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Comment by sorenjan | Hacker News Reader

He spent more on gaming computers than my yearly salary, and then follows it up with

> I actually find it funny how cheap computers are.

If you read it in context, I am making a comparison between computers and cabinetry, and noting how absurd it is that the technological marvel that is a computer costs a similar amount of money to the cabinet holding it, which is just some wood and hinges. One would almost expect the computer to cost millions of dollars, but instead it costs thousands.

Maybe "cheap" was a poor choice of word for this. Sorry.

I get what you mean, the marvels of modern mass production and logistics impress me too, but those cabinets costs as much as a small house in some places so it still comes across as rich people musings. And for the record I'm not poor, I'm just a European engineer.

Congrats on all your success though, good to see you're enjoying it with friends.

"Sorry"

Sorry.

I always marvel at technology the same way: $200 gets you a whole lot of TV, or a coffee table that will not survive two moves. Also I cut and trimmed a cat door into our laundry room so the girls could do their business, so I very much approve of going a little bit over the top for your kitties. Maybe when my son is old enough for the cats to see him at night I'll work on a solution similar to yours.

> One would almost expect the computer to cost millions of dollars

By 2030 they probably will...

And then it's - objectively! - not even true. That amounts to 3750 per computer. For a 4070, that's insanely expensive. You can get decent gaming pc with this card for less than a thrid of that, even in 2024.

I mean I have to admit this house looks live every geeks dream, but come on... Seven figure house price... In my country, most people don't make that much money in their entire working life. I do mean that literally, let's take "seven figure" as 4.5M. Evenly divided by 40 working years, that's 112.5k a year. That's almost double the median income. And I live in Germany, a nation that's considered rich.

FWIW, the 4070 was $600 at the time. You could indeed build a great gaming machine around a 4070 at much lower cost, but a few things inflated the price for me:

* I included the fairly nice 4k monitors ($750) in the price.

* The motherboards were stupidly expensive ($450) since I wanted something with 10G networking onboard, to support the netboot setup.

* The super-long fiber optic HDMI and USB cables are on the order of $150 each (and each computer needs one of each).

* Rackmount gear, which is stupidly expensive when purchased retail. (Datacenters obviously don't buy this stuff retail, so it's a weird market.)

* I think I included the networking gear and some other not-per-machine stuff in the figure. My spreadsheet from the time shows $3,067.64 per machine before tax.

(I am not trying to make any particular point here, just providing data for those who are curious.)

I really appreciate the answer and the detailed breakdown.

I should've stated more clearly what particular part of that statement I found untrue: the "computers being cheap" part when you pary 3k for a decent, but not great, gaming pc ;)

I absolutely believe that you paid 75k for 22 machines (I've used 20 in my post above in error). From the photos I can clearly and quite enviously see that no part of that setup could have been cheap.

He spend more than 10 yearly salaries of me. Why not get 20 junk computers and lan party classics or opensource incarnations?

This is from (2024) fyi

Still not cheap... even in 2024 GPUs were very inflated. The GTX 970 was around 350 at launch in 2014, and in 2024 was 650-ish.

Yes, this line made me angry. Privileged people from first world countries like these will increase their products prices for growth & more profit saying it's very cheap anyways.

Meanwhile common people in other countries can't even think about buying a proper gaming PC now. I bought a pre owned gpu, it stopped working after 5 months and I lost my savings.

It was cheaper than it is now after the AI stuff. I don't think people buying and using computers makes them expensive. Your anger is misplaced.

Be angry instead at companies who won't even comply with the most ridiculously basic laws. They are the ones causing all those problems.

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/naacp-...

I see and also had some immediate reaction when somebody mentions a $75k figure and says “cheap”.

But I think the point really here is that computers are cheap in relation to other items you can buy. Not cheap as in “small part of my wealth”, but as in “about equally much money as something that is not as impressive (as a computer)”.

And I really agree. I think it’s amazing that I can get eg a computer I find fast for the price of a kind of bad sofa. 2nd hand MacBook M1 vs dinner for 4 at a nice restaurant.

Computers are cheap!

He is an American so 'first world' is kind of debatable now with Trump. /s

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