I used to freelance / consult and charge more per hour than this thing costs me per month

I can vouch that for a critical engineer/CTO/VPE at a startup, it totally pays to get the next day onsite warranty, even when a good chunk of your work is on remote servers. I ran my laptop so hard the motherboard had to get replaced 2-3 times... but always was fixed quite promptly.

> 105 euro per month is a very reasonable cost from a business point of view and not at all expensive. People think nothing of spending the same on LLM tokens, or getting a lease car for their commutes (typically spending >2-3x per month). But when it comes to laptops, people suddenly become irrationally frugal. If you use your laptop to produce things and benefit from having a fast laptop in any way for that, don't be frugal like that. What's reasonable and what is expensive. "Expensive" and "cheap" are comparative terms, so what are you comparing them with when you say "reasonable cost"? And comparing them to cars and LLM tokens is just a straw man. 105 vs 70 is a difference of 1/3rd of the price, and if that cheaper device delivers the same performance, then 105 becomes unreasonably expensive. We're managing 3000 devices and that would be 90000 per month to pay for fluff that doesn't …

> 30 seconds vs 3-4 minutes on my previous laptop (14" M1 16GB) is a big deal. It was more constrained for memory (swapping) This is why data driven purchasing is key. Running some tests and having some data to show how much time will be saved by a laptop upgrade makes the decision process much easier. The companies that only decide based on prices and budgets set by someone making blanket decisions for the company always get it wrong. It’s also possible to go too far on the spending path. I remember some people who demanded brand new maxed out MacBook Pros every generation until someone ran some tests and proved that it wasn’t making any noticeable difference at all year over year despite costing upwards of $5-6K per person. That’s money that could have gone to something else.