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.
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.
> 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 $5-6K per person. That’s money that could have gone to something else.
> 105 euro per month is a very reasonable cost from a business point of view and not at all expensive. People think nothing of spending the same on LLM tokens, or getting a lease car for their commutes (typically spending >2-3x per month). But when it comes to laptops, people suddenly become irrationally frugal. If you use your laptop to produce things and benefit from having a fast laptop in any way for that, don't be frugal like that.
What's reasonable and what is expensive. "Expensive" and "cheap" are comparative terms, so what are you comparing them with when you say "reasonable cost"?
And comparing them to cars and LLM tokens is just a straw man.
105 vs 70 is a difference of 1/3rd of the price, and if that cheaper device delivers the same performance, then 105 becomes unreasonably expensive.
We're managing 3000 devices and that would be 90000 per month to pay for fluff that doesn't deliver all that much value over the 70$ price tag.
It pulls data from Amazon and so is limited to availability there. For instance, the most expensive MacBook in there is $5839 while on the Apple Store you can max out at $7349 (hardware only). I suspact same goes for other manufacturers. So if you want to blow ungodly amount of money you’d need to do some extra research.
Last year I purchased a Lenovo P15 Gen 1 used, originally it came with a sticker price of $5700 but I managed to get it used for ~$500. All these hyper expensive laptops fall into one of two buckets, either they are top end gaming rigs or they are like my Lenovo and designed for large engineering companies that will just lease them and not give a crap how much they cost.
For the average consumer though I highly recommend going on Ebay and finding these hyper expensive laptops used from a few years ago. Mine came with an i9 processor, an RTX 5000 and can support up to 128GB of RAM and even 5 years on those are still wild numbers except that same computer can be found for maybe 10-15% of the original price.
Though I will say one downside of buying one of these is they are customizable to an insane degree so finding the "right" one might take you a while (took me around a month to find mine).
Another downside is that the seller might install spyware on your machine - had that with a Lenovo too. Ended up buying a brand new Asus that was so heavily discounted it cost the same as the 2nd hand Lenovo I returned.
It seems like a scam that gaming laptops are marketed with the headline, i.e: GeForce RTX 5090, then in the fine print, read: GeForce RTX 5090 laptop GPU.
Agreed, but the scam is coming from Nvidia, not the laptop manufacturers. I doubt they're even complicit - Nvidia probably forces them to agree on exact marketing phrasing before selling them GPUs.
Most people look at computers as a commodity that needs to perfectly balance performance and price; most really expensive computers usually are acquired by professionals that do need the specs and within small time, it gets paid off quickly.
I have a 16" Macbook Pro M2 with 96GB of RAM. Costs without VAT around €4k, but a client paid half of it as a one year retainer for my work, so the device ended up costing me €2k. You would say those specs are over the top, but it's been 2 years and I still have an amazing work machine and there's not enough things I can do to make it feel slow; it pays off, because I don't waste my time waiting for my device, it's the other way around. Would my dad buy such a machine for browsing? Absolutely not! Me as a professional? Makes no sense not to!
There's also the fact that usually, a higher-end machine will have better components that are more comfortable to use. Most brand-new "enterprise" computers we have at work have much worse screens, keyboards and touchpads than my 2013 mbp. I know many people don't seem to care, so that also has to be considered.
Sure, they cost maybe half as much in nominal terms, but seeing how they fall apart even though I take good care of them, I would have needed to replace them so often that I'm not even sure I would have come out ahead. And, at the same time, I would have always had a terrible experience.
Now, I haven't used that Mac in a few years, ever since I stopped going to the office and it stopped being supported. But even over a 7-year period, when I used it daily and carted it around daily, I'm pretty sure it's still an all-around better investment.
Outside of some of the fascinating VAIO laptops with their wild and wacky features, I have never loved a super expensive laptop. I like a laptop that can get the job done when I need to and easily be fixed if I need to when I am on the road. At the moment that is Framework, and previously thinkpad, and a while ago, Powerbooks.
I have learned as I became older that the device is a tool to getting the work done, not something to drool over. I am more proud of the output than the device I do it on.
When you buy a really nice power tool or hand tool, it's going to last you a very long time. It will remain fit-for-purpose for decades to come. The cost can often be justified because it's an investment in emotional happiness. It feels nice to use an expensive quality tool, and it feels nicer knowing that you'll be able to continue doing so for many years.
