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It is worth it to buy the fast CPU

In the past few years, CPUs have gotten really fast. Shockingly fast! Yet most people are stuck on previous generation mobile chips (whether by choice, or by their companies choice), at a huge detriment to their productivity. Meanwhile, AI coding subscriptions like Cursor are all the rage these days. I'll skip the debate on exactly how useful these tools are, and focus on the pricing. Cursor is $480/year for the team plan (the cheapest corporate plan), and other providers are around the same, setting a clear price point: engineering productivity is worth at least $500/year.

This makes sense, as given the typical salary of a senior (US-based) software engineer, you don't even need to be 1% more efficient for that investment to pay off. Practically speaking it will last longer, but I believe typically corporations amortize the cost of development machines over 3 years putting it at only $170/year - a bargain compared to AI!. The fastest laptop my former employee would give me in 2024 (i7-1165G7, released in 2020; my employer clearly didn't follow my advice to give engineers top end CPUs!).

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