive test suites, or whatever: you could use a fast laptop.

I used to freelance / consult and charge more per hour than this thing costs me per month. In retrospect, for me the lesson on updating here is to never ever allow myself to penny pinch on laptop cost again.

I can vouch that for a critical engineer/CTO/VPE at a startup, it totally pays to get the next day onsite warranty, even when a good chunk of your work is on remote servers.

I ran my laptop so hard the motherboard had to get replaced 2-3 times... but always was fixed quite promptly.

> 30 seconds vs 3-4 minutes on my previous laptop (14" M1 16GB) is a big deal. It was more constrained for memory (swapping)

This is why data driven purchasing is key. Running some tests and having some data to show how much time will be saved by a laptop upgrade makes the decision process much easier.

The companies that only decide based on prices and budgets set by someone making blanket decisions for the company always get it wrong.

It’s also possible to go too far on the spending path. I remember some people who demanded brand new maxed out MacBook Pros every generation until someone ran some tests and proved that it wasn’t making any noticeable difference at all year over year despite costing upwards of $5-6K per person. That’s money that could have gone to something else.

> This is why data driven purchasing is key.

Many years ago I failed to convince my employer how buying their programmers less expensive computers with 5400rpm hard drives was an overall loss compared to 7200rpm disk drives. My argument was that any programming necessarily entailed reading and writing dozens to hundreds files all the time, especially during compile cycles. Maybe if I'd had data showing the actual time lost waiting? Or maybe I was a dumb kid trying to justify my desire to have a nicer computer for my daily driver.

> Maybe if I'd had data showing the actual time lost waiting?

This is exactly what works.

Adding analytics that reports duration of test runs to a central server makes it easy. Some developers panic at the thought of this because it feels like spying, but the data is immensely helpful.

Can the average person lease a laptop or just businesses?

You can almost certainly lease if you really want to but the usual benefit is more enjoyed by a company (no capital expense, only operating expense, defined, and steady).

As an individual, you can get the exact same laptop for $333.25/mo (for 12 months) right now with 3% cash back and 0% interest on the Apple Card. That's only a little over twice the monthly cost, and you're done in 12.

Sometimes you can find pay over 24 or even 36 which would make it even lower. Add in AppleCare and you're probably ahead as an individual.

Business taxes and others change this, or if you KNOW you will need it only for a year, or must have the latest and greatest every time.

(Our OP spends 3780€ over 3 years and doesn't even own it at the end; but the financial tax advantages can be huge and make it worth it, so much so that founders sometimes will make TWO companies, one to buy the capital item and lease it to the actual startup.)

I don't think they officially support leasing to individuals directly, but it's very easy to setup a leasing/biz account with them as a business. I think any Apple store has a POC there that can help / see: https://www.apple.com/shop/finance/business-financing

You can very easily setup an LLC and obtain an EIN. It's been a minute since I've setup an Apple financing account, so I don't recall what they require on the finance side. I'm certain they will want to see some sort of financial proof, but I doubt they will care much if you're not a proper operating biz. I'm not sure if proof of finances will need to be linked to a banking account under the business name, but if so, that's easy enough to setup with an ebank once you have an EIN.

All of that being said, the tradeoff will be if you're willing to deal with the potential state/federal tax and biz reporting requirements of having the business. It's not hard esp if it's not a real active business, but just another thing to deal with.

If the laptop is stolen are you on the hook for the whole thing minus some depreciation?

Yes, but that's what insurance is for - pretty much every business will have business & office equipment insurance, which should cover it.

locally, last i checked, an LLC costs ~$20/yr ... so yeah. easy.

I have one which I haven't really used though probably a useful thing to have. But be aware of various other fees like annual state fees. It definitely costs more than I was thinking it would once all the costs are taken into account. For a lot of purposes just using a DBA is probably fine.

Nice. In california it’s $800/yr

It's even easier and cheaper to set up a trust and get an EIN that way.

> 105 euro per month is a very reasonable cost from a business point of view and not at all expensive. People think nothing of spending the same on LLM tokens, or getting a lease car for their commutes (typically spending >2-3x per month). But when it comes to laptops, people suddenly become irrationally frugal. If you use your laptop to produce things and benefit from having a fast laptop in any way for that, don't be frugal like that.

What's reasonable and what is expensive. "Expensive" and "cheap" are comparative terms, so what are you comparing them with when you say "reasonable cost"?

And comparing them to cars and LLM tokens is just a straw man.

