[fastball]

Because the productivity gains from upgrading can be quite large relative to the cost of upgrading, esp when you factor in the average salary in this community.

I spend 8-10 hours on my Macbook every day. The amount of time I've saved / productivity I've gained by things just running faster and by being more mobile (much longer battery life) is huge compared to the $2000 price tag.

Frugality is good but there are some things in life (depending on your personal circumstances) where it does in fact make sense to upgrade for clear benefits.

[JohnBooty]

Really depends on what you're doing.

I spend 8-10 hours a day coding on my 2018 MBP (web apps - Postgres and Rails or Python) but almost none of that is really CPU-bound in my case. The meat of my work, the actual coding and iteration, is not limited by the aging CPU.

The one thing that's painfully slow is rebuilding Docker images, but we don't do that too often. Less than once per week.

I actually am upgrading soon, but it is not going to make an amazing difference for me in terms of productivity in my current work.

[rewmie]

> Because the productivity gains from upgrading can be quite large relative to the cost of upgrading, esp when you factor in the average salary in this community.

You see, this is simply not true. At all. By far.

I have a cheap Intel laptop released 8-10 years ago. It shipped with 8GB of RAM and 4 cores. I bought it on a clearance sale for around $500. I use it still to this day to work on webapps, including launching half a dozen services with Docker Compose. The only time I experience any type of slowdown is when I launch IntelliJ.

I also have new kit, including a M2 MacBook.

There is absolutely nothing I can do with my M2 laptop that I cannot do well with my cheap old Intel laptop. Nothing. The only issue I have with my old laptop is battery life, and that's just because I don't bother replacing it.

Please do point out a single concrete example of "productivity gains" that I would get by spending $2k on a new laptop.

[georgespencer]

> There is absolutely nothing I can do with my M2 laptop that I cannot do well with my cheap old Intel laptop. Nothing.

[…]

> The only time I experience any type of slowdown is when I launch IntelliJ.

I can't tell if you're a serially dishonest interlocutor, or whether your fetish for making very emphatic generalisations with lots of intensifiers makes you seem like one, but once again this is very weak reasoning. You have yourself pointed out something you cannot do with your Intel laptop which you could with an upgrade.

> Please do point out a single concrete example of "productivity gains" that I would get by spending $2k on a new laptop.

You can run IntelliJ smoothly and have no battery life issues. (Literally from your own post… it's just so sad to see this utter lack of self awareness.)

[xxs]

The only downside would be struggling with 8GB, which should be upgradable just as well. 10y old would have a cd/dvd tray - that can be replaced by an SSD for 4TB of goodliness (SATA but still good enough).

My spouse has a 12y old laptop that has had pretty much everything (but the soldered GPU) upgraded - CPU, memory, HDD->SSD, CD-SSD, WiFi (to support 5GHz), keyboard (replaced), fan & heatsink, battery (replaced, might rebuild one w/ LG's 18650 MJ1). Unfortunately pre-Sandy Bridge memory is capped at 8GB, so it shows its age - still an amazing thing.

[karolist]

I love responses like this, we should think hard first why NOT to upgrade, instead of doing reverse.

[fastball]

Why do you have an M2 Macbook?