{"id":211607,"date":"2015-11-06T04:00:03","date_gmt":"2015-11-06T11:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/getrichslowly.org\/blog\/?p=211607"},"modified":"2019-11-25T21:24:01","modified_gmt":"2019-11-26T05:24:01","slug":"how-do-you-decide-what-to-spend-on-a-computer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.getrichslowly.org\/how-do-you-decide-what-to-spend-on-a-computer\/","title":{"rendered":"How do you decide what to spend on a computer?"},"content":{"rendered":"
Decide to buy a computer these days and immediately you’re confronted with a complex decision process wherein you pit features against price. The choice is intensely personal and a total reflection of your tastes, priorities, and pocketbook. I know how I’ve gone about it in the past, but I was curious to see how other people approach the problem.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t hard to get people to talk. (People are passionate about their computers!) But as they did, I identified three basic methods to decide on price:<\/p>\n
Now that I think about it, this may be true for a lot of purchases!<\/p>\n
Most everyone I talked to went right to the features. Many of them use their computer for work, but a lot of them use it for entertainment or gaming. What the computer does for them is how they establish its value.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s a MacBook Air with a Thunderbolt display!\u201d or \u201cIt has a terabyte of memory and I can keep all my movies on it!\u201d<\/p>\n
Never mind the fact that it’s $4,000.<\/p>\n
Price can be irrelevant to people who are driven by features. But if you need to stick to a budget, concentrating on features can be a bit problematic. (If you’re financially independent, of course, that might not be an issue for you.)<\/p>\n
Last year, my hand-me-down computer was on its last legs. I’d kept it well past its prime — a good seven years — but I couldn’t deal with it heating up and turning off without warning. So I went into cheap-computer-buying mode.<\/p>\n