A while ago I saved a comment from an Ars Technica forum thread about a midrange processor review. I remembered it as an excerpt from the review itself, but it was comment #31, written by a user named Mechjaz.
Even though I could buy the 9-series of whatever PC part - 4090, 7950, i9 whatever - there's a part of me that's too stubborn to do so, and I make my fun shopping in the upper midrange. It's served me very well, with the rare if defensible miss of buying a 3080 12GB for $1k. (It was as stock levels were coming back, but it wasn't clear if it was a surge or a trend yet, so I moved on it.)
Nothing wrong with the card and probably the only thing that could drive my AW34 in a sensible way, but I do feel a small pang of superannuated buyer's remorse. The fun is in the 2nd and 3rd SKU down. It's just more fun to weigh and read and agonize and then build - it's cheerful, I guess, rather than akin handling Faberge eggs. It kind of mentally keeps them in check as a hobby, a luxury, and to an extent a commodity.
With the flourish of a seventh-grade essay:
And that's why I showed up to read a midrange processor review.
— Mechjaz, Ars OpenForum comment #31
That comment has stayed with me because I already buy almost everything this way.
I own a 4070, not a 4090. I bought the base PS5. My mouse is a Logitech M720 instead of an MX Master, and my laptop is a MacBook Air instead of a MacBook Pro. None of these choices feel like deprivation. They do the thing I bought them to do, and I avoided paying a large premium for the last bit of capability I may never use.
Pareto principle at full display, basically.
The more important part shows up when I am new to a hobby. At that point I do not know enough to shop at the top. I have no experience, no preferences, and no idea which limitations will actually bother me.
I started buying Blu-rays with the cheapest working player I could find at a thrift store. Before thinking about a fancy player, I should probably learn whether I enjoy collecting discs, how often I use them, and which features I miss. The cheap player can answer all of that.
My bike is cheap right now for the same reason. I need to ride it, learn what kind of riding I like, and find the limits myself. A more expensive bike on day one would give me better parts, but I would still have no idea which of those parts mattered to me.
The savings are nice, but the real value is a learning path with less pain if the hobby does not work out. If it sticks, the first purchase gives me the context to make the second one properly. I can name the problem I am paying to remove instead of buying somebody else's idea of the end goal.
A hobby is something you get better at. Buying the finish line first skips the useful part where your taste catches up with your budget.
Until then, the cheap bike is doing exactly what I bought it to do: teaching me what my next bike should be.