I had this conversation with my cousin who wanted to purchase a high-end laptop with the latest processor and graphics card. He already had a Mac book but he couldn't get some ML stuff working on that. His idea was to purchase a brand-new laptop that had all the latest specs and he did not worry about the cost. Unfortunately, we did not have enough options in India. We were thinking of importing laptops from other countries where it was already released. We have been continuously hunting this for almost 2 months. Later we had a conversation if it would be worth the effort or not.
The idea was to purchase the laptop, improve his ML skills, and then switch to a different job. He is well settled in a good job but he wants to upskill and was looking for upgraded hardware here. Ultimately after gathering some suggestions and consulting some experts, I asked him to stop investing in hardware and instead use cloud solutions. I understand that it may not be easy to get everything on the cloud but these days every other cloud solution is providing a competitive option. First, let's see what and all would be the problem if we invest in hardware.
Hardware can get outdated
This is the biggest problem. Today we might think that we have bought the latest technology and the best specs available in the market but there is a high chance that it might soon get outdated and we end up staying outdated. But now it would be so tempting to purchase another laptop or other hardware that is recent. If this was the thought before 10 or 15 years then it is natural because we did not have enough options but today we have cloud solutions and we get almost everything for rental through a cloud service provider. Investing in heavy-priced hardware can be avoided.
Depending on cloud solutions
There are also situations where we may not need the hardware we purchase for a longer period. We may not even be able to spend enough time on our investment if we already have a day job. In that case, having a cloud solution like a server on AWS and doing our stuff there would be the best way to do it because we can turn the service on and off whenever we require it. There are also competitive options available on cloud service providers like AWS. The support system is also very good and if we need our hardware replaced, we can easily do it if we are renting it. For physical hardware, it may not be the case and if there is a fault, we have to either live with it if possible or take a lot of effort to replace it.
Technology keeps changing
As I mentioned earlier, technology keeps changing. If we purchase something and try to be happy, there will be another bigger or better thing emerging in the market tempting us to buy. Obviously, we cannot afford all the technological changes that are happening around us and it is also hard to stay up to date. We can keep chasing technology only to some extent. Especially ML and AI are very new and they will keep changing rapidly in the next decade.
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