Comment by wjnc
1 day ago
This should even hold for non-US salaries? This is a machine that enables you to work for about four years. What’s that 200k € in /median/ EU wages. Penny pinching. The thing is that consumer and prosumers vary and everybody wants to drive a Porsche to work And to leisure.
Not blaming anyone for wanting a machine like this. Trying to point out that tech has become so accessible that we all aspire to have a supercomputer as our daily driver.
When I was young a PC (xt and on) would set my dad back about a monthly wage. What I see is a huge compression of the price range. But the upper part of the range still exists (training LLM is not much different from the central computer at universities in the 70s/80s).
I think an EU salary of 200k/year is at least uncommon if not outright rare and definitely not median. At least in the tech space, maybe in finance it's more common.
GP suggested 200k over 4 years, which is pretty reasonable.
That makes far more sense in that case. Though I would have to clarify that 200k/year is attainable in terms of total compensation, just not salary per year on average.
> This is a machine that enables you to work for about four years. [...] Penny pinching.
But that wasn't the argument. In "your time is more valuable", the time is what it takes to remove a dozen screws, replace a card, and format it. Plus any increased risk of data loss, but that should also be quite small if it exists. So for saving hundreds of dollars or more, your expected time is like an hour if you have backups (you'd better have backups!), hard to say for sure if you don't.