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The Rules of Thumb For Tech Purchasing
Hugh Pickens writes "Sam Grobart writes in the NYT that buying gadgets can sometimes be like buying a car; it requires sorting through options because the reality is that most of us are usually dealing with a finite amount of money to spend, and that means making trade-offs. Grobart puts forward his set of rules for getting the most for your tech dollar when buying computers, cameras, cellphones, data plans, and service contracts. For example, Rule No. 1: pay for PC memory, not speed. 'When buying and configuring a new computer, companies often give the option of upgrading the processor and adding more memory, or RAM. If it is an either/or proposition, go for the RAM,' writes Grobart. 'Processors are usually fast enough for most people; it is the RAM that can be the bottleneck.' Other rules include 'Pay for the messaging, not the minutes,' 'Pay for the components, not the cables,' 'Pay for the sensor size, not the megapixels,' and 'Pay for the TV size, not the refresh rate.' Kevin Kelly expands on Grobart's rules of thumb with 'Pay for the glass, not the shutters,' 'Pay for reliability, not mileage,' and 'Pay for comfort, not for weight.' Any others?"
Read TFA, not TFS.
"Decide what you want to do with it, then buy exactly what you need"
It sounds stupid, but you have no idea how many people buy a laptop or something without knowing whether they want to run high-end games or just use it for browsing the internet and then they end up with something overly expensive with traits they don't need.
FUCK! I was trying to come up with some of these sayings for open source software, but it just doesn't work.
I started with, "Pay for the FreeBSD, not the Linux". But FUCK, that doesn't work. You don't have to pay for the FreeBSD! It's already free!
Then I tried, "Pay for the LLVM, not the GCC". But FUCK, that doesn't work, either! LLVM is free, too!
Finally I tried, "Pay for the Python, not the Ruby". But FUCK ME AGAIN, that doesn't work. Python is totally free.
FUCK.
The summary claims that one rule is to pay for more RAM over better processor. That sounds like poor advice for at least three reasons: 1) RAM can usually be user-upgraded later, while the processor usually can't be; 2) RAM is cheaper than the processor; 3) some OEMs overcharge for RAM upgrades (cough, Apple). Plus, it is dubious to claim processors are usually fast enough for most people. All told, whoever offered that suggestion wasn't thinking very soundly.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
For desktops, always use an SSD as your OS/Applications drive.
For casual photographs: Buy the smartphone with a cutting edge camera. You'll have your phone with you more often than a camera.
For tvs: size first, then black levels, then refresh rates. You can safely ignore the rest.
So an Atom with 16GB RAM > an i5 with 4GB RAM?
(just taking the given statements to an extreme)
Basically you need to balance performance, not lean heavily towards either side
#1 rule, no matter what you buy. Plasma vs. LCD, car vs. SUV vs. truck, laptop vs. desktop, handgun vs. rifle vs. shotgun, or even rent/lease vs. own.
If you don't know your real requirements for a purchase, then you're just shooting in the dark, or have already made up your mind based on peer pressure. The best example of sheer peer pressure/brand pushing can probably be best summarized within 80% of Apple sales. The other 20% actually know what they're buying and actually need it.
As long as Windows applications are almost universally 32bit, this is pointless. As long as the system has 4GB, the rest is "nice to have for future", nothing more.
Bullshit. Running 32-bit apps just means that no single app can have all of that RAM mapped into its address space at once. Even if you're only running a single 32-bit app, 6GB means that you have 2GB left over for the OS, most of which is used for filesystem caches. More likely, you're running half a dozen 32-bit apps. With 6GB, each one now has a maximum of 512MB of physical RAM before you have to go to swap (ignoring the OS requirements), which is well within the limits of a 32-bit address space.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
"Don't buy a house more than 3x your annual income."
Probably could have saved us some troubles back there.
I started with, "Pay for the FreeBSD, not the Linux". But FUCK, that doesn't work. You don't have to pay for the FreeBSD! It's already free!
