You desire things. You work to have those things and, when you achieve them, you don't want them anymore.
Last year you wanted the iPhone XS, you got it, and you thought it would satisfy you. But it didn't. This year you have been thinking a lot about spending ~900 euros on that phone last year. What if you used your iPhone 6 until it died? What if you bought a second-hand phone rather than a new one?
Lesson learned. Don't spend circa 1000 euros on a mobile device again. It's not worth it. Companies upgrade their products every year, it makes no sense to have the latest because it takes only 12 months for a new product to become an old one. It's better to buy an old generation phone in the first place.
Now your laptop is getting old, M1 Apple fresh lineup is tempting, but you need to resist the urge to buy the new thing. Wait until your machine can't function anymore. Think about it. What would you do differently on a new machine? You use simple text processors to create code. You are writing this article on a .md file using Brackets.
Yesterday you began to use GitHub actions, so now compiling and deployment take place in the cloud. After committing a piece of code, GitHub compiles it and deploys it on a Firebase server. You won't benefit from a faster processor. Take a look at your current situation; you don't ship any faster when you are working on your desktop computer, which is several years newer than your laptop.
You do the same things in both machines; you work at the same pace. What you need to understand is that no matter the machine you are using to work. Now, you are the bottleneck, not your machines. Of course, it would be nice to have a 16 inch MacBook Pro. It's nice to go to some random place and open the huge display and put your fingers on the big trackpad.
But do you need it?
You don't edit photos or videos, you don't run complex simulations in Matlab (not anymore) and you don't create videogames using Unity.
Hi, I'm Erik, an engineer from Barcelona. If you like the post or have any comments, say hi.