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Comment by franciscop | Hacker News Reader

I recently tried to play a bit of tennis, which I've already stopped. My friend was appalled when I proudly announced that my tennis racket costed $15. "But we are in tech!" he cried. But for a couple of games, I know I won't be able to tell the difference between a $15 one and a $150 one (I know because I've played tennis in the past).

And true to my predictions, I no longer play tennis and I'm only $15 poorer. I don't know the name for this, but the fact that I avoided wasting $150 and only "wasted" $15 into something I knew might be temporary also feels very satisfying.

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> At first, buy the absolute cheapest tools you can find. Upgrade the ones you use a lot. If you wind up using some tool for a job, buy the very best you can afford.

—https://x.com/kevin2kelly/status/1845192874947674291

Absolutely the right choice. I do triathlons and your comment makes me think of all the people who turn up, do an Ironman and leave the sport after. Or people who sign up for a marathon, do it, then never run again.

Meanwhile there are shorter events you can do on much less training and cheaper equipment to see if you’ll like it before investing in the extreme end of the sport. If you run a 10k and hate every step, you’ve saved yourself a lot of time, pain and money.

This is my thinking with photography, I love photography but I'm still not very good at it. So I use a D7100, which is probably considered a shitty relic nowadays compared to more modern stuff. But right now, the camera isn't the bottleneck for me getting good photos, it's me. The camera is still way better a camera than I am a photographer.

I'll get a better camera, when I'm a better photographer and the camera is actually the limiting factor, but I expect that is very very very far off.

Photography is an edge case. The camera is virtually never the limiting factor. Case in point, Daido Moriyama.

Yeah, I played with a $15 racket for years. I only got a $150 one when I could tell the difference between them.

I just look around in the most expensive street in my city for posts online or offline of people selling rackets that have maybe 2 hours of use on them. Then you can usually get 150$+ rackets for $15 as these folks threat $150 as I threat $15. Some of them are just given away to charity shops etc.

This is how I have it with my guitar. It's a simple Ibanez Gio from a starter kit, probably coming in at 150 Euros - 200 Euros or so, with another 40 Euros spent on a guitar tech to set it up properly.

I'll replace it once I know how it is holding me back. At least that's the plan I've had for the last 4-5 years. But it has low action, fairly low-noise pickups, holds tuning. So no need so far.

Cheap electric guitars are much better now since the parts are CNC'd, even if they don't come properly setup from the factory. As long as the fretwork is good, you can easily upgrade everything else if you have problems with it.

Yes, and from what I've been reading and hearing: Modern electronic components and the manufacturing methods in general are also much more consistent in this day and age.

Back in the day, costs of a guitar would go into higher quality parts, and possibly even labor to ensure consistency and function exactly how it should. Nowadays, components are more consistent and cheaper than the better components of the 80s and 90s.

Thus the pure functional spread between cost ranges has been reduced.

Yep, it’s the golden age of guitar quality. These days even a starter guitar is pretty darn good. Ditto for amp emulators and small tube amps, wish that was all around as a teen.

> with another 40 Euros spent on a guitar tech to set it up properly

that's probably the best decision you could have made, much better than putting an extra 40euros in a slightly more expensive guitar!

When it come to equipment, sometimes I think it’s okay for a beginner to splurge on something mid level because of resale.

Do a little math and figure out how much it’d cost you to quit and cash out.

A more expensive intermediate-level instrument is easier to sell than the cheaper beginner model.

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