Spend, spend, spend...

I read an article the other day which spoke about the way in which we are so willing to spend on technology and it really rang true with me (although I don't go to the extremes with spending in this particular area). The writer was an IT professional, but was writing about his personal spend rather than work-related, and this is the gist of what he was saying, but from my own perspective:

The basic requirements of a home PC are email, word processing, spreadsheets and internet browsing and like many people, my adventures into full-blown PC ownership started between ten and fifteen years ago. My PC configuration of approx 13 years ago was something like this: An 8GB hard-drive partitioned into 4 x 2GB (!!!this was the factory settings!!!), 300MHz PII with 64MB RAM and Windows 95 with a dial-up 56k modem. This mighty machine cost £1200 ($2000).
Actually, I still have this PC (in bits) though nothing of the original is retained in the casing. I recently started a project to renew every part of the old machine just to see if I could do it. It now has a motherboard which cost £10 from eBay which has a CPU that runs at a mighty 500MHz, has 384MB RAM and a 20GB drive complemented by a 120GB drive (all bought from eBay) - the only thing still in use is the casing...

This ancient machine is my 'backup' in case of catastrophe, my main machine is a more respectable 1.6GHz, 2GB RAM with a 160GB drive and a 320GB drive with a 250GB external drive - To be fair this one was given to me, but without drives and with 512MB RAM. The point of all this is that once I am settled with a new PC, I start to look at how I can make it better. The reason for this is that PC's are expandable in all sorts of ways, and there is this desire to have the best spec available even though it may not be totally crucial. After all the main things that I use the PC for are email, word processing, spreadsheets and internet browsing IE. exactly what they were thirteen years ago. We seem happy to spend a LOT of money even though we have not really improved things a great deal. Admittedly money spent on broadband has seen some significant returns in the way the PC is now used, and hard drive size allows us to store huge amounts of data, our PC's run faster, but the bang-per-buck is very difficult to justify when you look at how much people (blokes in particular) actually spend on their PC's.

Now I am a skinflint, a meanie and a user of second-hand technology so to be fair I have probably spent less than most, and if I'm totally honest, I only really spend money that I have generated from internet earnings, so I feel justified... but the fact remains that we can pour money into these bottomless pits and feel that we are getting good value. This 'value' is distorted by the comparisons that we make.
Yesterday you may have had a total of 160GB hard-drive space, today you spent £80 and have a total of 66oGB hard-drive space. If you had waited for 6 months, you could have had the same thing for £30 probably... yet you still feel a sense of value because you can remember when a 500GB hard drive would have cost £500. I'm starting to think that maybe that is the crux of the matter, the fact that we place a value on something, then can see it get cheaper almost daily until we can resist no more and end up buying it, regardless of it's real value in terms of what it can offer us.

Of course, one of the reasons that you can get such a cheap hard-drive is that someone else has felt the call of a 1TB hard-drive (even though they don't need it..) and is prepared to sell off their 'previously enjoyed' 500GB drive to make room for the new shiny 1TB drive. Ebay is the driver behind this culture of replacing old with new and passing on the old so that it becomes new for the 'followers', the 'early adopters' are forging the way whether it be for components or for a complete PC. The idea that I can go out today and buy something for £300 that is far more powerful that the equivalent thing I bought for £1200 thirteen years ago is a compelling argument on it's own.. Do I need it? Well no, but it's ONLY £300...!