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The younger generation of programmers seem to think that a $1000 computer is crazy expensive these days. How spoiled we have become! When I built my first compu

The younger generation of programmers seem to think that a $1000 computer is crazy expensive these days. How spoiled we have become! When I built my first computer 30 years ago, the components cost just over $2K (and the components you wished you could afford were closer to $3K) and that is not inflation adjusted. That wasn't the first computer I owned, just the first one I built. I am sure some really old timers remember the ones that cost more that $5K.

matwood 4y ago
Exactly. I see $1k for all that as a steal. I remember spending a lot of money on LVD SCSI in one machine I built to do anything to speed up disk access.
sroussey 4y ago
Wasn’t the original Mac like $2.5k ($7k inflation adjusted)? For the base model.
nickjj 4y ago
I think things could be seen as a little pricey nowadays compared to ~25 years ago, mainly due to video cards. I built about half a dozen machines from parts since 1998 and it was almost a constant to spend $650-800 for a mid-range machine for about 20 of those years. This includes everything but a monitor, but it does include a decent video card. His part list for $915 doesn't include a video card. With today's market a mid-range card will put you at a grand total of about $1,250-1,300. That's approaching 2x the cost of a solid mid-range machine that you could build 8 years ago. Here's a couple of line items from my last part purchase in 2014: - Intel Core i5-4460 LGA 1150 CPU $182 - Crucial MX100 256GB SSD $105 - Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO $35 The crazy thing is, here we are 8+ years later and that same CPU cooler is $45, that's ~23% more expensive than almost a decade ago. The exact CPU and SSD aren't worth price comparing because no one would buy them today since we have way better hardware at similar price points. For ~$180 you can grab a Ryzen 7 5700G and a 1TB SSD is about the same price as 256GB from back then. That feels like it's on a higher end of mid-range for today. It's really video cards where you get killed.
- neogodless 4y ago
  Yup - I used to budget $200 - $250 for "last year's flagship" or something midrange. Spent $290 in April 2020 for a Radeon RX 5600 XT - a few steps below the top end $400 5700 XT! The 6600 XT is actually about that much now, which isn't awful. But it's also increasingly far from the top end (behind the 6700 XT, 6800, 6900 XT, 7900 XT, 7900 XTX) and those range in price from $350 to $1000!
  - nickjj 4y ago
    Yeah, a bunch of years ago $200-250 would get you a really nice card relative to what's available at that time. I lost my invoice for my video card but it's a GeForce GTX 750 Ti. I'm pretty sure it was around $150 went I got it. It's not the best thing in the world and today it's good enough to casually play some older games. It has no problem powering multiple 1440p displays which is why I continue to use it. For its time when I got it in 2015 it was maybe middle of the pack as a mid-range card. Playing those era games at 60 FPS at 1080p is fine. Nowadays, forget about getting anything near that price point even though every other piece of hardware has huge upgrades at similar price points as back then (as seen with my previous post on CPUs and SSDs). It's especially bad too because almost 10 years has passed. Expectations have rose. Nowadays you would hope to be able to have a 1440p display running at 120+ hz and be able to play games at that resolution at 120+ fps. Today you're looking at something like $300 to get a comparable card relative to what's available today vs back then. I haven't done the research on what's the best card in that range but a GTX 2060 is about $300 nowadays but it also retailed at about that price in 2019. In theory it should have dropped by now since there's been multiple new generations since then.

matwood 4y ago

Exactly. I see $1k for all that as a steal. I remember spending a lot of money on LVD SCSI in one machine I built to do anything to speed up disk access.

sroussey 4y ago

Wasn’t the original Mac like $2.5k ($7k inflation adjusted)? For the base model.

nickjj 4y ago

I think things could be seen as a little pricey nowadays compared to ~25 years ago, mainly due to video cards. I built about half a dozen machines from parts since 1998 and it was almost a constant to spend $650-800 for a mid-range machine for about 20 of those years. This includes everything but a monitor, but it does include a decent video card. His part list for $915 doesn't include a video card. With today's market a mid-range card will put you at a grand total of about $1,250-1,300. That's approaching 2x the cost of a solid mid-range machine that you could build 8 years ago. Here's a couple of line items from my last part purchase in 2014: - Intel Core i5-4460 LGA 1150 CPU $182 - Crucial MX100 256GB SSD $105 - Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO $35 The crazy thing is, here we are 8+ years later and that same CPU cooler is $45, that's ~23% more expensive than almost a decade ago. The exact CPU and SSD aren't worth price comparing because no one would buy them today since we have way better hardware at similar price points. For ~$180 you can grab a Ryzen 7 5700G and a 1TB SSD is about the same price as 256GB from back then. That feels like it's on a higher end of mid-range for today. It's really video cards where you get killed.

neogodless 4y ago
Yup - I used to budget $200 - $250 for "last year's flagship" or something midrange. Spent $290 in April 2020 for a Radeon RX 5600 XT - a few steps below the top end $400 5700 XT! The 6600 XT is actually about that much now, which isn't awful. But it's also increasingly far from the top end (behind the 6700 XT, 6800, 6900 XT, 7900 XT, 7900 XTX) and those range in price from $350 to $1000!
- nickjj 4y ago
  Yeah, a bunch of years ago $200-250 would get you a really nice card relative to what's available at that time. I lost my invoice for my video card but it's a GeForce GTX 750 Ti. I'm pretty sure it was around $150 went I got it. It's not the best thing in the world and today it's good enough to casually play some older games. It has no problem powering multiple 1440p displays which is why I continue to use it. For its time when I got it in 2015 it was maybe middle of the pack as a mid-range card. Playing those era games at 60 FPS at 1080p is fine. Nowadays, forget about getting anything near that price point even though every other piece of hardware has huge upgrades at similar price points as back then (as seen with my previous post on CPUs and SSDs). It's especially bad too because almost 10 years has passed. Expectations have rose. Nowadays you would hope to be able to have a 1440p display running at 120+ hz and be able to play games at that resolution at 120+ fps. Today you're looking at something like $300 to get a comparable card relative to what's available today vs back then. I haven't done the research on what's the best card in that range but a GTX 2060 is about $300 nowadays but it also retailed at about that price in 2019. In theory it should have dropped by now since there's been multiple new generations since then.