My work machine is a 2012 MBP 15" with Quad i7 16GB RAM and 256GB SSD. It was $3,000 new.

I've never had a work machine more than 3 years old, so it feels like I should upgrade.

But when I look at the newest machines, I realize they're pretty much exactly the same as my 3 yr old machine, except that they now cost $2,000 and are very slightly faster.

Oh, that sounds great. Pointers please. I've bluffed my way in, but have yet to achieve the god-like position and huge sums of money.

because they had the wrong attitude....

Yeah, I hate it when jobs advertise for X experience in Y language, rather than just asking for a creative, analytical thinker with development experience.

Ok, I'm being partly sarcastic, but in an ideal world, I'd be serious.

Oh, they slowed down alright, but the attitude was not right.

WTF? No automated system check to determine if all needed files are present before flying??!

I'm sure that's true wrt writing and compiling....but there's plenty of programs I write that need to run for days to weeks on current i7 processors before producing output...so CPU can still be a bottleneck.

Hahaha...yes...there's that. :)

Although personally, the last desktop I bought/built was in 2001. I've been exclusively on a laptop since 2004.

pretty amazing. the yearly updates make me feel like I'm getting a new device each year.

yeah, the cost is trivial. No one cares. Except perhaps in principle.

You can develop for a Mac in any development environment. It doesn't have to be Xcode. That's just a free IDE from Apple.

You can distribute your software to anyone without paying Apple anything. The Mac is an open platform.

Only for iOS devices, which are closed platforms, and which all software is sold by Apple and not third parties, do you have to pay $100/yr to have Apple sell your software.

World Wide Distributed Cluster

Agreed. $10/month is incredible value for access to the world's music on demand. Still, it's a luxury that not everyone can afford.

I pay $5/month for SiriusXM. I wouldn't pay more, but I think it's good value at that price.

Just call SiriusXM up and tell them you'll subscribe for $5/month but not a penny more. They'll agree after a few minutes of back and forth. Their prices are fluid.

ha, I remember my college computer, a Pentium 200Mhz with 32MB RAM could play MP3s well, but couldn't do much else at the same time.

Notice the interesting trend of people on Slashdot being generally happy/content with machines that are up to 5-6 yrs old?

That's intriguing from a group of technology happy people who mostly earn good money.

I suspect it's the combination of family obligations (time and money), good work machines, and portable devices...that have reduced our desire and allocation of money for frequently updating our machines. And of course the fact that CPU performance has largely been flat lined over the past several years while SSD upgrades have dramatically improved the performance of our older machines.