A friend at work is currently building a PC, and yet another friend is in a similar position as I am, considering what kind of desktop to buy next.
A question came to mind at lunch, which I posed to my friends: “Assuming you get your money’s worth, will a PC that costs you twice as much, last you twice as long?” They both answered in similar ways: “No, but buying a better PC means it might last 1.5x as long, which in the long run saves you the time of having to put together and setup new PC’s.”
So where is the sweet spot? In the past, I’ve always tended toward getting the one-generation older part for cheaper, and thinking about upgrading every year or so. That means I could put together a PC sans input/display devices for under $1K. At some point, I got sick of having to do this, so I bought the powerbook, which in practice requires me to do nothing except install a bit of software. Still it’s questionable whether paying almost $1000 more than what I would have paid for a new desktop has been worth the simplicity of the Powerbook[1].
In hindsight, going the laptop route was a little extreme. I’m still curious to see whether I would use my laptop in its capacity as a laptop more if I had a real desktop to use when I was at home. Both of my friends told me that they have several machines, and didn’t have a problem with having multiple machines to do different things.
Getting off my tangent, I need to place a value on not having to upgrade so often. If I only have to upgrade every 3 years instead of every 2, how much is that worth to me? Putting together a machine takes I’d say roughly a week to two weeks. Of course, that’s not 2 weeks of 24/7 solid time, or even 8 hrs a day, but researching and purchasing, waiting, and constructing takes a good amount of time.. I’d say at least 20-25 hrs. If over a 12 year period, I’d only have to upgrade 4 times instead of 6, that’s a good number of hours that could be saved. Maybe even enough to warrant an extra $500 per purchase (besides, who knows how much more I’ll get paid in 12 years right ;-P)
fn1. Ok, that’s note exactly fair, since a laptop is inherently going to cost more than a desktop for similar specs.