Ask HN: How to avoid “technolust”?

12 points by roscoebeezie 9 years ago | 9 comments

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 'good enough' and recent.

I don't know the official term for it, but I call it technolust. Anyone have any tips on combatting this behavior?

ShinyCyril 9 years ago |

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 9 years ago | |

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/

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

J_Darnley 9 years ago |

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

bbcbasic 9 years ago | |

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 9 years ago | | |

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

digi_owl 9 years ago | |

Pretty much. You learn to look, but not lust.

Or go for thing with more than just numerical increases.

lgieron 9 years ago |

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.