The Offset Podcast - The Offset Podcast EP042: Technology Lust

Episode Date: October 15, 2025

If you have a craving for the latest, fastest and most powerful hardware and software out there - you’re not alone!  Technology lust is real, and in this episode of The Offset Podcast we��re discussing managing it. Specific topics for this episode include:Staying at or near the technological curveMeasuring desire vs real impact of new gear and softwareThe benefits of being slightly behind the bleeding edge - improvement without breaking the bankHow small improvements can scratch that upgrade itch Monitor upgradesThe underrated value of storage upgradesThe danger of ‘build it, and they will comeThe financial part of upgrades - purchasing, finance, leasing If you liked this episode check out our growing library of other episodes, and we'd love it you could take a moment to like/subscribe where ever you find the show. Also, we'd be grateful if you'd consider supporting the show by buying us 'a cup of coffee' https://buymeacoffee.com/theoffsetpodcast

Hey, everybody, and welcome back to another episode of The Offset Podcast. And today we're talking about managing technology lust. Stay tuned. This podcast is sponsored by Flanders Scientific, leaders in color-accurate display solutions for professional video. Whether you're a colorist, an editor, a DIT, or a broadcast engineer, Flanders-Scientific has a professional display solution to meet your needs. Learn more at flanderscientific.com. Hey, everybody. welcome back to another episode of the Offset podcast. I'm Robbie Carmen. With me as always is Joey

Danna. Hey Joey, how are you doing, buddy? Hey, everyone. Joey, today got an issue topic that I think is a good discussion, but it's primarily brought around because my thinking about doing this episode was because as you know, I am a major, major, major, major sufferer of technology lust. In fact, right before we got on this call. We were just debating the merits of some, you know, crazy technology plan that I had. And, you know, you try to talk me down off a ledge. And so it made me sort of realize that, you know, especially in the business and the industry that we work in, right? Technology is always changing.

There's always something faster, better, bigger out there. And I think it's really easy to succumb to those technology desires, right? you know, always wanting to stay at or ahead of the curve, no matter the cost. And today I just want to discuss the merits of that, maybe the downsides of that, some things to think about when it comes to, you know, specific, you know, pieces of technology, how to go about thinking about it, whether the investment's worth it, how to pay for it, all of those kind of things. And along the way, I'm sure we'll have some tangents that we go along for.

Yeah, I mean, this one is dear to my heart, because as you know, and as anybody here, who's talked to me in the past like month, knows. I have spent weeks almost paralyzed on a computer purchase decision, right? Because my old Mac Pro, best computer I've ever bought, I love this machine.

It's treated me so well. It's paid for itself 20 times over. It is amazing and I love it. It is starting to run out of steam, especially with the latest version of Resolve that's so heavily optimized for newer Nvidia GP. or newer Apple GPUs.

The old Intel AMD GPU combo, it's really starting to slow down. And I just had a couple of really fusion heavy high resolution jobs that were honestly pretty painful. And it started to be like, okay, now I need to seriously think about upgrading my main workstation. And we all know, I've said it a million times. I am a snob for workstation. So I was going between, do I buy a huge super micro? Do I get a big home build Intel, NVIDIA monster? Do I go with the kind of universal Mac studio that everyone is loving right now?

Or do I wait for what I've talked about on the audience? I even tried to convince you to go DIY approach, which gave you a nervous breakdown. Yeah, you know, I thought the long and short of it is I want the next Mac Pro that I've built in my brain. and that's not available right now. So I needed to do something. And we came up with the plan. We'll talk about my plan in a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Thought process of do I spend $6,000 now? Do I spend $10,000 now? Do I wait and spend $15,000 later? You know, all of these factors kind of add up because everything we do is technology related. From the computers to the control surfaces to scopes to networking, to monitors. we have a much bigger cost in hardware now than we do in software, plugins, licenses, etc.

Hardware is our biggest cost. And therefore, it's our one biggest spot to find efficiencies and make good business decisions. But also it can be a weak spot for, you know, wasting money or chasing something that we don't want to chase. And especially, you know, Robbie and I are both nerds. We love this stuff. You know, there's a lot of callers out there that are like, I've been working on my 5K

iMac for the past like decade. I just work in proxies in HD and then render it 4K later. And it works great for me. And I feel like my artistic work is all I focus on. I don't care about the technology. That's a perfectly valid approach. But it's good to have some of this knowledge in place. The technology is part of it.

But for us, it's just second nature. We like the technology along with the artistry. So like we're always fighting this. What do I buy when? Totally, totally. All right. Well, before we dive into all that, let's just do the normal housekeeping stuff. Just a quick reminder to everybody.

