Comment by NoSalt

Any and all. It's not particularly justifiable. It's more like, I'm a software engineer, and this is my home workshop. I run dozens of services, experiment with a bunch of different LLMs, tune my Postgres instance for good performance on large datasets, run ML data prep pipelines. All sorts really.

I'm also into motorcycles. Before I owned a house with a garage, I had to continuously pack my tools up and unpack them the next day. A bigger project meant schlepping parts in and out of the house. I had to keep track of the weather to work on my bikes.

Then, when I got a house, I made sure to get one with a garage and power. It transformed my experience. I was able to leave projects in situ until I had time. I had a place to put all my tools.

The workstation is a lot like that. The alternative would be renting. But then I'd spend a lot of my time schlepping data back and forth, investing in setting things up and tearing them down.

YMMV. I wouldn't dream of trying to universalize my experience.

I'm thinking the same. My total computing purchases in the last 25 years, including desktops, laptops, monitors, phones, and tablets is way under 20k.

I would bet it continues to be more affordable to buy reasonable specs with current consumer hardware, rather than buying a top system once.