One of these expensive laptops? It's going to be as obsolete as a cheaper laptop in a couple of years' time. Hell, it'll probably start feeling old and slow after the next round of Windows updates in less than a year.
Of course, but it depends on the job. If you're working on heavy 3D scenes, or doing video work in 4k or 8k, then "gets the job done" will be an expensive laptop. Maybe not $8k expensive, but $4k easily. For this kind of work it's often cheaper to buy a highly specced gaming laptop rather than a workstation laptop.
> Outside of some of the fascinating VAIO laptops with their wild and wacky features, I have never loved a super expensive laptop.
Sure, if and only if you put in the word "super". Frameworks are expensive, starting around $1000 or $1500 depending on screen size. Perfectly good models are available for 1/3 the price.
Photographers and camera operators. One of my students remarked that his dad saves his pictures in raw format, and that they've grown much bigger in recent years.
The funny part the 5090 mobile is more like a 5080 desktop edition!
See the Alienware laptop flagged as 5090 while it's "GeForce RTX 5090 24 GB GDDR7" as laptops can't sustain the TDP and RTX XX90 full power. For AI an external GPU is less costly option.
But if you're just interested in doing some machine learning on it, then it's all about how much RAM and not really how fast. I used to use my gaming laptop to do a lot of local ML
These HP Fury Laptops and many others on that list are such a joke.
A somewhat capable CPU, sometimes just an integrated GPU slapped in a cheap chassis with mediocre build quality. Sold at absurd prices. My employer is "getting scammed" by HP continuously by paying for this absolute crap. The workstations aren't any better.
Nowadays the "business laptops" you get cost the same as a MacBook, have a bad, barely usable, CPU and are made out of flimsy plastic. I do not get how companies like HP keep doing this, what a total embarrassment.
I could be completely wrong about this, but my hunch was the HP Zbook were mobile workstations and you could rip out the wireless components, so I thought this could be useful if you wanted something portable in say a SCIF.
That ThinkyPad that is selling for over 7000$ and it doesn't even have a GPU makes it really hard for anyone to see that price as justified. Do some of these sellers just have a goal to sell one or two of these for the entirety of the products life cycle and that would be a win in their book? Or is this just then trying to pad the market pri ces to make the less expensive products look more appeealing?
I didn't realize Amazon was offering payment plans for laptops. I'd only ever seen that for cars and houses.
Which makes me wonder, what do they do when people default on payments? Do they have a kill switch they can throw? Or do they send the repo man to repossess it while you're sleeping?
Where do you live? Here in the UK, a company called Klarna has managed to wriggle their way into almost every single online storefront and offers plans for sub-£5 purchases.
Might be region specific, where I live you can't default or do bankruptcy, it just goes to the National Enforcement Authority that haunts you until you pay for the rest of your life. They don't care about any valuables without clear resell value like a newish car or jewelry or a house.
You also lose your credit status, making you unable to get new loans or phone plans, and often making apartment finding really really difficult
The FZ-40GZ-0SBM is almost $8000. You get an Intel Core Ultra 7 165H, 32GB of RAM, and 512 GB of SSD space. Intel integrated GPU only.
The Getac X600 Server Laptop be decked out with a Xeon W-11865MRE, 128GB of RAM, and 6TB of storage space (no GPU again), but it'll run you a cool $17,000.
IIRC they weigh 7 to 10 lbs, so not terribly light either.
jillesvangurp|4 months ago
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|4 months ago
I ran my laptop so hard the motherboard had to get replaced 2-3 times... but always was fixed quite promptly.
Aurornis|4 months ago
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 $5-6K per person. That’s money that could have gone to something else.
cactusplant7374|4 months ago
7bit|4 months ago
What's reasonable and what is expensive. "Expensive" and "cheap" are comparative terms, so what are you comparing them with when you say "reasonable cost"?
And comparing them to cars and LLM tokens is just a straw man.
105 vs 70 is a difference of 1/3rd of the price, and if that cheaper device delivers the same performance, then 105 becomes unreasonably expensive.
We're managing 3000 devices and that would be 90000 per month to pay for fluff that doesn't deliver all that much value over the 70$ price tag.
pointlessone|4 months ago
mahin|4 months ago
_fat_santa|4 months ago
For the average consumer though I highly recommend going on Ebay and finding these hyper expensive laptops used from a few years ago. Mine came with an i9 processor, an RTX 5000 and can support up to 128GB of RAM and even 5 years on those are still wild numbers except that same computer can be found for maybe 10-15% of the original price.