105 vs 70 is a difference of 1/3rd of the price, and if that cheaper device delivers the same performance, then 105 becomes unreasonably expensive.

We're managing 3000 devices and that would be 90000 per month to pay for fluff that doesn't deliver all that much value over the 70$ price tag.

3000 * 5K = 15M per month in salaries. We can argue if 90K is worth it or not. Depends how good the people are. But it's not a lot of money relatively speaking. And 5K is not a lot of salary. We're probably talking 2-3x the amount. And you are also spending on buildings and infrastructure, software licenses for things like Office, Slack, etc.

Not saying every company should blindly buy big laptops for any software developer. But I am saying that penny pinching on their laptops might not be the smartest thing. Save 90K vs. destroy flow state for 3000 people on a daily basis. One of those things could really cost you; it's probably not the 90K. Big companies can be short sighted like that. Big companies incentivize mindless penny pinching like that. Nobody even questions it when it happens.

If I work for myself, I do question these things. IMHO if you are a freelancer or a consultant, having proper equipment to do the job is not optional.

I put that in relation with the performance a device delivers, you again argue only about cost. This is point less. Enjoy your day.

>30 seconds vs 3-4 minutes on my previous laptop (14" M1 16GB) is a big deal. It was more constrained for memory (swapping) and CPU and just ran a bit slower. Still reasonable. But a 7x improvement is massive for me. Times 10 or so per day adds up to really significant time savings. If you compile stuff, run expensive test suites, or whatever: you could use a fast laptop.

This was in their original comment. So, when you say they are only arguing cost, I really have no idea what you are talking about.

It pulls data from Amazon and so is limited to availability there. For instance, the most expensive MacBook in there is $5839 while on the Apple Store you can max out at $7349 (hardware only). I suspact same goes for other manufacturers. So if you want to blow ungodly amount of money you’d need to do some extra research.

True, you can spend more money than this and probably get better performance. I already had data from Amazon so I thought this would be a fun list.

Last year I purchased a Lenovo P15 Gen 1 used, originally it came with a sticker price of $5700 but I managed to get it used for ~$500. All these hyper expensive laptops fall into one of two buckets, either they are top end gaming rigs or they are like my Lenovo and designed for large engineering companies that will just lease them and not give a crap how much they cost.

For the average consumer though I highly recommend going on Ebay and finding these hyper expensive laptops used from a few years ago. Mine came with an i9 processor, an RTX 5000 and can support up to 128GB of RAM and even 5 years on those are still wild numbers except that same computer can be found for maybe 10-15% of the original price.

Though I will say one downside of buying one of these is they are customizable to an insane degree so finding the "right" one might take you a while (took me around a month to find mine).

Another downside is that the seller might install spyware on your machine - had that with a Lenovo too. Ended up buying a brand new Asus that was so heavily discounted it cost the same as the 2nd hand Lenovo I returned.

> Another downside is that the seller might install spyware on your machine

At least in my case it came without a hard drive so there was no vector for attack there. Sure they might have installed spyware at the BIOS level though the practical chance of that happening from a seller that does any sort of volume is more unlikely than winning the lottery IMHO.

Sellers (especially volume sellers) just want to ship you your stuff and make a buck off the margin.

why not just re-install the OS?

or did you mean spyware at hardware/firmware/BIOS level?

It seems like a scam that gaming laptops are marketed with the headline, i.e: GeForce RTX 5090, then in the fine print, read: GeForce RTX 5090 laptop GPU.

Agreed, but the scam is coming from Nvidia, not the laptop manufacturers. I doubt they're even complicit - Nvidia probably forces them to agree on exact marketing phrasing before selling them GPUs.

The laptop manufacturers like marketing an RTX 5090 instead of the more accurate 5070. It's a simple reality that you can't cool 600W in a laptop case, but Nvidia selling laptop 5090 is complicit.

What are the actual chips? Of course it's not going to run at 600W but I would think you can run a 5090 at 150W and the performance will be better than a 5070 at 150W. Of course, Nvidia may not be binning the chips the way I would expect...

It's closer to an RTX 5080, I misremembered the number. Still, that's half the shader cores of a desktop 5090.

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/nvidia-gb203.g1073

Nvidia is incredibly strict with the laptop and board partners on the design and marketing of the final product.

Are there any laptops that actually have a desktop GPU built in?

Yes, and their battery life was usually a full one half of ten minutes

I've come across a few in the past, these 18 inch giant-ass "desktop replacement" / gamer things that had insanely large power bricks. Been a few years but I think they all had desktop GPU chips from NV.

