John Siracusa made a number of good points about the buying habits of computer users on the most recent episode of Hypercritical. He commented about how most users never upgrade their machines, and they will vote with their wallets to get machines that are less upgradeable but more reliable, lighter or have longer battery lives. I pretty much agree with this, and I find it interesting that I’m buying myself an iMac whenever Apple upgrades them, not a Mac Pro or a hackintosh. The last 4 computers I’ve purchased were all pro-grade towers, in which it’s easy to add hard drives, expansion cards, RAM, etc. During my ownership of those machines, I added a 3dfx video card to one of them and an IDE card to another. The only other upgrades I’ve added were RAM and hard drives.

I’ve been overbuying my computers in a really bad way.

Looking at that it’s easy to see that I’m not one of those users who needs the infinitely expandable and upgradeable machine. My storage needs are handled by my OpenSolaris file server, which means I want less drives in everything else that I own so I can use the reliability and recoverability of ZFS in as many cases as possible. I don’t need more network cards, video cards, etc. And RAM is still upgradeable in the iMac. If it’s not in the next revision, but I get SSDs for the price of hard drives, I’m ok with that. And I’m OK with buying a machine every 3 years instead of every 6, as long as the machine is ¹⁄₂ the price.