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So you can head over to this link here on screen for Buy Us a Cup of Virtual Coffee. And that support helps us to make more shows and turn them around in a quick way. So we really appreciate that help. So Joey, yeah, in the intro there, I mean, you kind of hit on the nail on the head. I mean, I have, to be honest with you, when I think back on this, I have had this, I don't want to call it a disease, but this issue for pretty much my name. entire life. I mean, even as a kid, when I first started getting into, uh, you know, music and guitars, I wanted like, you know, the latest like, you know, task cam porto studio and then the latest,

you know, guitar and the new, the new strings and the new amp. And then, you know, obviously, later got into computers and all kinds of stuff. And I admit that I have a problem. I mean, that's the first step in getting help, right, is admitting you have a problem. And my thing is that I hate the feeling. It's, it's, it's, it's a hundred percent. you know, the fear of missing out on something that could be revolutionary, could be, you know, life-changing. Now, honestly, you know, in tech, that's seldom the case. You know, a lot of the technology that we're into and that we use,

updates are relatively irritative, right? If you have a, just use a recent example, let's say you have an M1 Mac Studio versus an M4 Macs studio. Is the M-4 faster? Sure, of course it is, right? Is it life-changingly? So, well, that's some of the things that we're going to discuss today. And I see the arguments for that on both sides.

Same thing with monitoring, right? Hey, great brand new HDR monitor came out, but maybe you're not doing any HDR. Is it worth that investment? Maybe, maybe not. Or staying ahead of, you know, the curve on storage and servers, right? So there's these areas that we want to talk about. But I guess the first thing that, you know, you hinted out earlier was just sort of like, hey, the industry we're working, this is just the state of affairs, right?

It's all about tech. It's all about capabilities and et cetera. So I want to get your opinion on this because, you know, one thing that I think has helped, you know, in 20-ish years of doing this, you know, on my own or on our own is staying head or at that technological curve, I think gives you a leg up. And it used to be that this was impossible to do, right? In the golden age of the post house, you were not going to go out and buy a Quintel Henry or a flame or. an EQ or a Da Vinci or whatever because these boxes cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and we don't have to rehash the you know the the democratization that's happened there but the reality is now all this stuff is accessible none of it's really truly expensive uh comparatively uh to where we were a decade ago and so i think

it leads to a lot of people always chasing that next thing right and i'm one of them but i guess my question to you is like that's never like it's a never win scenario so how do you go about managing it and the first question I'll ask you is okay there's new tech maybe you need it maybe you don't how do you go about balancing the desire to have new cool gadgets and toys versus the real impact on your day-to-day work right I think that's a harder question than it seems yeah because there's more factors than just the cost and the impact on your day-to-day work. One, you don't really know what the impact on your day-to-day work is going to be until you've started working with whatever this new piece of tech is for a while.

But also, anytime you change your overall kind of set up and infrastructure, there's a ramp-up period. There is, I need to configure this. I need to figure out how it works best in this environment. I need to get all my settings together. I need to figure out how to do this or that. There's learning curves involved. So for me, in the example I pulled up earlier, buying a new computer is a major, major disruption, right? It means ripping out stuff in the rack. It means configuring a whole new working environment. It means getting all my macros, all my plugins, all my software migrated over, getting my storage connected, figuring out all of the little hiccups.

and they're going to come up when that happens. So it's got to be worth it from a speed or capability standpoint. As in, like I said, I just had some fusion jobs that really brought this old machine to its limit. That is why I need that new machine. So what I ended up doing is kind of a stopgap solution, right? I don't think the Mac studios are where I want to be for my main workstation forever. I want something bigger with more GPU, with more thermal dissipation capability,

more of a traditional big hero workstation. But that doesn't really exist in the Apple world right now. So the thought came to me, do I buy a big Linux box? Love Linux. Would probably rather use Linux than Mac or Windows. But there's a whole set of challenges, yeah. Exactly.

That kind of ramp up period. I've got a thousand stream deck macros that I've built. They're going to pass over to a new Mac, relatively easily. Okay, I've got network infrastructure set up designed for the way the Mac mounts volumes. So not to mention new Mac immediately.

Yeah, not to mention plug-ins, you know, things of that nature. Like, it would be a, it would be a week or two of just getting up to a baseline to a switchover. So that first metric of, is this really going to save me time?