But I think it's not possible to do any more, not with any high-power card that is... the RTX 5090 has a TDP of 600-ish watts, you can neither get in that kind of power into a laptop, even at 24 volt that's still 25 amps of current just for the GPU, and most importantly you can't get rid of 600 watts of heat, no matter what, without making the user uncomfortable.

That's not the case. A 5060 has a 145W TDP, which is borderline feasible. A 5090 is 575W, which is approaching furnace territory.

Thanks, fixed. I intended the 5090 indeed but haven't had a coffee.

Anyway, even the 145W of a 5060 are... an ugly challenge to meet. The 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro for example can happily guzzle 90W when you max out the i9 CPU and the dGPU and gets uncomfortably warm after a few minutes once the aluminium case goes into thermal equilibrium.

Add in even just a 60W CPU to match with a 5060 and you're looking at double that heat to be dissipated!

Weren't those MacBooks relatively thin – the same as the OG retinas of 2012-2013?

A friend of mine has an Asus with some Nvidia GPU (3070? not sure), a 5th gen ryzen 9 and a 200+W power brick.

That thing is twice as thick as my 2013 MBP and the case is plastic. It also has more vents than my mbp, each of which has more surface area than all those on the mbp combined. I also suspect the fans are bigger.

He actually bought it to play games on it and never complained about performance dropping after a while. So I suppose it manages to move the 200 W of heat somehow.

Which is where we come to my original post saying "without making people uncomfortable".

I'd guess that under full load that Asus thing (probably ROG series) sounds louder than your vacuum. Just had a look though, even their most powerful G835 [2] that you can get in a variant for ALMOST 9000€ [3](it's 8.400, but wanted to reference the meme) comes with a 5090 "laptop" GPU variant - that's barely half as powerful as the "desktop" 5090 [4].

The charger options are also ... nuts. 330 watts [1] - they're pushing 16 amps through that connector. A tiny amount of dirt, rust or other contamination and you got yourself a nice fire.

[1] https://rog.asus.com/de/power-protection-gadgets/chargers-an...

[2] https://rog.asus.com/de/laptops/rog-strix/rog-strix-scar-18-...

[3] https://www.voelkner.de/products/12304814/ASUS-ROG-Strix-SCA...

[4] https://www.dlcompare.de/spiele-news/nvidias-rtx-5090-laptop...

That’s still about two orders of magnitude less than an electric furnace (100A at 240V single-phase is 24kW)

Resistive heat is really crappy, a 7-8kW heat pump could replace the hypothetical 24kW furnace.

1Wh = 3.412141633 BTU/hr

The most extreme I've seen are some laptops that have two 240W power supplies, and even then that wouldn't be enough to reliably power these extreme high end desktop GPUs these days.

Yes (at least there used to be), but obviously that has a certain effect on their battery life and cooling requirements.

at that point, it's about portability, not battery life

you can pretty easily carry around a small form factor PC at that point. even a tower, where my LAN guys at.

Laptop is still integrated with all the peripherals though (screen, trackpad, keyboard, speakers)

Are Sager laptops still a thing? I used to lust after those many moons ago.

I don't think they do it anymore, but for a while nvidia laptop GPUs of the same model number had more cuda cores to match the desktop model of same number, with the laptop's lower clock.

The 3080 Ti laptop card has fewer CUDA cores but more VRAM than the desktop version.

I think it was on the 2000 and maybe 1000 series.

I thought "24 TB SSD" was a typo lmao

Most people look at computers as a commodity that needs to perfectly balance performance and price; most really expensive computers usually are acquired by professionals that do need the specs and within small time, it gets paid off quickly. I have a 16" Macbook Pro M2 with 96GB of RAM. Costs without VAT around €4k, but a client paid half of it as a one year retainer for my work, so the device ended up costing me €2k. You would say those specs are over the top, but it's been 2 years and I still have an amazing work machine and there's not enough things I can do to make it feel slow; it pays off, because I don't waste my time waiting for my device, it's the other way around. Would my dad buy such a machine for browsing? Absolutely not! Me as a professional? Makes no sense not to!

There's also the fact that usually, a higher-end machine will have better components that are more comfortable to use. Most brand-new "enterprise" computers we have at work have much worse screens, keyboards and touchpads than my 2013 mbp. I know many people don't seem to care, so that also has to be considered.

Sure, they cost maybe half as much in nominal terms, but seeing how they fall apart even though I take good care of them, I would have needed to replace them so often that I'm not even sure I would have come out ahead. And, at the same time, I would have always had a terrible experience.

