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Professional Independent contractors, sure I’ll buy that argument. Never once, in all of the tech companies I’ve worked for, have I seen anyone upgrade a compu

Professional Independent contractors, sure I’ll buy that argument. Never once, in all of the tech companies I’ve worked for, have I seen anyone upgrade a computer. Even recently, my Mac had an issue with parallels that couldn’t get resolved. New Mac given to me. Coworker had a 1.5 year old thinkpad. Just needed to swap the RAM from 8 to 16. Nope, just was given a new Thinkpad with 16 gigs instead of spending $150 on RAM. Companies write off a ton of these expenses, and they don’t “upgrade” the hardware. They upgrade the machine.

captainmuon 9y ago
They'd be stupid to throw away money / working components. Often, old PCs go back to a "pool", where they are upgraded or scavenged for parts, and then given to new employees. Only when they are too old to upgrade, or it is not worth the work, they are sold to employees or dumped. From the perspective of employees, you just get a new PC. Essentially you just need a room for parts and a few employees part time, and you can use your computing resources much more efficiently - basically free money. Granted, it only works for organisations of a certain size (large corporations, universities, gov.).
ebiester 9y ago
I will say that we had some issues at one fortune 500 company where we were passing RAM sticks out to contractors because the computers had pitiful amounts of memory, but they weren't fully capitalized. Dumb things happen when productivity is abstracted. But again, these are not the people given iMac pros.
mirkules 9y ago
Your anecdotal experience is opposite of mine: at my place, we still use 4-5 year old computers, and frequently upgrade hard drives, memory, video cards even when needed. We have a few rooms dedicated to spare parts, and when we can't find what we need, new ones are bought. And honestly, my 4yo PC doesn't really need upgrading just so I can open my IDE or browser 20 seconds faster. Granted, we are an enterprise shop with a few dozen devs - exactly two people have a mac. So we're not exactly Apple's target (enterprise never was)

captainmuon 9y ago

They'd be stupid to throw away money / working components. Often, old PCs go back to a "pool", where they are upgraded or scavenged for parts, and then given to new employees. Only when they are too old to upgrade, or it is not worth the work, they are sold to employees or dumped. From the perspective of employees, you just get a new PC. Essentially you just need a room for parts and a few employees part time, and you can use your computing resources much more efficiently - basically free money. Granted, it only works for organisations of a certain size (large corporations, universities, gov.).

ebiester 9y ago

I will say that we had some issues at one fortune 500 company where we were passing RAM sticks out to contractors because the computers had pitiful amounts of memory, but they weren't fully capitalized. Dumb things happen when productivity is abstracted. But again, these are not the people given iMac pros.

mirkules 9y ago

Your anecdotal experience is opposite of mine: at my place, we still use 4-5 year old computers, and frequently upgrade hard drives, memory, video cards even when needed. We have a few rooms dedicated to spare parts, and when we can't find what we need, new ones are bought. And honestly, my 4yo PC doesn't really need upgrading just so I can open my IDE or browser 20 seconds faster. Granted, we are an enterprise shop with a few dozen devs - exactly two people have a mac. So we're not exactly Apple's target (enterprise never was)