[throwaway23236]

Nice article, but most of the time people are buying high-end equipment it is either to save time or save upgrade cycles.

In the example about the 4,000 TV, if it has the latest specs and they are not upgrading it for 5-10 years, it might be worth the investment.

Same thing with the top of the line computer, the amount of time saved doing work could be used to justify the cost. Sometimes saving seconds, minutes, hours, days over years is worth it.

I have been at places where it takes 10+ minutes to login and open Outlook to check your emails in the morning. 10+ minutes every morning times hundreds or thousands of workers ad up very quickly.