Though I will say one downside of buying one of these is they are customizable to an insane degree so finding the "right" one might take you a while (took me around a month to find mine).
mmarian|4 months ago
yellow_lead|4 months ago
esperent|4 months ago
yccs27|4 months ago
nullbyte808|4 months ago
marcogarces|4 months ago
vladvasiliu|4 months ago
Sure, they cost maybe half as much in nominal terms, but seeing how they fall apart even though I take good care of them, I would have needed to replace them so often that I'm not even sure I would have come out ahead. And, at the same time, I would have always had a terrible experience.
Now, I haven't used that Mac in a few years, ever since I stopped going to the office and it stopped being supported. But even over a 7-year period, when I used it daily and carted it around daily, I'm pretty sure it's still an all-around better investment.
ktallett|4 months ago
I have learned as I became older that the device is a tool to getting the work done, not something to drool over. I am more proud of the output than the device I do it on.
beAbU|4 months ago
One of these expensive laptops? It's going to be as obsolete as a cheaper laptop in a couple of years' time. Hell, it'll probably start feeling old and slow after the next round of Windows updates in less than a year.
esperent|4 months ago
Of course, but it depends on the job. If you're working on heavy 3D scenes, or doing video work in 4k or 8k, then "gets the job done" will be an expensive laptop. Maybe not $8k expensive, but $4k easily. For this kind of work it's often cheaper to buy a highly specced gaming laptop rather than a workstation laptop.
Dylan16807|4 months ago
Sure, if and only if you put in the word "super". Frameworks are expensive, starting around $1000 or $1500 depending on screen size. Perfectly good models are available for 1/3 the price.
tarruda|4 months ago
bartvk|4 months ago
bandrami|4 months ago
brailsafe|4 months ago
colinstrickland|4 months ago
mehdibl|4 months ago
See the Alienware laptop flagged as 5090 while it's "GeForce RTX 5090 24 GB GDDR7" as laptops can't sustain the TDP and RTX XX90 full power. For AI an external GPU is less costly option.
CafeRacer|4 months ago
Coneylake|4 months ago
constantcrying|4 months ago
A somewhat capable CPU, sometimes just an integrated GPU slapped in a cheap chassis with mediocre build quality. Sold at absurd prices. My employer is "getting scammed" by HP continuously by paying for this absolute crap. The workstations aren't any better.
Nowadays the "business laptops" you get cost the same as a MacBook, have a bad, barely usable, CPU and are made out of flimsy plastic. I do not get how companies like HP keep doing this, what a total embarrassment.
BizarroLand|4 months ago
https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/pdp/hp-zbook-fury-g1i-16-inch-...
Also, you should never be paying the MSRP unless you're getting a kickback. Your employer may be stupid but that is not the default.
commandersaki|4 months ago
ETlol|4 months ago
dguest|4 months ago
Which makes me wonder, what do they do when people default on payments? Do they have a kill switch they can throw? Or do they send the repo man to repossess it while you're sleeping?
rozab|4 months ago
garmjenif|4 months ago
You also lose your credit status, making you unable to get new loans or phone plans, and often making apartment finding really really difficult
vel0city|4 months ago
IAmBroom|4 months ago
IlikeKitties|4 months ago
somerandomqaguy|4 months ago
The FZ-40GZ-0SBM is almost $8000. You get an Intel Core Ultra 7 165H, 32GB of RAM, and 512 GB of SSD space. Intel integrated GPU only.
The Getac X600 Server Laptop be decked out with a Xeon W-11865MRE, 128GB of RAM, and 6TB of storage space (no GPU again), but it'll run you a cool $17,000.
IIRC they weigh 7 to 10 lbs, so not terribly light either.
nullbyte808|4 months ago
yccs27|4 months ago
hshdhdhehd|4 months ago
unknown|4 months ago
[deleted]
NoSalt|4 months ago
ycombinatrix|4 months ago
unknown|4 months ago
[deleted]
ur-whale|4 months ago
So, looks like none of them can run an .5T LLM locally.
Pass.
asimovDev|4 months ago
Oxodao|4 months ago
mahin|4 months ago
neilv|4 months ago
AstroBen|4 months ago
boredhacker3|4 months ago
_ZeD_|4 months ago
naoru|4 months ago