Maybe in the long run, yes, but in the short term, No. So I looked at the long-term possibility of do I spend $15,000 on a giant super micro and this is my main computer for the next five to seven years because this Mac Pro has lasted me almost seven years. And I thought, yeah, the transition to Linux is going to be too hard and too kind of annoying. And I don't think I'm going to get as much performance out of that. And if I'm talking about a seven-year investment, I don't want to get two years into that and have this dream Mac Pro that I'm waiting for. for them to come out with, come out, and then I've already spent a huge load of cash, and I don't have the cash to get what I really want. So I like to look at it from a holistic perspective of how I can kind of put technology down the line. And this is actually Robbie's idea, got me

sold and got me buying a Mac studio for my main machine right now. It's shipping. It's in the mail right now. It's on the boat. My assist station eventually is going to need to be up. It's an old M1 Mac Studio. It's starting to feel its age as well. It's pushing three, four years old. So I can get this new Mac Studio that's going to outperform my Mac Pro right now. Use it for one year, two years, wait for the next generation Mac to come out, which is what I really want, and then kind of reuse this investment. Reuse that Mac Studio that I just bought as my new assist station, buy something new from here, and the whole thing goes down the line. So I guess the long-winded answer to your question of how do you know if it's worth it or if you're just doing it to feel cool? Is it going to have a tangible, like, good impact on your work?

In my case, yes, I need it for this fusion job. Okay? Two, is the cost worth it? Yes, because I'm not spending the gigantic chunk of change. I'm kind of spending a little bit less than I would if I bought a new massive workstation. And is the ramp up time going to be onerous? No, because I'm just swapping one Mac for another. Yeah.

Those are all great points. There's a lot to unpack there. So a few things that you said I want to hit on. So I think, you know, for me, the desire versus real impact factor is one that I'm always sort of fudging in my head and always rationalizing a little bit in my head too. I'll give you a wonderful example of this before I talk about something that's germane to this conversation about forecasting. But this box sitting on the workbench right behind me is a perfect example of desire versus real impact, right? So I'm building a brand new NAS slash VM box all around Flash, right? And high speed networking. So you can see the little flash array right there in the front. I got eight, eight terabyte and VMEs. That little white thing on top is another eight SATs. I'm going to connect that all to an existing disk shelf of 200 terabytes of spinning disk. And of course, it's like, don't you already have a NASRAP?

Yes, of course I already have a NASDAS. It's sitting right over here in Iraq working perfectly. fine, okay? So one of the things that I battle with is staying ahead of that technological curve. And I have learned over the years that there's some ways to do this, right? And one of the ways that I manage desire versus real impact is by not being at the curve, not necessarily ahead of the curve, or right behind the curve. So I'll give you a case and point with this box. So two years ago, putting 64 terabyte or 128 terabytes of, or 128 terabytes of flash storage in a box, impossible, right? It would cost me, you know, $100,000 to do. Two years later,

much more, much more realistic. That's number one. Number two, I'm not using, in a lot of these things that what I think of, I'm not at the curve. I'm not at the technological breaking point. So, for example, this box, I put in a hundred gig nick in it, 100 gig E nick in it, right? two years ago, that was at the absolute, you know, data center level breaknet curve. Today, there's two, 400, even 800 gigavit Ethernet that data centers are using. So this- And he's already got them in his Amazon card. Right. So this card, which a couple years ago was $2,000 plus, I got on eBay for $300, right?

Dual Port 100 gig nick. So one of the ways that I managed my desire versus impact is, is that when I'm feeling the lust factor, the first flag that goes up in my head is, you don't need the latest and greatest. Can you improve what you have now and make a big leap without breaking the bank, without being technology that you don't understand, can't work?

So if I went to, like, say, an 800-gig nick in there, one, I have no idea how to use it. Two, it would have been ridiculously expensive. Heat, temperature, you know, electricity, you use it, right? So now I'm using something that's mature enough, but still brand new to me and still makes me feel like, oh, you're going from 10 gig a Ethernet or 25 gig Ethernet to 100 gig Ethernet? That's a huge jump. So one of the ways I look at this is, okay, it is a desire, but can I effectuate real world impact in my day-to-day workflow, but without having to necessarily

be on the cutting edge curve, but I'm still on the cutting edge for me, if that makes sense. Now, the other part of this that I want to kind of play devil's advocate here is we're in front of these stupid boxes for eight, 10, 12 hours a day. Yeah. And sometimes something that you like or want because it makes the experience more enjoyable is just worth it. If you want the latest and greatest tablet, for example, you want to upgrade your tablet to something nice and newer and better, by all means do it. Throw more stream decks at the problem because they just came out with something. I'm cool and you want to be able to add more macros or whatever. Biggest example of that for me, a non-insignificant amount of my decision-making to buy this Mac Studio

is that the Mac Pro can only output a 60 hertz UI refresh and the Mac Studio can do 120. And if you've ever used Resolve on like an iPad that has the high frame rate display with the little Apple pencil and you just move a clip in the timeline and you see how smooth it feels, at 90, 120 hertz UI refresh, you're like, oh, I want that all the time. Joe, Joey, this is not all the time. This is not hyperbole. This is not hyperbole. Joey has literally been lusting, like in a literal sense, lusting.

