How much do you spend per year on your workstation

[VirtualRain]

Curious how much you spend or budget per year on your workstation and attached peripherals (storage, displays, etc). For example, if you buy a $3000 Mac Pro every 3 years, you're spending an average of $1000 per year. If you spend another $1000 over that 3 year period on upgrades, then your yearly spend is an average of $1333. If you spend another $1000 on a display that lasts two cycles (6 years), then that only contributes $166 to your annual spend.

So what is it?

In my case...
2009 Mac Pro Quad $3300
Dual 24" ACD Displays $1800
Additional GPU $200
Initial SSD storage $800
Current SSD storage $900
Spinning disk storage $200

Most of this (all but the spinning disk) I expect to recycle this year, so my spend over 4 years has been $7000 or about $1750 per year.

Note, I'm not counting misc. parts less than a couple hundred dollars nor am I adding my Audio Interface and Monitors which should last much longer and not be a significant contributor.

 

[wonderspark]

Not sure what to do about the fact that I recently bought a MacBook Pro laptop, which is my new mobile workstation. I didn't include that in the figure, but perhaps I should have.

 

[Varmann]

My 5 year old MacPro is only a 10th of the accumulated cost this period. And by far the best computer I ever had. Before I use to spend the same on home built PCs, one at least every two years. Today I spend more on high quality peripherals and much less on pc basics.

 

[Baunkjaer]

My 5 year old MacPro is only a 10th of the accumulated cost this period. And by far the best computer I ever had. Before I use to spend the same on home built PCs, one at least every two years. Today I spend more on high quality peripherals and much less on pc basics.

Same here. I´ve just bought a refurbished MBP as a supplement to my MP.

 

[JesterJJZ]

$5k every 5 years or so seems accurate.

 

[VirtualRain]

600 views and 20 votes? I'm not sure why this is not getting any participation. It's anonymous.

But the interesting observation so far is that 30% of people are spending less than $500 per year on their workstation. That implies buying used or entry level systems and not spending much on upgrades or purchased a high end system a long time ago and haven't invested much in it since.

 

[wonderspark]

I've bought two GPUs so far, and am considering a GTX 680 Mac Edition. I also did the 6-core swap, and spent a ton on my Areca RAID system. Averaged out, it's not so bad.

 

[Inconsequential]

Mac Pro (£2k in 2009)
Disks (SSD/HDD) £500
GPU £100
Memory £200
CPU £400

£3300 over now what is 4 years.

So £825/year or $1200/year.

Although it is probably more like £3000 due to selling the old bits!!

But the base machine purchase was 66% ish of the total spend.

 

[-hh]

$5k every 5 years or so seems accurate.

That was along my thoughts for the 'major hardware' updates. There's then also a lot of other stuff that occurs on a relatively regular basis year-to-year, even before we consider the cost of an ISP (should this be included or not?). As such, I think that for most Mac Pro users, a number in the $1500+/year range shouldn't be unexpected.

Of course, the other part of this question is what should (shouldn't) be included. For example, in 2010, I dropped $8K on some new photo gear ... is it considered to be a peripheral to the Mac, or is the Mac considered to be a peripheral to it? For the purposes of this survey, I took the latter interpretation and ignored this expense as part of my "Workstation" averaged costs.


-hh

 

[Designer Dale]

My workstation is a 5 year old 17 inch MBP so I didn't vote. If I did, it would be in the $500+ per year range considering all the stuff I have hooked up to it by now. In fact a nMP with all those dreaded expansion things would clean up my desk.

Interesting poll graph, though. A vote of zero shows as 1/2 of 1. Isn't zero zero?

Dale