[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.