He's like, I don't care. Can it do 120 hertz? Can it do 120 hertz? And so, you know, you're right. You're right. It is like, it is a quality of life thing. I cannot wait for that thing to come in. I plug it in.

I had to buy a new UI monitor that supports 120 hertz because my old one didn't. Don't care. The second I pick up that pin and feel that smoothness, I'm going to be happy. And I'm going to keep on being happy for eight hours a day, for 10 hours a day. It's just going to make my job feel better. And that's okay. That's worth spending money. That's an intangible thing that's worth spending money on.

Yeah, I hear you. I mean, so I think that there is that always going to be that balance of desire versus real impact. And I think to a certain degree, things that are quality of life improvements. I'll put even like things like, oh, well, that chair, that's been ruining your back for, you know, for 10 years. Like, you know what? Spend the grand on the new chair. Why a thousand dollar chair. Don't be demonstrated. You know, all of those kind of things. Those things matter. But I think we're really comes down to if I can categorize how I evaluate the real actual impact, because that's different than the desire. But how do I,

I do spend a lot of time evaluating the real world impact. And to me, that comes down to kind of three or four things, right? First, and I know this is your mantra about a lot of things, but alleviating, you know, repetitive task or eliminating steps in my workflow, right? If there's a piece of technology that I can insert that saves me actual steps in time or whatever, done deal. Like, it makes sense to get it, right? That could be software, keyboard maestro. Totally. It could be lots of little things. Significant speed improvements. And this one is a little bit of a black hole, right? Because part of the thing, especially with computing and servers and network technology, et cetera, you have to weed through a little bit of the marketing mumbo-jumbo,

right? Like, for a computer manufacturer, of course, it's their job to come out and go, oh, it's 78% faster. And then you read the bullet point. It's like on this one little task, right? Like, so, like you have to dig deep on some of those things, right? There's not a computer that, well, I can't say never has existed. But just. Generally speaking, a generation to a generation, you are not talking about 100% speed improvements, right? You are not talking that big of a jump. Is it a little bit faster on certain things? Sure, right?

So, especially the way that a lot of these companies work, Apple is a perfect example, every year. You know, every fall, it's a new phone. Every, you know, spring, it's a new laptop or whatever. Like, you have to weigh that a little bit, not, you know, that desire versus the real-order impact. because the impact, especially on significant speed improvements, is probably really not there generation to generation. I think you build some momentum whether you're talking, skipping a generation or two or three. If you're going from an M1, for example, to an M5 that's rumored to be coming out soon,

yeah, that's a significant generational leap on a lot of levels, right? If you're going from Intel to the current arm, you'll see a big jump, which is what I'm doing. Huge jump, right? But is going from, you know, M4 to... M5 going to be a life-changing thing for most people and most in most workflows probably not right you got to decide how many generations you want to skip right the other thing I think about is just the you know where does from from our capabilities right where does this get me from the competitive edge the new capabilities the services point of view right if I can say hey look this new piece

of equipment allows us to do X Y and Z that we were never able to do for do before that That's a definitely consideration. Or if I can say this new piece of equipment saves us tangible hours on processing, rendering, etc. Where we can build the same for a fraction of the work, that makes sense as well. But all of these things, part of my thinking is, and you make fun of me a lot, my family makes fun of me a lot about this, but it's fine. I can take it.

And that is I do a lot of forecasting and research, right? I'm always reading industry rags about display technology. about GPUs, about CPUs. I know a lot of really nerdy things about things that don't matter at all. But the reason that I stay up on all of that, so I can make somewhat intelligent forecasting decisions on, oh, you know what, it's not this year that I'm going to buy all the flash. It's probably in a year or so when, you know, these things come down, whatever, whatever, whatever.

