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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

Over time, you're probably paying 2x or 3x in insurance premiums compared with what the loss would be.

Consider also the overall effect if you invested the premiums instead of paying them.

This is also nutty. The guy is clearly risk-averse, which means if he did invest he would go for a risk-free rate, which is.... 0.90% right now?

I've had this conversation with friends before. Some people can't see outside their own risk profile.

I pay $45.00 a year for a $2,062, no-deductible policy on my MacBook Pro through State Farm. I'd have to have the MacBook for 45 years for the premiums to even equal the payout on loss.

22 years if you invest the premiums at 7%. (At 45 years you'd have $12,858.70.) Add this up for all the other non-catastrophic items you have insurance for.

I know when you're young 45 years seems like it'll never happen, but if you're lucky it does.

You can't guarantee 100% expense coverage during random events. Not everybody has thousands of dollars laying around in emergency fund for 12+ months. Committing to an insurance policy is simply a semi-guaranteed safety net.

Have tons of cash? You should still probably look at a cheaper plan with a super high deductible.

I'd buy a cheaper computer before one so expensive it would be a fiscal catastrophe if I lost it. Buying a computer on credit is just as bad, might as well just set fire to money.

In fact, my laptop is a $500 one I bought 2 years ago for travel use and didn't want to be too upset if it was lost/broken/stolen.

My previous one was 10 years old and was a bit heavy :-)

A $500 laptop is garbage and hardly adequate for the use of most of the people that frequent HN. I mean, what does $500 buy you? A shitty TN panel with a subpar resolution, color reproduction and viewing angle, often shoddy build quality, tons of bulk and probably a spinning drive (I wouldn't buy a laptop without a SSD today).

Not everybody on the planet needs something svelte and sexy, but for those of us who work on their machines a $500 POS doesn't cut it.

You do have a good point, a $500 laptop doesn't make for a great development machine. But that's not what I use it for, I use it as a travel machine. (It can be used for dev in a pinch, and I carry along a full size $9.99 keyboard and wireless mouse for that purpose.)

I use a desktop for dev built with about $600 in parts from newegg, excluding the display. I do get a bit spendy on the display, as that is the most bang for the buck value to me. None of the high end laptops have a display large enough for dev for me. Portability and dev are at odds.

But this thread is about insurance to protect against the loss of a high end laptop. I presume that someone doing serious computer work is making enough money that they don't actually need insurance to cover the loss of even a high end laptop, and the premiums hence won't be worth it.

BTW, my laptop is an ASUS X202E. It's small, and the build quality is surprisingly good. You can also get usable laptops from the pawn shop for $150. A bonus is you'll never have to worry about someone stealing it :-)

I did work on an Acer C7 ($200 with about $200 worth of SSD+Memory and a $100 23" LCD when I was home, total cost $500) with Ubuntu for about half a year. I initially bought the machine to travel with, and it became a workstation when another machine malfunctioned. I do a mixture of C, Python, Javascript, and Clojure development. It was absolutely fine. Clojure needed a settings tweak to bootstrap the repl properly (it was slow at over a minute), but I never left the repl, so it was a one time cost. C/Python/JS have compilers that were fast even on a dual-core Celeron. tmux/bash/vim were fast (as always).

I did everything on that machine up to and including playing TFC via Steam. It ran an IRC client, Chrome, Firefox, VirtualBox for Windows, and my xterm w/tmux. I don't know that I'd give up my rMBP for it, but I did a lot of work on the chromebook.

As far as a developer machine goes, a $300 special 14-15" screen plus $200 of RAM+SSD would probably be fine for 99% of what I do. This likely doesn't work for those who need Photoshop, do video editing, or need to rebuild their OS (rebuilding world in FreeBSD on the thing would have been a bit much). If you're slinging JS, Python, Ruby, Erlang, Clojure, Java or something similar and you can't get by on 16GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD, something is atypical.

"Buying a computer on credit is just as bad, might as well just set fire to money".

You are not living in reality. Most of people live on credit and can't afford to pay for things in full.

Especially not $500 laptops "for travel".

Please take a look at the antecedents in this thread. The person had a Surface Pro 3 (a thousand dollar item) he was buying insurance for.

If I had to buy such on credit, I'd opt instead for a $150 machine from a pawn shop I could pay in full.

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