[jillesvangurp]

Expensive is relative. I'm the CTO of a small startup and we're leasing our laptops from Apple. We don't have huge budgets. I got my 16" M4 Max, 48GB, 1TB model a few months ago. Costs us 105 euro/month. That includes 3 years of extended warranty. After the lease is over (3 years), we have the option to buy the laptops at a discount typically. The new value of this thing is around 4500 euro, I think. We could have gone cheap and gotten something for 70-80 or so Euro per month. It's not worth the savings. Over 3 years that adds up to about 900 euros saved. That's nothing in the grand scheme of things.

105 euro per month is a very reasonable cost from a business point of view and not at all expensive. People think nothing of spending the same on LLM tokens, or getting a lease car for their commutes (typically spending >2-3x per month). But when it comes to laptops, people suddenly become irrationally frugal. If you use your laptop to produce things and benefit from having a fast laptop in any way for that, don't be frugal like that.

I get a lot of value out of having a fast laptop. For example, our entire integration test suite (Spring Boot) can run in under 30 seconds making use of all the CPU this thing has and running against docker containers with DB, Valkey, and Elasticsearch. That's a build that takes a lot longer on crappy CI vms or one of my old laptops. Basically, it runs almost like a small unit test suite. I can just invoke that whenever and not be blocked by it. I do this a lot. It helps me catch things early and keeps my feedback cycles short. Which helps me maintain flow state when I'm working. That is priceless.

30 seconds vs 3-4 minutes on my previous laptop (14" M1 16GB) is a big deal. It was more constrained for memory (swapping) and CPU and just ran a bit slower. Still reasonable. But a 7x improvement is massive for me. Times 10 or so per day adds up to really significant time savings. If you compile stuff, run expensive test suites, or whatever: you could use a fast laptop.

I used to freelance / consult and charge more per hour than this thing costs me per month. In retrospect, for me the lesson on updating here is to never ever allow myself to penny pinch on laptop cost again.

[gregw2]

I can vouch that for a critical engineer/CTO/VPE at a startup, it totally pays to get the next day onsite warranty, even when a good chunk of your work is on remote servers.

I ran my laptop so hard the motherboard had to get replaced 2-3 times... but always was fixed quite promptly.

[Aurornis]

> 30 seconds vs 3-4 minutes on my previous laptop (14" M1 16GB) is a big deal. It was more constrained for memory (swapping)

This is why data driven purchasing is key. Running some tests and having some data to show how much time will be saved by a laptop upgrade makes the decision process much easier.

The companies that only decide based on prices and budgets set by someone making blanket decisions for the company always get it wrong.

It’s also possible to go too far on the spending path. I remember some people who demanded brand new maxed out MacBook Pros every generation until someone ran some tests and proved that it wasn’t making any noticeable difference at all year over year despite costing upwards of $5-6K per person. That’s money that could have gone to something else.

[cratermoon]

> This is why data driven purchasing is key.

Many years ago I failed to convince my employer how buying their programmers less expensive computers with 5400rpm hard drives was an overall loss compared to 7200rpm disk drives. My argument was that any programming necessarily entailed reading and writing dozens to hundreds files all the time, especially during compile cycles. Maybe if I'd had data showing the actual time lost waiting? Or maybe I was a dumb kid trying to justify my desire to have a nicer computer for my daily driver.

[Aurornis]

> Maybe if I'd had data showing the actual time lost waiting?

This is exactly what works.

Adding analytics that reports duration of test runs to a central server makes it easy. Some developers panic at the thought of this because it feels like spying, but the data is immensely helpful.

[cactusplant7374]

Can the average person lease a laptop or just businesses?

[bombcar]

You can almost certainly lease if you really want to but the usual benefit is more enjoyed by a company (no capital expense, only operating expense, defined, and steady).

As an individual, you can get the exact same laptop for $333.25/mo (for 12 months) right now with 3% cash back and 0% interest on the Apple Card. That's only a little over twice the monthly cost, and you're done in 12.

Sometimes you can find pay over 24 or even 36 which would make it even lower. Add in AppleCare and you're probably ahead as an individual.