And, you know, is that risky? Sure, but that's how I like to think about it. I always like to keep my finger on where all these things are and make decisions, you know, when they all kind of fall in line. Yeah. So we've covered the computer aspect, I think, in pretty good detail. The next biggest thing, and in fact, in some cases, bigger thing for colorists or post-production professionals is reference monitoring. Right. And that, I think, has a completely different set of requirements to evaluate the purchasing decision.

And we're facing that too, right? I want to talk a little bit about kind of where I'm at with reference monitoring, where we're at, you know, as a business unit together with reference monitoring and where we kind of think the plan is for that. Because, you know, the reference monitoring is a very significant long-term investment. And up until recently, even with current offerings, there's a lot of pros and cons, right? There's a lot that goes into that decision making. And if we kind of apply the same standard that we've been applying thus far, which is, does this have a tangible impact on what I can do, what I can bill, and how fast my job goes, right? You've got to decide kind of where you're at now monitoring wise and where you want to be.

Biggest example for that right now, me holding on to my trusty XM310K, local dimming. Full array local dimming, HDR reference monitor, right? Robbie was at a different stage of the reference monitor upgrade cycle, so he has moved on to the latest and greatest technology, which is the QD OLED. Fantastic. If I was buying a reference monitor tomorrow, I would buy the new X311K that Flanders is offering the 31-inch,

because that's my preferred size QD-O-LED technology. It's got better viewing angles. deeper black levels, no haloing or local dimming problems, right? That would be a big day-to-day upgrade for me to get those advantages. However, I can't justify it because there's nothing that it does that I can't do with my 310K. I just need to manage the backlight modes and be knowledgeable about it, which is, that was always the compromise with Fulleray Local Dimmings. I went in there. Yeah.

I was an early adopter of the technology, knew that going in. It has served me incredibly well. And I'm probably going to wait one or two more generations before I leapfrog into a quantum dot OLED display. However, if you're now just starting to get into I want a 4K or an HDR reference display, it's a great time to make that jump because the prices have gone down so much while the capability is just gone up and up and up and up. Basically, for what we would have spent 30,000 on. a couple years ago, you can now spend $10,000 and get something better. So that is like the nexus, the crossing point of,

for the masses, it's time to buy. Yeah, I mean, I look at monitors in a slightly different category, obviously, because it is a different category than computers and stuff. They're a little more evergreen in kind of the use of them, right? You know, and this is largely driven by the life cycles of the panel manufacturers themselves, right? They invest in generations.

They spend billions. spooling up these factories and these lines, et cetera, they're going to get the most that they can out of any given piece of technology, right? But it has some analogous things to computers, right? Like, you know, where we are, QDOL, that's a great example of this, right? You know, gen three or four or wherever we are now.

You know, is it better than gen 1 or 2? Yeah, certainly, right? A little brighter, a little bit better gamut performance, etc. Is it life-changing? Hard to say if it's life-changing, if you're like, you know, I have, you know, I'm sitting right across from an X-1. Mp 550, which is a 2,000-knit QD-O-Led. Flanders, for example, has announced that they have the 551 coming out, which is a

4,000 knit. In my day-to-day with the current workload and works that we're working on, is the difference between having a 2,000-knit version of this monitor and a 4,000-knit version of this monitor, life-changing for me? No, it's not, right? But it would make, as you said, if you're on older tech or whatever, it's super compelling, makes a lot of sense. And so I look at, we're computer, you know, if we could put this into a year marker,

I look at computers as a two to three year cycle. I look at monitors more like three, four to six year cycle, somewhere in kind of that range. And you can definitely hold on it. Like one of the things I wanted to say earlier about computers and just this general balance of desire versus real word impact. And you alluded to this. And I do this a lot more than you do because you're, I say this in the nicest possible way. You're a little bit of a hoarder, right, compared to me, is that.

I'm always thinking about the life cycle of things, right? So what that means to me is first step, how can I hand things down from their main initial use to a secondary use and finally getting rid of it, right? And I also think about that we'll get to just a minute on the financial side, right? It's like, oh, okay, well, this is a piece of technology that I'm not utilizing in the way that I originally thought it was or it's a little long in the tooth. can I sell it, get something out of it to help me fix that, get that literal fix of, you know, technology that I need to help pay for the next thing, right? And I do that a lot. I'm always on eBay, selling things, whatever, that kind of thing. But yeah, monitors are a hard one. I think that they're, you know, I think that they are when they're well taken care of, well calibrated. They can last you a long time. And, you know, you have to take a serious look. Because right now, the biggest differentiation, between monitors is whether they're, what level of HDR they do and how well they do it, right? If you are in an SDR-only workflow, spending 30 grand on the latest and greatest, you know, HDR reference monitor, it doesn't make a lot of sense to it, right?

