What year was that? I got a Pentium 1 166mhz with 16MB of ram in 1995. Cost my parents $3000. Later we upgraded the RAM and for a while I was running a weird 80MB of RAM configuration (16 + 64).
Any Pentium would have been considered high end when Quake came out. Most people were still running 486s, and it caused some consternation that Quake practically required a Pentium to run smoothly (as the renderer’s inner loop was written to exploit the P5’s superscalar architecture).
$3000 in 95 was a hell of a lot of money. I don't think my parents ever had that much in savings. $3k now is a hell of a lot of money, my parents still don't have that much in savings and I'd really hold out for a stellar upgrade in that range.
Living in Germany I'd definitely still qualify $3k as a lot of money. Median net wage per month comes out to around $2200, so that's almost one and a half months of work for the average person, ignoring all other expenses.
Once you consider inflation since '95, it's probably closer to $6k of today's USD.
Of course it's still possible for someone to have that much in savings, but to be able to spend it (or justify spending) on a computer is something else entirely.
Now obviously "a hell of a lot" is a very subjective term. Where would you say it starts?
OP here. I pretty much agree with your assessment here, though coincidentally enough I'm working for a German company and getting paid in CAD in Canada.
I grew up relatively poor, I've come to realize, so I'm relatively frugal by nature. In a bit of a contrast to those parents I mention, I think I'm good at assessing the value I'd get out of something. So while I'm frugal, I'm happy to spend what I think is worthwhile on something. I'm currently working on a ~$3k MBP, and it serves me tremendous value, but I think the demands of the thing would need to dramatically increase, or whatever is announced next would need to be an intense upgrade for me to consider it.
and I am somewhat close, but recently trying to fix my damn beat up gaming pc that I bought off the street has reminded me how good the MBP is, even though it's 2019 and a lower specced model. No blue screens, no driver issues, the luxury of a refined OS, and it's fast. Docker is really pushing the limits of this thing though.
Not OP, but traditionally I had £400 as the expenditure price-point you really didn’t want to make a mistake with. (Oddly enough, because it was a new laptop budget figure a couple of decades ago - and you couldn’t afford to buy a lemon)
OP here. I think that's not too far off, but it depends on the purchase. For a phone it's basically $500 to solve all of my uses for the thing, and not that much of a risk and no debt. If I break the thing in half, it's a $500 hit over the course of about ~3 years instead of over $1000.
I wouldn't necessarily deride someone for spending $1000 or more on a phone, but to me that's a silly allocation of funds. I'm using a Google Pixel 4a that I got a few years ago for around ~$450 CAD (Canada). If I couldn't get one for that price, I'd go to the used market, and if that yielded nothing worthwhile, I'd pick something super shitty until something around $500 came up. I just can't imagine how I'd get $500 more value out of a phone personally.
That said, if there was a profoundly impactful advancement in technology that did cost $500 more, then sure I'd consider the investment, but it would be a hesitant choice.
For the difference between my current equivalent phone brand new, and anything $1000 or more, I can spread that cash modestly over some of my other gear and get pretty impressive results out of it. In this case, I happen to be spending probably $500-700 CAD this month on misc surprise things that have come up. It'll mean dramatically improving the performance of both my haggard gaming pc that I got for $10 originally, and my bike that I got for $250, and a small trip out of town.
If I wasn't doing that, I could take that cash and spend it on a flight back home, or get the flight anyway and spend the cash on renting a room somewhere for a week or two.
For the PC, going from a 5400 rpm boot drive that I harvested out of a PVR, to a modest ~500gb WD SSD cost around $60 and makes the computer wildly more functional. Likewise, the power supply literally exploded (popped with sparks and fumes) so it could be replaced with another ~$120 cad
A smartphone can be had for $100 or less. Only top-of-the-line smartphones are $1000 or more. Even expensive brands like Apple offer phones for a bit over $400.
You can get a secondhand iPhone 7 for much less, and I’d (genuinely) wonder if the newness, missing features (or difference in their quality) are really worth the extra $850?
Having just upgraded from a 6s to an 11, I’d say… meh? The 11 is nice, I guess, but apart from having a new battery and being slightly more responsive (and on the downside, no fingerprint scanner and no headphone jack) it’s functionally pretty equivalent.
I've never owned an iPhone, but this is basically the framework I operate within when thinking about most purchases, but especially phones. If the question of what it offers me is tenuous at best, I don't have enough extra money to burn that I'm going to spend anything close to that on upgrading, and usually never upgrade, instead just replacing one that was either stolen or broken in a horizontal purchase within a budget of around $500
Ah yes, had it running on my Pentium 60 MHz, 16MB RAM in '95. Didn't run on highest specs, but performance was good enough in SVGA. 60MHz single core and having a floating point unit in your CPU was considered acceleration.
