If you are going to start making a list of expensive hobbies, $3K for a computer isn't going to be anywhere near the top of the list.
Of course, not near the top in terms of money because there are a few hobbies that cost vastly more.
The distribution is highly skewed. Like wealth. The 99th percentile are near the top in rank (by definition) but nowhere near the top in absolute terms.
Judging by the authors preference for Linux, I’m guessing this hobby has some professional applications as well.
$3k is the price of a very nice guitar, but I am not about to casually shell out that money every few years.
However, I earn my wage using a computer, so it’s a lot easier to justify staying relatively current on specs.
A computer is many, many orders of magnitude more complex and expensive than that.
This isn't said with the intention to demonize expensive hobbies if no one is harmed because of it.
But I do sometimes wonder if my hobbies are too dependent of a power plug. Even reading, which I do with a e-reader.
Obviously you can spend pretty much any amount of money on those if you want (if you are "serious" about it) but you don't have to and most people don't. Also he said this $3k expenditure wasn't for serious work.
And in contradiction to computers, a bicycle from 40 years ago still does the same job as it did at the time, there is no software making it incompatible and it doesn't feel slower than the more modern stuff. All you need is a set of brake pads, cables, tires, chain and cassette every once in a while. All these consumables are fairly cheap if you aren't chasing the newest/highest end tech and stick to 2x9 / 2x10 speed transmissions.
It’s once you get “serious” and need to have your own equipment that all these things get real. Or in the case of things like social dance, you want to take time off with and travel further and further away to attend pricey exchanges and camps.
I’ve taken my 10 euro dance classes for years without feeling the necessity of pricey exchanges and camps.
My neighbour goes to the park many evenings to play petanque, doesn’t cost him anything.
A couple I’m friends with goes on day hikes where they do bird watching—maybe they bought a nice pair of binoculars once? Another couple likes to lay jigsaw puzzles together, not exactly breaking the bank!
My sister is learning Finnish because she never learned a non indo-european language. She bought a book.
I would wager most people’s hobbies are low key like this because either they don’t have disposable income to spend on them, or they don’t want too!
I get very frustrated with the kind of people who see one tiktok about a thing and suddenly feel like they need to spend $3k to pursue whatever their new passion is.
Take the music hobby as an example. I have several expensive guitars now, but in the first 20 years of that hobby I probably spent under $1000 on guitars and related gear the entire time.
The neighborhoods with sidewalks cost a lot more, in my experience.
For example Silicon Valley suburb Saratoga has hardly any sidewalks. Median house price is around $4M.
Safe place to run though.
In many areas there’s a tendency to overdo it with tools, gadgets and also to compensate for lack of skill with more gadgets. I do woodworking for example and my total spend for industrial vacuum, different types of power and hand tools, work bench, clamps, etc probably comes to around a few thousand EUR. Mine is a really good set-up for a hobby, but I still don’t have any stationary machines or fancy separate work area or room. I bought everything over the years and I only buy brand-name. My point is, this is actually a lot of money especially if spent as lump sum and not at all a “nothing-burger”.
Yacht owner says ‘hold my beer’.
I want to find a way to revive the hobby by showing younger people short on money that they can get into sailing for less than they already spend on much less rewarding stuff like app subscriptions and smartphones.
Most people save $400 per month tops, that they spend on holidays.
Many universities in rural areas have student clubs that offer lessons and rent club owned planes for cheap.
Not sure what you call a "reliable used car". My low mileage for its age 2006 Mercedes B200 costed me 5.5k€ for instance. A car doesn't have to cost a lot to be reliable.
Around me $20k is an expensive price for a car and most people buy second hand +20y old cars they buy for less than 5k€.
I am also into older cars and can get a reliable car for a few hundred dollars, but I would never be able to convince anyone else I know that it is an option. So yea, you can get a reliable car for a lot less than a cheap airplane only if you don’t have some irrational bias against older cars.
Sure, but I did specify expensive hobbies.