Now, I haven't used that Mac in a few years, ever since I stopped going to the office and it stopped being supported. But even over a 7-year period, when I used it daily and carted it around daily, I'm pretty sure it's still an all-around better investment.

Outside of some of the fascinating VAIO laptops with their wild and wacky features, I have never loved a super expensive laptop. I like a laptop that can get the job done when I need to and easily be fixed if I need to when I am on the road. At the moment that is Framework, and previously thinkpad, and a while ago, Powerbooks.

I have learned as I became older that the device is a tool to getting the work done, not something to drool over. I am more proud of the output than the device I do it on.

When you buy a really nice power tool or hand tool, it's going to last you a very long time. It will remain fit-for-purpose for decades to come. The cost can often be justified because it's an investment in emotional happiness. It feels nice to use an expensive quality tool, and it feels nicer knowing that you'll be able to continue doing so for many years.

One of these expensive laptops? It's going to be as obsolete as a cheaper laptop in a couple of years' time. Hell, it'll probably start feeling old and slow after the next round of Windows updates in less than a year.

> I like a laptop that can get the job done

Of course, but it depends on the job. If you're working on heavy 3D scenes, or doing video work in 4k or 8k, then "gets the job done" will be an expensive laptop. Maybe not $8k expensive, but $4k easily. For this kind of work it's often cheaper to buy a highly specced gaming laptop rather than a workstation laptop.

I do find a gaming laptop usually has far worse battery life over a dedicated workstation laptop, plus it isn't something you can really carry with you day to day. A Zbook or a thinkpad is both not super heavy and does fit in.

But there are mobile workstations for that if someone would turn up with a wacky 8k MSI gaming laptop he would certainly get some looks. Not because of the performance but because of no 24h replacement.

> Outside of some of the fascinating VAIO laptops with their wild and wacky features, I have never loved a super expensive laptop.

Sure, if and only if you put in the word "super". Frameworks are expensive, starting around $1000 or $1500 depending on screen size. Perfectly good models are available for 1/3 the price.

I have the base amd and found it perfectly acceptable for everything I have need and it has 32 gb of ram with a 2tb ssd in, and it cost all in around £1000. It can do 3d work, both lab based in Lumerical and Blender plus Cad. I would say considering workstations and comparable macs would cost around double minimum I am not of the view it is particularly expensive.

A mac would be double the cost purely because of order of magnitude ram/ssd markups, so that comparison is tricky.

For the specs you listed, I don't know how much the integrated GPU matters, but I can find laptops with the same ram and storage and a solid ryzen CPU for $650-750. There are probably sacrifices but framework isn't free of sacrifices either.

It is tricky of course, but that is the state of play. I wish it wasn't that way.

As someone that used to travel weekly, I used to go with Thinkpads or a Zenbook as both I was able to fix whilst away (the former had a keyboard issue, and the latter a HDD issue). I am yet convinced on the long term durability of the Framework but I have had it a year and it is pretty good still. No different in issues than any other laptop I have used in recent times. Overall for the quality I am pretty happy as I have used a lower cost laptop for various reasons and found I was always anxious of breaking it.

The big thing I do feel I am missing when doing 3D work is a dedicated GPU for simulations but then that would reduce the battery life too much day to day.

I'm wondering what would be the use case for a laptop with 24TB storage.

Photographers and camera operators. One of my students remarked that his dad saves his pictures in raw format, and that they've grown much bigger in recent years.

Which is strange. You would think the father at least was done growing.

Vertically, sure...

DJs and music producers. I have about 32TB of externally stored samples and have to curate them for my DAW laptop.

That sounds like a lot of samples. Even with 192kHz 32 bit stereo wav that's way over half a year of continuous audio.

With 96kHz 32 bit FLAC it would be around three years.

Reservoirs are not useful if you can only refill the cup a few times.

Also, a bookshelf is not a library.

phew howdy, you must be crate digging. Thats a lot of samples! Im impressed

Anything to do with geotiffs

video editing, multiple projects

Sure, but are you really doing all video editing on all projects on the go?

When it's your job job dealing with huge data it quickly becomes very time consuming and error prone to deal with multiple external storage devices. (edit: by error prone I mean human error eg where did I put this stuff?)

8k raw video is very large - even a single project will fill that up and need extra storage to add externally.

A couple 4k cameras filming at 60fps at, for example, tech conference and you can about fit a single days footage on those 24TB,

If you're on location filming a nature show, yes. It's less to upload.

The funny part the 5090 mobile is more like a 5080 desktop edition!