Business taxes and others change this, or if you KNOW you will need it only for a year, or must have the latest and greatest every time.

(Our OP spends 3780€ over 3 years and doesn't even own it at the end; but the financial tax advantages can be huge and make it worth it, so much so that founders sometimes will make TWO companies, one to buy the capital item and lease it to the actual startup.)

[parkaboy]

I don't think they officially support leasing to individuals directly, but it's very easy to setup a leasing/biz account with them as a business. I think any Apple store has a POC there that can help / see: https://www.apple.com/shop/finance/business-financing

You can very easily setup an LLC and obtain an EIN. It's been a minute since I've setup an Apple financing account, so I don't recall what they require on the finance side. I'm certain they will want to see some sort of financial proof, but I doubt they will care much if you're not a proper operating biz. I'm not sure if proof of finances will need to be linked to a banking account under the business name, but if so, that's easy enough to setup with an ebank once you have an EIN.

All of that being said, the tradeoff will be if you're willing to deal with the potential state/federal tax and biz reporting requirements of having the business. It's not hard esp if it's not a real active business, but just another thing to deal with.

[cactusplant7374]

If the laptop is stolen are you on the hook for the whole thing minus some depreciation?

[roryirvine]

Yes, but that's what insurance is for - pretty much every business will have business & office equipment insurance, which should cover it.

[inanutshellus]

locally, last i checked, an LLC costs ~$20/yr ... so yeah. easy.

[ghaff]

I have one which I haven't really used though probably a useful thing to have. But be aware of various other fees like annual state fees. It definitely costs more than I was thinking it would once all the costs are taken into account. For a lot of purposes just using a DBA is probably fine.

[tony69]

Nice. In california it’s $800/yr

[RandomBacon]

It's even easier and cheaper to set up a trust and get an EIN that way.

[7bit]

> 105 euro per month is a very reasonable cost from a business point of view and not at all expensive. People think nothing of spending the same on LLM tokens, or getting a lease car for their commutes (typically spending >2-3x per month). But when it comes to laptops, people suddenly become irrationally frugal. If you use your laptop to produce things and benefit from having a fast laptop in any way for that, don't be frugal like that.

What's reasonable and what is expensive. "Expensive" and "cheap" are comparative terms, so what are you comparing them with when you say "reasonable cost"?

And comparing them to cars and LLM tokens is just a straw man.

105 vs 70 is a difference of 1/3rd of the price, and if that cheaper device delivers the same performance, then 105 becomes unreasonably expensive.

We're managing 3000 devices and that would be 90000 per month to pay for fluff that doesn't deliver all that much value over the 70$ price tag.

[jillesvangurp]

3000 * 5K = 15M per month in salaries. We can argue if 90K is worth it or not. Depends how good the people are. But it's not a lot of money relatively speaking. And 5K is not a lot of salary. We're probably talking 2-3x the amount. And you are also spending on buildings and infrastructure, software licenses for things like Office, Slack, etc.

Not saying every company should blindly buy big laptops for any software developer. But I am saying that penny pinching on their laptops might not be the smartest thing. Save 90K vs. destroy flow state for 3000 people on a daily basis. One of those things could really cost you; it's probably not the 90K. Big companies can be short sighted like that. Big companies incentivize mindless penny pinching like that. Nobody even questions it when it happens.

If I work for myself, I do question these things. IMHO if you are a freelancer or a consultant, having proper equipment to do the job is not optional.

[7bit]

I put that in relation with the performance a device delivers, you again argue only about cost. This is point less. Enjoy your day.

[542354234235]

>30 seconds vs 3-4 minutes on my previous laptop (14" M1 16GB) is a big deal. It was more constrained for memory (swapping) and CPU and just ran a bit slower. Still reasonable. But a 7x improvement is massive for me. Times 10 or so per day adds up to really significant time savings. If you compile stuff, run expensive test suites, or whatever: you could use a fast laptop.

This was in their original comment. So, when you say they are only arguing cost, I really have no idea what you are talking about.