You know, like, go get something a lot more affordable than that, right? So you have to kind of balance it out, do the forecasting that we spoke of, et cetera. In a similar category, I mean, storage is another one that I think that we're always constantly weighing, I gave that analogy about my storage box, whatever, earlier. Storage is something that I think is, how should I say, I think is, I think takes a backseat a lot of time when it comes to infrastructure, spending, and managing that technology lust. There's definitely a case of diminishing returns. And I've hit that, right? So with storage, I think the best thing to do is to take that longer term.

strategy with it, just like you talked about with monitors, because, you know, a lot of people don't do the initial investment on storage, right? They buy external drives. They buy a small raid. Then they buy another one. Then they buy another one. They end up with a bunch of drives on shelves, a disorganized mess, shuttling drives back and forth, doing sneaker net, really like workflow nightmares that are also reliability nightmares that really, you could have saved yourself a lot of trouble. If you look over like a 10 year period, if you spend $10,000 on random thunderbolt arrays that are now on shelves versus if you just spent that $10,000 on a really good fundamental storage system that's going to handle all your needs for the next 10 years,

that was the thing to do. I know it hurts at first to spend money on something that is not really front and center. But like, remember early on I was like how much of a pain in the butt is it to upgrade and to change something out, storage is the hardest thing to upgrade because you've got to figure out how to migrate all your projects, copy a ton of data, maybe transfer drives back and forth,

move things in and out of racks, right? Buying all new storage is a big, big, big, both time and cost investment. So I think it's one of those things that people underspend on early and then end up overspending to maintain their initial underspend

over the years. That's definitely true. And storage is a category that is different than computers, monitors, etc., where it actually has some sub-levels within it, right? So, like, you might go out and, like, so where I am in my life cycle with storage is, you know, six, seven years ago, I spent a boatload of money to build a real capable, high-volume NASS. In the meantime, those, you know, in that period, those six or seven years, I invested in my other parts of my storage backbone, right? I bought, you know, offline storage, slow but high volume so I could have a good backup, you know, invested in LTO, you know, the latest and greatest LTO, right? So now I have, yeah, there's three or four tiers of this. I'm now coming back around to the top tier six, seven, eight years later, and I'm going to

replace that. And then over the next few years, that will trickle down a little bit, right? I'll improve, you know, I'll improve my offline. I'll probably get the latest generation of LTO, do I can do less tapes, you know, all that kind of stuff, right? It is a little cyclical with storage. And I think you're right. I think that you have to think about it. I mean, here's the thing about storage.

If a computer dies, right, processor catches on fire, right? I can go down to, you know, Best Buy, MicroCenter, Apple Store, or whatever, get a new computer, and with a few hours I'm back up and working. With storage, you lose stuff. It's potentially way more disastrous than any other part of the gear that we work in. And so I don't want people to sleep on storage. Storage, when it comes to this, is one place you should definitely be spending money. But at the same time, it's a balance act.

Do I need 100 gig, you know, 100 gigi network performance to work with pro res files? Certainly not when it's two computers or three computers on the box. Does it make me feel awesome? Yes, right? So there's a lot of steps in between getting to there that you can still have robust storage solutions for sure. Yeah. And I think the reliability aspect is number one with storage. It's a feel good thing on the computer level.

Like we've talked about this a lot. This is why I want the big heavy duty rack mount workstation because I want to be able to look at it and have it be trustworthy every single day and never have to think about it. That's my attitude. That's why I've kind of not gone the Mac Studio route in the past because it's a more consumer device. and I'm looking at it as a bit of a stop gap with storage. Nope. I want good redundancy. I want top level components.

I'm not buying secondhand drives. I'm not buying secondhand memory. I'm not buying, you know, in VMEs that don't have gigantic heat sinks on them and are made from a no name company, right? I want everything on my storage side to be buttoned up. And then I want everything on my backup storage side to be buttoned up.

Because like you said, if everything else blows up, I can still go to the Apple store or just get my MacBook and plug in a thunderbolt to my backup array and I've got all my projects and everything is back online and my business keeps turning. The risk with storage is so much higher that I just, I cannot emphasize enough how much I think it's worth a heavy, heavy, heavy initial investment, not a incremental. I'm going to buy more as I need investment. Yeah, totally. And I mean, but the less factor is still there with it. I mean, like, I'm just, you know.