See the Alienware laptop flagged as 5090 while it's ‎"GeForce RTX 5090 24 GB GDDR7" as laptops can't sustain the TDP and RTX XX90 full power. For AI an external GPU is less costly option.

Isn't the GPU throttled anyways? Because it's going to be a mobile version?

But if you're just interested in doing some machine learning on it, then it's all about how much RAM and not really how fast. I used to use my gaming laptop to do a lot of local ML

memory speed is still really important for inference tasks

These HP Fury Laptops and many others on that list are such a joke.

A somewhat capable CPU, sometimes just an integrated GPU slapped in a cheap chassis with mediocre build quality. Sold at absurd prices. My employer is "getting scammed" by HP continuously by paying for this absolute crap. The workstations aren't any better.

Nowadays the "business laptops" you get cost the same as a MacBook, have a bad, barely usable, CPU and are made out of flimsy plastic. I do not get how companies like HP keep doing this, what a total embarrassment.

HP Fury laptops have a metal shell, 16" or 18" screen and the cheapest one comes with an 8gb Blackwell P1000 for about $2600.

https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/hp-zbook-fury-g1i-16-inch-...

Also, you should never be paying the MSRP unless you're getting a kickback. Your employer may be stupid but that is not the default.

I could be completely wrong about this, but my hunch was the HP Zbook were mobile workstations and you could rip out the wireless components, so I thought this could be useful if you wanted something portable in say a SCIF.

That ThinkyPad that is selling for over 7000$ and it doesn't even have a GPU makes it really hard for anyone to see that price as justified. Do some of these sellers just have a goal to sell one or two of these for the entirety of the products life cycle and that would be a win in their book? Or is this just then trying to pad the market pri ces to make the less expensive products look more appeealing?

I didn't realize Amazon was offering payment plans for laptops. I'd only ever seen that for cars and houses.

Which makes me wonder, what do they do when people default on payments? Do they have a kill switch they can throw? Or do they send the repo man to repossess it while you're sleeping?

Where do you live? Here in the UK, a company called Klarna has managed to wriggle their way into almost every single online storefront and offers plans for sub-£5 purchases.

Might be region specific, where I live you can't default or do bankruptcy, it just goes to the National Enforcement Authority that haunts you until you pay for the rest of your life. They don't care about any valuables without clear resell value like a newish car or jewelry or a house.

You also lose your credit status, making you unable to get new loans or phone plans, and often making apartment finding really really difficult

You can get payment plans for fast food these days.

Amazon offers me payment plans on sub-$100 items.

Installment payment offers even for relatively inexpensive items are super-common.

Willing to bet these kind of notebooks get the worst update support possible.

...these are kind of quaint, honestly.

The FZ-40GZ-0SBM is almost $8000. You get an Intel Core Ultra 7 165H, 32GB of RAM, and 512 GB of SSD space. Intel integrated GPU only.

The Getac X600 Server Laptop be decked out with a Xeon W-11865MRE, 128GB of RAM, and 6TB of storage space (no GPU again), but it'll run you a cool $17,000.

IIRC they weigh 7 to 10 lbs, so not terribly light either.

Makes a $3500 Macbook Pro look like a steal of a deal.

#9 on the list is a Macbook Pro.

Depends if you want a decent amount of SSD and RAM

the $3500 Macbook has the same about of RAM as these even.

Typically I need to pick from the other end of the spectrum, but this is pretty cool to look through.

$9k for 64 gigs of RAM...fyi a single 64gb DDR5 SO-DIMM stick is only $200

Largest has 128G RAM and not clear if the GPU can access all of it.

So, looks like none of them can run an .5T LLM locally.

Pass.

how much of those prices is due to having 8tb nvme drives?

The thinkpad is insane, 7k and NOT EVEN A GRAPHICS CARD

I think that listing is an anomaly; I see models with similar specs for cheaper (~$5000) on Lenovo's site. But they do come with Nvidia Ada GPUs.

The Lenovo ThinkPad P16 Gen 2 can have up to an Nvidia RTX 5000 Ada Generation (16GB GDDR6).

If you pay MSRP for a thinkpad you're doing it very, very wrong

Where do you get them instead? eBay?

Lenovo sells refurbished Thinkpads on eBay, yeah. I bought one at the start of the year for about 30% of MSRP and I couldn't tell it wasn't brand new

If you're intent on getting a new one they still offer regular deals on their store

MSI is rubbish

and yet not one of them has a monitor of 17" or more...

Top five are 18". Are you sure?

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