What is the difference other than a psychological one? Especially when you use car as an example. A car will probably depreciate just like a TV. It comes down to whether the terms are good. I have purchased TVs and computers on for 0 or very low APR because I had better things to do with the cash. I have no problem paying $4000 2 or 3 years in the future for a TV I have had the whole time - it beat the alternative.
A car has obvious practical utility if you live in a country where a car is the only way to get around. In many places it's basically essential to having a basic life where you get to your job, and so on. A television has comparatively little such practical utility, and the downsides to setting your sights on a cheaper one are much easier to live with.
The value of a car is also substantially greater (making a cash purchase less practical) and your odds of recovering a substantial portion of the purchase price through resale are much better (indeed with a TV you'll likely pay to get rid of it).
Same here. I always make sure I have the cash on hand to pay for debt if I'm somehow out of income, but if I can get a 0% interest rate on a TV (or, more practically, the $4000 bed I bought a few years ago since I don't quite understand what the difference between my $500 TV and a $5000 TV is other than marketing)... I can put that money into an index fund and have it grow instead.
I think this kind of highlights the issues that GP was pointing out though. I have stellar credit so I qualify for amazing rates. Folks who are perpetually in debt and don't have great credit will always have the worst rates. Being poor is expensive.
I just buy things with cash. How much interest is $1000 realistically going to be worth stretched out over a year? Not enough to be worth playing shell games.
Both are true. Personally, I don't have the energy to optimize my personal cash flow like this, even when it is a reasonable thing to do. But then I am employed again, with a steady income. I would use those 0% credits, and manage cash flow accordingly, if I were still self-employed so.
For reasons other then cash-flow, I wouldn't take a credit for things other then a house or true business investments (as: my company needs a credit as a way of financing).
I'm sorry, but I don't understand the point you are trying to make here either with regards to the original topic or even how the second part of your story relates to the first.
That's like 10% of the comment - I feel like some point was trying to be made with the dialup caching product but it went over my head.
Also back then, Macs weren't so much a luxury like they are today (this is pre Jobs) -- they were just defacto standard in the creative fields. DTP and Photoshop were strictly better on the Mac up until about that point and it would be a number of years for PCs to erode the entrenched Apple dominance in that field. Much like UNIX workstations still had a lock on CAD/CAM/engineering in those days that was rapidly eroding to NT PCs. $8000 was the price for a well-equipped workstation whether it was Wintel, Apple, or UNIX (well a bit more for those). As alluded, the big issue with Internet publishing was taking into account a 56K dialup vs a corporate T1 rather than hardware differences.
Thats the same point. When everyone professional is using 8000$ Macs or PC workstations but you customers are on C64s and Amigas, you would like to run some tests on those machines as well.
My point did get muddled there in telling a story.
It's that the teams were putting all this effort using quite literally millions of dollars of tech infrastructure, to create tech products to be delivered to very limited computers and slow networks.
And the real point: the end product was never seen on the target hardware by those building the things. No clue.
The web browser company assembled a usability lab, would get volunteer people to come in and try things out. But the feedback from that group was submitted as a report to a management group that was two layers above us.
Chain the coders and designers to $350 laptops, at least one day a week.
