I don't know the official term for it, but I call it technolust. Anyone have any tips on combatting this behavior?
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.
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.
Or get a house you can barely afford.
Or have kids
Or go for thing with more than just numerical increases.