Yeah, Robbie spins his days and nights with, like, the Black Magic disc speed test, like burned into the back of his retinal wall, just trying to get it one more millimeter. One more millimeter. He just needs more and more. You know, when you're pushing, you know, 11, 12 gigabytes a second through the pipe, you know, having that extra 30 megabytes is really going to be the. make or break situation. No, it's fair.

That's where you kind of got to put your rational head on and be like, what is the, is the juice worth the squeeze? Am I doing this because I want it? Or am I doing this because it's going to make my business more successful? And like we said, sometimes because you want it is more than reason enough. Totally. And I think that there's, there's part of the game that I also try to do with all of this stuff is I don't just, you know, if money was no object, maybe a, maybe.

I would be a little bit more impulsive with what I do and how I do it, right? But oftentimes, I spend months thinking about planning this, you know, running ideas past you, running past ideas past other people, and thinking about this because by the time I pull the trigger on this stuff, I want to be certain that what I'm doing is going to work, first of all. Second, not going to be, I've already planned how I'm going to implement it, when I'm going to implement it, you know, all that kind of stuff. And then three, that I have some grasp of how that, like, I don't want to, like, the worst situation for me to be in is a situation where I went after something that was cool, new computer, new monitor, new piece of storage. I put it into my production pipeline, not really understanding all the ins and outs of it. And it becomes a problem, right?

That's a position, that's a situation you should never be in. When you put something in play, you should already understand. exactly how it works. That might mean having a test bench for a computer or storage or whatever, putting it through its paces, doing some burning on a monitor, not literal burning, but like, you know, running a monitor for a week or two before you put it in the room with clients sitting in front of it. Like all of those kind of things can really, really come into play.

Now, there's one subtext of this that I do want to make sure that, because admittedly, we've said both of us have a little bit of a gear obsession, technology less, but there's a downside to this as well. Obviously, that comes with the financial impact, but I generally like to say, and we've all seen this happen probably in our own professional lives, is the idea of build it and they will come, right? It is really tempting, I think, if you're a technology nerd to go out, get the latest and greatest of everything, stay ahead of that curve, as I said earlier or beyond that curve. but one of the challenges of that is that you could go out and literally bankrupt yourself for things that do not matter and make you money at the end of the day, right? So do I think that, you know, some 128 core CPU with, you know, three petabytes of memory attached to it is awesome?

Of course. But if I went out and purchased that, you know, I'm spending $100,000, $200,000 for what? nothing that's going to affect my billing whatsoever, right? And that's one thing I will say that you have to be aware of in this whole game of technology. Being quick to figure out what works and what doesn't work. If you get a piece of gear in and go, yeah, this is not life changing as I thought. Then move on from it. Don't just sit on it and absorb that cost if it's something that you could return, sell, etc.

Sometimes that happens. I'll give you a perfect case and point. Remember when the stream deck pedals came out? Right? And at the time, I still use one. I was all about it, right? Because I'm a guitar player. I have guitar pedals.

I love it. I use that thing like three times, right? Because I was like, yeah, whatever. Playheads. Yeah, I know. I know. There's reasons for it. But my point is that sometimes, and some problems are bigger than others, right?

It's a big difference between buying, you know, $150 pedal and buying a $15,000 computer, right? Those are two big different things. But you have to ask yourself sometimes, am I getting this just because of it's cool, it's a new little gadget, what is it really going to do for me? All right. Last thing I want to wrap up this show with is this idea about kind of, as I said, the financial impact of new technology. Because I get asked, surprisingly, because I think I am a gear nerd, I get asked this by a lot of people, like, how do you pay for that? How do you work that? How do you go about that? And I want to be clear, this is not a financial advice show, right? Please ask your accountant

bookkeeper, business partners, etc. Maybe lawyers. I don't know. I just want to kind of give you some thinking about how I go about it, right? Gear can be expensive. And so I think about

kind of things in three separate categories. Things I'm going to purchase, things I'm going to finance in one way or another, and things I'm going to rent slash lease, right? And I know that different people have some hard, hard held feelings about this, right? Like you, for example, You love the feeling of this is mine.

I own it. It's paid for. It's done. Where it doesn't bother me at all that I'm like, oh, yeah, I'm just renting this computer, right? Or using it while I can use it, right? So I don't want to get into like the feelings about that. But I do think it's to put on people's plate, I do, I would challenge you to look at things in those three categories. Purchase, finance, or rent slash lease, right?

