Global Affordability Estimate:

Top 10% of global earners (~800M people) can afford a $2,000 device without major financial strain.

Top 25% (~2B people) could afford it with some budget adjustments.

Bottom 50% (~4B people) would find it prohibitively expensive.

So for a SV top income, maybe that might look more like the weekly pet brushing budget, but for most people out there this is not that much of a no-brainer.

▲

an hour ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

▲

frollogaston 41 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Bottom 50% aren't paying for Claude either, probably also don't own PCs or write code

▲

disgruntledphd2 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The maths changes if you're working for yourself. Because I live in Europe, I've ended up working as a contractor due to the lack of a legal entity in my country. While that mostly sucked for a bunch of reasons, I was able to get a 64Gb Mac M2 a few years back with approximately a 52% discount, which was kinda nice.

	▲	weego 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		If you're working for yourself paying monthly is exactly the same as amortising an asset. Personally I'd rather my business just pay $100 a month than have to deal with additional hardware and software maintenance while using a depreciating asset that is break-even after 3-5 years depending on the spec.

▲

richwater 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, because the bottom 50%, mostly impoverished or near impoverished folks were spending money on Claude Code subscriptions instead /s