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 ran my laptop so hard the motherboard had to get replaced 2-3 times... but always was fixed quite promptly.
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.
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.
As an individual, you can get the exact same laptop for $333.25/mo (for 12 months) right now with 3% cash back and 0% interest on the Apple Card. That's only a little over twice the monthly cost, and you're done in 12.
Sometimes you can find pay over 24 or even 36 which would make it even lower. Add in AppleCare and you're probably ahead as an individual.
Business taxes and others change this, or if you KNOW you will need it only for a year, or must have the latest and greatest every time.
(Our OP spends 3780€ over 3 years and doesn't even own it at the end; but the financial tax advantages can be huge and make it worth it, so much so that founders sometimes will make TWO companies, one to buy the capital item and lease it to the actual startup.)
You can very easily setup an LLC and obtain an EIN. It's been a minute since I've setup an Apple financing account, so I don't recall what they require on the finance side. I'm certain they will want to see some sort of financial proof, but I doubt they will care much if you're not a proper operating biz. I'm not sure if proof of finances will need to be linked to a banking account under the business name, but if so, that's easy enough to setup with an ebank once you have an EIN.
All of that being said, the tradeoff will be if you're willing to deal with the potential state/federal tax and biz reporting requirements of having the business. It's not hard esp if it's not a real active business, but just another thing to deal with.
What's reasonable and what is expensive. "Expensive" and "cheap" are comparative terms, so what are you comparing them with when you say "reasonable cost"?
And comparing them to cars and LLM tokens is just a straw man.
105 vs 70 is a difference of 1/3rd of the price, and if that cheaper device delivers the same performance, then 105 becomes unreasonably expensive.
We're managing 3000 devices and that would be 90000 per month to pay for fluff that doesn't deliver all that much value over the 70$ price tag.
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.
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).
At least in my case it came without a hard drive so there was no vector for attack there. Sure they might have installed spyware at the BIOS level though the practical chance of that happening from a seller that does any sort of volume is more unlikely than winning the lottery IMHO.
Sellers (especially volume sellers) just want to ship you your stuff and make a buck off the margin.
or did you mean spyware at hardware/firmware/BIOS level?
But I think it's not possible to do any more, not with any high-power card that is... the RTX 5090 has a TDP of 600-ish watts, you can neither get in that kind of power into a laptop, even at 24 volt that's still 25 amps of current just for the GPU, and most importantly you can't get rid of 600 watts of heat, no matter what, without making the user uncomfortable.
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.
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.
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.
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.
With 96kHz 32 bit FLAC it would be around three years.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
So, looks like none of them can run an .5T LLM locally.
Pass.
