alt Hacker NewsGlobal 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.
Replies
frollogaston • today at 6:38 PM
Bottom 50% aren't paying for Claude either, probably also don't own PCs or write code
richwater • today at 3:42 PM
Yes, because the bottom 50%, mostly impoverished or near impoverished folks were spending money on Claude Code subscriptions instead /s
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.