
Ask HN: How to avoid “technolust”? - roscoebeezie
So I got this issue where I completely fetishize new laptops, phones, tech gear. I always got to have the latest phone, laptop, best monitor, everything as soon as they come out. The problem is that most of my stuff is already &#x27;good enough&#x27; and recent.<p>I don&#x27;t know the official term for it, but I call it technolust. Anyone have any tips on combatting this behavior?
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ShinyCyril
For me it was when I started buying hardware stuff second-hand. It made me
realise that very few people actually need as much processing power as they
say they do. I used to subscribe to PC-building communities where people would
drop a couple of hundred pounds extra on an i7 for a gaming rig because they
also did 'video editing'. If you actually produce videos and need to do
transcoding / rendering on a deadline then fine - but I suspect the majority
are simply editing their gaming captures together to upload to YouTube. Of
course it's great to have hobbies and I'm not going to tell anyone how to
spend their money, but personally I think that it's an unnecessary cost if you
just want it to transcode game captures when you could leave a much cheaper i5
running overnight instead (or buy a Xeon).

My workstation (FPGA development, programming, and a little gaming every now
and then) was an ex-business unit. My 2013 MacBook Air belonged to an ex-
student wanting to upgrade (can't think why - I don't even remember the specs
myself because it runs as smooth as butter and I've never had reason to check
otherwise!). Same with my phone - I bought a friend's old iPhone 3GS years
ago. This year I've finally had to retire it because it was no longer reliable
and I need it to get into my house (another story). My audio setup consists of
a pair of vintage bookshelf speakers a friend picked up from a car-boot sale
for a tenner, and my amp was gifted to me years ago by an old teacher (one new
transistor and it was good to go)!

The bottom line is that buying second-hand made me realise that the extra bit
of performance isn't worth the significantly higher asking price. I no longer
care about small aesthetic imperfections like scuffs and scratches provided it
doesn't break functionality (like a scratch on a lens for example).

Figure out what you really need your equipment to do for you then do your
research and pick up something used. Be satisfied when it gets you 90% of the
way, and you'll start to wonder why you ever lusted after shiny new things! At
least that worked for me.

~~~
brudgers
A couple of weeks ago, the boy said he was going to buy a computer. He'd been
looking on Amazon. Technolust for keyboards giving him a rationale for
ditching the i3 based Vostro I picked up from the Dell Outlet four and a half
years ago -- in fairness it's been waiting on an SSD I already bought and a
Windows reinstall for a couple of months.

Inspired by this article [1] and my experience with what is now an eight year
old dual E5405 Xeon workstation that given enough RAM is simply never
insufficiently powerful, I suggested we build a used Xeon system that kicks
ass and takes names. Amazingly he acted as if he didn't know everything.[0]

After discovering the vageries of LGA 2011 sockets and the price of version 1
motherboards versus version 3 and the problems of C1 versus C2 stepping I gave
up and priced out a new AMD FX 8350 system. But before pulling the trigger, I
did some Ebay.

Yesterday, it came: a used buy-it-now Dell Precision T7500. If the
hyperthreading hexacore Xeon 5660 doesn't meet all of the boy's computing
needs through the rest of high-school and some college (technolust aside),
adding a pair of PCIe 16X GPU cards and bumping up to 96gigs of RAM might
help.

It all cost less than a used 1100 power supply and quality tower case are
likely to fetch on Ebay, not to mention leass than a budget level new assemble
it myself AMD box. As a bonus it came with a Winows Product Key sticker [not
part of the listing] and it was running a Windows 10 upgrade [2] within a
couple of hours of hauling all forty or so pounds of it in from the front
door.

For me, it's not that the extra bit of performance isn't worth the money. It
is more performance for the dollar. And I'd be that a used workstation is
going to be more reliable than a bunch of new consumer components: it's passed
several years of burn in under warranty.

[0]: Sometimes, it happens.

[1]: [http://www.techspot.com/review/1155-affordable-dual-xeon-
pc/](http://www.techspot.com/review/1155-affordable-dual-xeon-pc/)

[2]: I pitched Linux. Sometimes, it [0] doesn't happen.

------
J_Darnley
Easy: be poor. You will still lust after every new shiny trinket but you will
be too poor to buy them.

~~~
bbcbasic
Better, commit a large amount of your income to pension. Youll be poor now but
rich later.

Or get a house you can barely afford.

Or have kids

~~~
J_Darnley
Wrong. All of those require wealth first. That wealth will be spent on shiny
trinkets before pension, house, or children.

~~~
bbcbasic
That is simply not true. They require a job, sure. Anyone who can afford a new
phone could at least with no credit rating or savings divert their pre tax
salary into pension such that their net take home is small enough that they
ain't buying tat.

------
lgieron
I think consumerism tends to creep in when your life is emotionally empty
(i.e. no meaningful human connections, no true passions), the same way
alcoholism and other addictions do.