These people will happily let you pay for FreeBSD. The FreeBSD Foundation has just paid for some of my work, so I'm pretty sure that it is possible to pay for FreeBSD.
Then I tried, "Pay for the LLVM, not the GCC". But FUCK, that doesn't work, either! LLVM is free, too!
XCode 4 includes LLVM and Apple will let you pay for it. Some of that money goes to funding LLVM development. If you need extra features added to LLVM, I (and others) will happily give you a quote.
Finally I tried, "Pay for the Python, not the Ruby". But FUCK ME AGAIN, that doesn't work. Python is totally free.
I currently have a contract that is paying me to hack on Python, so I can assure you that it is possible to pay for Python.
FUCK
I've not tried, but I'm pretty sure you can pay for that too...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
As long as the system has 4GB, the rest is "nice to have for future", nothing more.
Only if you run a single program at the same time. Which isn't ever the case anymore. How often do you have a program using 4GB of your RAM anyway? Generally I have my web browser always open - which takes 500mb - 1gb or so depending on the amount of tabs I have open, and then if I'm running something RAM intensive it can take the rest. Not that I've ever used up all my RAM anyway...
Fascinating, I have a similar rule for Star Trek movies.
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
Simple. For software, pay for the support+license, not the license.
.sig withheld by request
Shop Electronically, Buy Locally. Do the research at home and take it with you to brick-and-mortal stores. If worse comes to worse, Buy Electronically, Return Locally. By doing this mistakes are easily corrected.
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
Pay for the protection, not the clinic.
Old RAM advice is old.
Just do a "free -mto" or open up the perf monitor in taskman.exe . With all your common applications open, if you still have more than a few megs of free memory (instead of cached), then you probably have too much RAM.
These days, I would modify that to say RAM before SSD. You can typically load up on another 8GB+ of RAM for less the the cost of the cheapest SSD, and it will have a more profound effect on the apps you always have open. RAM is still more than 100x faster than even the high-end SSDs, but SSDs aren't necessarily more than 10x faster than a decent cheap hard disk, even with lots of small reads provided you use readahead to preload a lot of your HD data to RAM, and of course migrate /tmp to tmpfs or something.
http://trumblings.blogspot.com/2010/11/using-readahead-to-speed-up-disk.html
(and for recent Fedora, Ubuntu/Debian, etc. your OS is already using readahead to boot fast)
If you never shutdown your laptop or desktop and just put them in and out of suspend, this cache is always maintained in RAM where most of your critical OS and applications never expire from, so you're kinda not benefiting from your SSD as much as you expect anyway. Maybe if you used your SSD for swap, but people don't tend to like to do that ;-)
As long as Windows applications are almost universally 32bit, this is pointless. As long as the system has 4GB, the rest is "nice to have for future", nothing more.
First, A 32-bit application can allocate more than 4GB of memory, and you don't need 64-bit Windows to do it.
Second, even if each application couldn't use more than 4GB, all applications combined certainly can.
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I have this poster of the movie Trainpotting (1996) on my wall:
http://imagecache6.allposters.com/LRG/%5C7%5C713%5CZYKA000Z.jpg
Note hat it says "Choose fixed interest mortgage repaiments".
If only people had listened.
Those not living in their parent's basement know that a window is a piece of glass in a frame, fitted into a hole in the wall, which is used to illuminate the room during the day, to allow watching the near surrounding, and usually also to let fresh air in.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I also find that most people who do go for the "emotional" buy, rather than the technical buy, will often be reluctant to tell you the real reason they bought something. Usually the sales/marketing material that they quote afterwards is merely an excuse or rationalisation for their decision. Usually the reason people buy tech is because it makes them feel good. Nothing more.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Readahead is not as fast as SSD, though. You can disable readahead if you have a SSD and get a faster boot. This is especially noticeable on slow SSDs like what's in my EEE 701 4G. Ubuntu(-minimal, I'm not crazy) boot time was cut in half by removing readahead.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Analyze what your needs and wants are. You have reasons you are looking at something, decide what they all are. This can be a mental exercise but if it helps you make a physical list and rank things. Do things like set a budget, I recommend 3 points: A target, a preferred max and an absolute max. List requirements, as in deal breakers if you can't have the features, and list things you'd like to have in order of importance. Basically, get yourself a specification sheet.
