When I ask myself, “Is this item worth the price?” how am I supposed to answer that question? An even harder question: “Will this item be worth the price in the future?” or “How will I feel about this purchase after I’ve made it?”
I can’t decide on how to decide whether a MacPro is worth it for me. $2500 is an arbitary number. Should I think about what else I could do with $2500? but it’s not like $2500 is all I have to spend. It’s just $2500 out of a larger flexible pool of funds. I feel like trying to think of all the ways that it could or could not be worth it (in combination with all the other combinations of things I could buy) is akin to solving a (large) instance of the 2D Knapsack problem. And I surely don’t have the energy to go through all the possibilities.
A useful, and at least somewhat entertaining exercise is to elaborate the _grand vision_. That is, what would be the total cost of all the stuff I wanted to get, with the constraint that I only include things which I think I’m getting what I pay for (i.e. no, $10,000 grillz). Maybe that constraint is still inherently subjective, but here goes anyways:
* Mac Pro, $2500
* 30 inch Cinema Display $2000 (mmm, koolaid)
* Mac Mini as a media center $600 (can you smell the koolaid?)
* Eye-TV $300
* Smaller box to do routing $400
* MacBook for Qian $1300 (here Qian, have some koolaid)
So I guess that comes out to just over 7 grand. Now compared to that $2500 doesn’t seem so bad. Right?