Either I don't understand the used apple market.. or I agree this is crazy. Someone spends $25k on new hardware, waits a year, and expects to sell it for $23k? Unless the ram issues save him, and cost of new goes up, I don't see how that was going to work.

> I don’t think -$2000 is a conservative enough figure for standard depreciation either (a lot can happen in a year)

We aren't exactly in "standard" times and haven't been for quite a while. Even five year old graphics cards are worth more today than they were just a year ago. Things will obviously depreciate at some point, but you gotta throw your existing notions of how quickly and how much hardware will depreciate out the window. There's just been too much money dumped into AI for a "well I guess this won't ever pan out, let's dump all this hardware to recoup our costs" moment to happen and tank the price of everything suddenly IMO.

And that's not even getting into the other geopolitical stuff going on right now. Strange times.

I wouldn't call this nitpicking. This is how people who are careful with money think. I learned embarrassingly late to stop justifying purchases by making predictions about future returns. I treat everything as having zero value as soon as I purchase it. Thinking otherwise is, for me, always a dangerous rationalization -- always a craving that's trying to outmaneuver sense.

Aren't things like this seeing 'negative depreciation' these days?

Sure, they took a gamble that they wouldn't be able to sell it used.

If you are able to tie up $25k for a few years just for shiggles, you clearly are able to make do fine without that money and if lost it would be at worst annoying, not catastrophic.

I assume he is calculating the loss as depreciation - what they would have spent on cloud bills if they hadn’t been doing this locally.

I think op would make a really good pope too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48118672