"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
HN has seen this quote many times; tech workers willfully or naively ignore the harm their contributions cause as long as the life changing paychecks keep coming, letting them pretend that they are too far removed from the damage to be responsible.
Then comes the classic post “I’m leaving FAANG, so brave of me <quiet-part>funded entirely by the same extraction and harm I once insisted I didn’t see.</quiet-part>"
My HEDT at home serves as my VR development machine and doubles as a gaming rig. I generally save basic research, design, and sandboxed coding for my MacBook Pro at a coffee shop.
If I had a similar performing laptop that could replace my desktop in terms of GPU performance and compatibility with the devices I use, my HEDT would start collecting dust.
Given that the latest Mac still uses an Intel CPU, I’d say the range is [5,7] years at minimum, based on Apple’s current vintage/obsolete policy, before x86 support is dropped from OSX.
I'm stuck with a $4000 brick I cannot use without frustration. Given that I'm still paying it off, this really hurts motivation.
Another issue that seems to be overlooked is the overly big force touchpad that, in combination with the awful keyboard, will not correctly reject my palms while I type, causing the cursor to move elsewhere, oftentimes causing unintended button clicks, premature email sends, page transitions, etc.