Then start doing some research. Find out what best meets your needs that fits in your budget. You can certainly get help, ask friends who are experts and so on. However research what your options are and decide what you would most like.
Also be willing to back down if you can't make it work. If you cannot find anything that meets your requirements and gits your budget, then be willing to say "Ok, I can't have that."
That doesn't guarantee a purchase you love, because nothing does, but it gives you a much better chance. You can also rest easier in your purchase with the knowledge that you probably bought what was best, even if it doesn't end up being perfect. You likely couldn't have done better.
Now I should note I'm not saying do this for every single thing in life. Base it on price. The more it costs, the more considered the decision should be.
When I bought a $20 water filter/pitcher I did no research beforehand, I just went to Target, looked at the options, and got the one I felt was most what I wanted.
When I bought a $600 bicycle I did some research beforehand on the Internet, and brought a friend who is a bike nut with me to the store.
When I bought a $7000 air conditioner, I spent a number of weeks researching A/Cs including who makes them, what matters, what options there are, and solicited bids from about 5 different vendors, all of who I did online background checks on with places like the ROC and BBB.
When I bought a 6 figure house, I hired a professional (real estate agent) to help me out in searching who in turn hired other professionals (home inspector, title search agent) to examine the potential purchase and make sure I was getting what I thought I was.
Tech is no different. If you are getting a cheap clock radio, go ahead and buy whichever one strikes your fancy at a store. If you are getting a $1000 computer, you can spend some time doing some research to see what meets you needs.
I find this statement to be true more for computer monitors than for television screens. Too many people end up with TV screens so large that the individual pixels become annoyingly visible. HD mitigates this, but most channels still use SD.
Pick a TV screen size that's appropriate for your viewing distance, instead of the bigger == better fallacy.
The main advantage to 64 bit windows is that all 32bit apps run in their own VM called WoW (windows on windows) meaning that a buggy app doesn't take the entire system down if it crashes or pukes. Another thing is that ASLR and DEP both work a bit better and when I max out system memory (16GB) the system should be able to run w/o paging/swapping at all because of the memory.
The last benefit is that I will also be able to run any 64bit app as they become available instead of being stuck with 32bit only and from what I've seen, MS is going completely 64bit with TNG Win8
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
I get that all the time with audio shit. Someone will came and say they want "The best sound system, money is no object." I say ok, and start laying out what in my opinion would be the best sound system money can buy. Generally you are talking in the high six figures, and no that doesn't use anything like audiophile ripoff cable, just extremely high spec speakers, amps, processors and so on.
They always balk at that, of course, and usually it turns out the budget is a few hundred bucks at most, which doesn't even get you a mid range home theater system. However for some reason they decided that they could have, and wanted, "The best." Never mind that even most people who have that kind of money wouldn't want it as the gains get extremely incremental.
Or they'll bitch to you, the person they asked for advice when buying and then ignored, that their computer is too slow. And they'll ask for your help in fixing it. If you tell them "I can't help you; your piece of shit is just slow. You should have bought what I recommended you buy instead of that piece of shit that cost $100 less", they get all upset.
For example - "Pay for RAM, not speed. The speed of the computer chip does not matter; the attention-span or RAM memory does matter."
Totally wrong. You can always throw in more ram at a later date, and it will probably cost less to replace all of it than the cost of the "upgrade" today. Upgrading ram on a laptop is even easier than on a desktop, while a cpu upgrade ... forget it. And you'll always find takers for your old ram.
Or "Pay for components, not cables. Buy the best components, and the cheapest cables". While you don't have to pay a monster price for "Monster Cables", some HDMI cables don't meet the latest specs. The difference between those that do and the cheapest may only be a few bucks, and it can't hurt.
