On expensive things.

You here it all the time in the technology world. What is the value of a product? Does the quality match the price tag? Relatedly, is future proofing your technology a good idea? Why spend extra cash on technology when it’s going to be outdated in six months? In my opinion, if it’s doable, spending more money on high quality products makes all the difference. 

An argument for future proofing: We’re all going to have computers from now through the well foreseeable future. Further, there are two approaches to take when buying computers. Buy cheap and upgrade frequently, or shell out more cash each time and upgrade less frequently. Given that we’re all going to have computers until we die, it’s true that both approaches will get to a point where they have spent the same amount of money. So, in the long term, the only difference is that the future proofing approach starts out with higher quality. With the more frequent upgrades, you’ll start at a lower quality, then after an upgrade, probably be about equal with the other, then with another upgrade you’ll finally be ahead. With the upcoming generation, it’ll be times for both approaches to upgrade, and it’ll start over. So, 2/3s of the time, the more expensive investment resulted in a better experience. Given that equal money will eventually be spent, I argue that it’s better to future proof if possible. 

The other part of this is that more expensive products, that aren’t shams, are truly built with design and user experience in mind. I’m currently typing this on a high quality (and in fact custom modified) mechanical keyboard, With the amount of money I spent on this, I could have bought 15 of those stock Dell keyboards. However, I love this keyboard and I love using it. To me, that makes it unquestionably worth it.