> Yeah, I never had a computer that cost north of $800 until recently. While that is far from the typical HN user's budget, my bet is that it is much closer to average.

There are segments, everything from "Average person in world" to "Average creative professional using computers for work" and more on HN, with a wide range of costs for the hardware. HN probably skews towards the latter rather than the former, probably sitting with enterprise hardware next to them basically for fun, hard to make wider conclusions from what people here have or not.

If we define "typical" as the median HN budget, it's probably about the same as yours. Maybe the answer would have been different 10 or 20 years ago, but the era of truly needing a big budget PC has been over for a while.

It's just for gaming and AI now. Maybe not even gaming as much anymore.

Consider the perspective of someone who has a practically unlimited budget for PCs, doesn't game much anymore, and doesn't need AI to do their job. It's just part of getting older, and there are plenty of people in their late 30s and older on here.