[0] EDIT: for reference, my previous ThinkPad lasted me 14 years.
Since we are talking about OS support. 4th gen Intel isn’t supported by Windows 11, so you’d have to upgrade to Linux.
If they're working perfectly, why does it matter if they have current operating support? It doesn't seem like you're dependent on Apple.
The first iPad Pro can’t run adobe products for example.
The Mac is a bit more resilient to this, but it’s still worrying as yearly improvements become subtler.
So, Apple leaves old hardware high and dry by not supporting them with operating systems, and 3P software leaves users high and dry by dropping support for operating systems. It's like they are working together to create e-waste.
That’s more on Adobe than Apple though right?
Their recent hardware is proving much more capable as tools than the budget i5 I had before, so I upgraded. In terms of machinery expenses, it's more than I'd like to spend on RAM and ssd than I'd prefer (their pricing ladder is comical) but the product is amazing. I'm going to wait as long as possible before I upgrade to Tahoe though, seems almost DoA
I ran a 2008 MBP until 2019. Then…gave it to my wife who used it until 2022. Finally retired it after the battery swelled. I suspect I could have replaced the battery and she could have got another couple of years out of it if I really needed.
Not once did that device ever feel obsolete.
In my view the forcefull obsolescence mechanism comprises the following strongly interacting practices:
1. Not supplying operating system updates for "older" hardware (actually not that old). Depending on your security posture this point alone may be sufficient.
2. Aggressively deprecating APIs and nudging developers to use the new APIs (i.e. nudging applications to not support the operating systems that run on the older OS that you have to run on the old hardware -- see point 1)
3. Ratcheting operating system upgrades with new hardware. There is no way to control the OS version that you use independent of hardware: replacing a machine always forces an OS upgrade.
4. Requiring the latest OS to run the latest development tools.
In combination, these practices create a treadmill that keeps everything "new" and anything older than 3 years not compatible. There's probably more to it than this but that's what I could write down quickly.
It depends on the person and the use case. Different personalities etc
i think i'll be upgrading in the next 2 or maybe 3 years if apple puts OLED screens on their new machines as it is rumored.
It’s also not true if you care about certain workloads like LLM performance. My biggest concern for example is memory size and bandwidth, and older chips compare quite favorably to new chips where “GPU VRAM size” now differentiates the premium market and becomes a further upsell, making it less cost-effective. :( I can justify $3k for “run a small LLM on my laptop for my job as ML researcher,” but I still can’t justify $10k for “run a larger model on my Mac Studio”
See https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/4167#discu...
For example if I spec out a 13" M4 MBA to match my current 14" M1 Pro MBP, which with tax came to ~$3k in 2021 (32GB RAM, 1TB storage), that $1k MBA ends up being ~$1900. Now that more frequent upgrade cadence doesn't make as much sense financially. After one purchase and one upgrade, you've exceeded the cost of the M1 Pro MBP purchase.
Overall I don't disagree with your sentiment, especially for more casual use cases, but progress will never stop. There will always be a newer laptop with better specs coming out. I personally would rather beef up a machine and then drive it until it dies or can no longer perform the tasks I need it to.
As for camera lenses, I expect my collection of manual focus F-mount Zeiss primes to have a longer useful life than their owner.
I actually find M1 Air class performance still more acceptable for all my usual dev tasks. I might only need a beefier machine for the extra RAM if I'm spinning up a lot of VMs. Otherwise though, the raw CPU performance is still quite fine.
I've been using the same PC that I built in 2013 continuously since then. Every four or five years or so I'll buy one part in the $500 range to keep it updated. It's currently got a Ryzen 7800X3D, 32GB DDR5, and a Radeon RX 6700XT, so it's easily outperforming a brand new $3000 Macbook Pro in most workloads that I actually care about.
My initial investment in it was $1200. My total investment over the last 12 years has been about $3000.
Buying disposable computers simply does not make any financial sense to me.
That says a lot about the community you live in.