Or "Pay for speed, not channels. For cable internet, with enough speed you can watch TV channels on the internet for free." Pay for bandwidth. Speed means nothing if you have a low bandwidth cap. And buying a pair of bunny-ears for your HDTV can give a better picture over the air than either the net OR cable.
And "Pay for reliability, not mileage. On a car, you'll spend more of repairs and maintaince over its lifetime than you will on a difference in gas." needs to re-think that when faced with $6-$8 a gallon gas prices. At $6 a gallon, 20mpg is going to cost you $30,000.00 in gas over 100,000 miles. At 40mpg you save $15,000.00
And for those who don't think gas prices will go that high, they already are in many parts of the world (and you can bet that cash-strapped state and federal governments are going to need to raise more taxes).
Think of how many people bought their cars when gas prices were half what they were today. When buying a car today, you have to keep in mind that history tends to repeat itself.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
App limits are different from OS limits for 32-bit. 4GB+ is moot if the user isn't on x64 Windows.
Windows XP, Vista, and 7 do not support more than 4GB RAM in 32-bit editions. If you have more than 4GB in the system, the remainder is not used. Some operating systems, such as Linux and Windows Server Enterprise, will use PAE to allow access to over 4GB to applications. Moreover, a 32-bit install of Windows (other than Server Enterprise with PAE enabled) will actually have 4GB - PCI memory space, which means subtracting video RAM, and other memory mapped spaces. It's likely that only ~3GB is usable to the OS. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778(v=vs.85).aspx
32-bit applications (even under x64) can only use 2GB each unless additional support is enabled. This support allows a 32-bit app to access 3GB RAM. You don't necessarily have 2GB left over if you have 6GB in an x64 box. Different 32-bit apps can grab different address ranges out of that 6GB and run the system out of memory just fine.
Modern Windows also has a tendency to use 100% of available RAM for app and filesystem cache. It's good behavior, but makes the numbers look off if you're checking and don't realize what you're looking at.
which refers to a blog that contains this claim:
This is entirely false. The lens size controls how much light enters the sensor and therefore how much light is "soaked up" by the sensor. So, the advice should be: "PAY FOR THE LENS".
All other things being equal, there may be advantages to having a larger sensor, but getting more photons into the sensor is not one of them.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
It's relative. When I buy a candy bar I'm not looking for the best deal. I buy what I want. A multi millionaire likewise does not bargain shop for a TV.
Most millionaires I know got to be millionaires by bargain shopping, and carefully choosing what they need instead of what they want at the right time in their lives. These are the reasons why 95% of upper-middle class will never become millionaires, as they're far too busy going broke trying to act like millionaires.
Psh - active studo reference monitors, connected to your high quality mixing board via XLR cables. :P
I'm on a Pentium M 1.8Ghz machine now that I was about ready to throw out. I got curious and checked the RAM and there was only 512MB. I thought I had bought it with more than that, but my memory was pretty bad, obviously. Upgraded to the max 2GB and have breathed another couple of years of life into the machine.
I'm a "computer guy" so I knew that RAM made a difference, but I hadn't ever experienced a RAM only upgrade that showed SO MUCH improvement. I run the network simulation tool GNS3 and it would not run at all before. Now I can have several routers running OSPF, BGP, etc. while I write Python scripts to poll them or whatever and it all works great.
Preaching to the choir here (you'd think), but spend the money on RAM, not a couple hundred MHz.
Pay for the resolution, not the screen size. 1920x1080 at 21" is the same as 1920x1080 at 27", but with poorer image quality (less pixels/inch).
OK, so you read Slashdot and you think you need a water cooled i7 with 16G of RAM and two Nvidia cards (More power than an NSA Cray), but you game on a console? So is this just for some testosterone laden bragging rights? It makes no sense for anybody to pay more than $500.00 for a PC, I do some pretty interesting things with an Asus b202 and an Asus Celeron M powered netbook.
When you puff up your chest and ball up your Cheeto stained fingers into fists and thump your tiny hairless chest and proclaim that you need this power for **, remember millions of people get by with way less just fine.
And, YES, I'm agreeing with you!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd