That's a bizarrely extreme position. For almost everyone ~$2000-3000 PC from several years ago is indistinguishable from one they can buy now from a productivity standpoint. Nobody is talking about $25 ten year old smartphones. Of course claiming that a $500 laptop is sufficient is also a severe exaggeration, a used desktop, perhaps...
Overspending on your tools is a misallocation of resources. An annual $22k spend on computing is around 10-20x over spend for a wealthy individual. I'm in the $200-300k/year, self-employed, buys-my-own-shit camp, and I can't imagine spending 1% of my income on computing needs, let alone close to 10%. There is no way to make that make sense.
Look at it a different way: if you'd invested that $10K/year you've been blowing on hardware, how much more money would you have today? How about that $800/month car payment too?
I don’t understand a world where spending $1k/mo on business equipment that is used to earn dozens of times more than that is crazy. It’s barely more than my minuscule office space costs.
My insurance is the vast majority of that $800, fwiw.
Having a 10% faster laptop does not enhance your ability to earn money in any meaningful way. Just like driving around in a luxury car doesn't enhance your ability to travel from point A to point B in any meaningful way.
It's okay to like spending money on nice things, it's your money and you get to decide what matters to you. What you're getting hate for here is claiming it's justified in some way.
Yes, you don't want to under spend on your tools to the point where you suffer. But, I think you are missing the flip side. I can do my work comfortably with 32GB RAM, but my 1% a year budget could get me more. But, why not pocket it.
The goal is the right tool for the job, not the best tool you can afford.
That’s exactly my point. Underspending on your tools is a misallocation of resources.