For me personally, I think that the change. over on a lot of this tech is so frequent, right, that especially for computers, leasing slash renting makes a lot of sense, right? Because it goes, hey, look, every three years, I have this path to get the, you know, give back the old thing, get the new thing. Of course, the downside of that is that you're always paying for something, right? I get, I get that. But from a cash flow point of view instead of coming up with, you know, $15,000 out of pocket, right? I'm like, cool, that's going to cost me $300 a month, right? To, to, to, with a, you know, I'm using that number wildly, right? And so that's the thing. Like, you know, we've talked a little bit about kind of the,

the cost of these things and where your kind of tolerance is and how many years of purchases for. That's the key for this decision of do I buy it, do I finance it, do I lease it? Right. You said that you consider a computer to be a three-ish year investment. I consider, you, it to be five to seven. I like to stretch those out. So I buy the computer. I don't lease it. But if you're, if you're planning on upgrading every three years, the lease is such a good move because by the time it's obsolete, yes, you might pay a little bit more if you were to lease it and then keep it. You would end up paying more total. But if you're going to flip that back around, it saves you the effort of let me try and resell this now obsolete gear, right? It's just a lease. I can send it back.

I can get the next one. I think for the upgrade schedule that you like to keep yourself on, the lease is a really good option that not a lot of people think about. Yeah, and related to that one is the financing vehicle, right? And so obviously, I'm not, I want to be clear here because I'm not talking necessarily about revolving credit. I mean, sure, everybody can use a credit card to buy anything. That's essentially financing something. What I'm specifically talking about is equipment financing companies that will give you a, a locked term at a locked rate, essentially it's a loan, right? They, you know, you go to B&H and go,

hey, B&H, I got $100,000 with the gear, you work with a financing company, they're paying B&H up front, B&H sends you the stuff, and then you're paying a monthly, basically repaying a monthly, you know, or a term loan until that term is done. So there are things like, hey, a $30,000 monitor, right, that's still $30,000 to come out of pocket on, right? So in situations like that, where, you know, if leasing's not available, financing makes a lot of sense to me as well, right? It's kind of the benefits of the term benefits of a lease, but I'm not having to come out of pocket for that cash. And, you know, again, you have to manage it. I'm not telling you one way or the other what the way it is doing that, but I can say from my experience, especially when

the lust factor is big for high dollar ticket items, right? The reality of it is, you know, if you got 50 grand in your bank account and spending that 50 grand is not going to have an impact on your cash flow, more power to you. I want to be just like you. But also think about could you use that 50 grand for marketing, other investments, other upgrades. Exactly, exactly. Exactly. So I tend to think of like there's in my head. I don't know if I've ever really done this in actuality, but like if it's like $2,000, $1,500 or less, that's clearly like a purchasing range for me. Right. Like I can write that off. I can amortize or write that off in one year like that's done. Right. gets a little higher than that, I'm considering those other options.

So again, good idea to talk to bookkeeper, accountant, et cetera, how that kind of thing impacts you. But one of the questions that I get a lot is like, dude, did you strike it rich? No, I didn't. I just, I manage these things in different buckets and containers. And the down, I understand the downside. The downside is there's always, you're, you're self-creating overhead for you to always pay for these things. I get it. But like at the end of the day, if I have, let's just pick a number out of a hat, it's $1,500 to manage all of the equipment I have or whatever a month.

Like that doesn't seem for me, our business, that doesn't seem unmanageable, right? It might be unmanage. Yeah, and the whole point of that equipment is you're going to use it to get income. Right, exactly. So you have to figure out where those boundaries are because clearly. You pay the power bill every month too. Clearly I've seen people bite off more than they can chew, right? They're like, oh, well, so in one go, we.

got four reference monitors, three sets of advanced panels, and five new computers. Yeah, it's only $6,500 a month to pay for all of that. And you're like, uh, you know, so you have to, you have to think about that as well. So, yeah, I mean, I think balance, balance for sure, for sure. And I think at the end of the day, um, you know, one thing, one last thing I'll put out there is that to fight this urge sometimes, uh, sometimes you'll be surprised about how you can, like, the stop gap measures that you can do to kind of fight that urge. I was laughing earlier when you mentioned the Wacom tablet, right? Like something as small and as relatively affordable as something like a new tablet or a new keyboard or whatever, right?

Even like a new UI monitor, as you alluded to, right? You know, $3,400 for new UI monitor can scratch that itch that you might be having to let you go, cool I can get another year out of this computer or I can get another year out of this monitor but did you see my cool new tablet that I just got or my new iPad like for me anyway sometimes like the small things can scratch that itch of you know stretching the time that I have for the next big thing yeah because like I said if it'll make your day to day better even if it doesn't make it faster even if it doesn't make it bill higher if it's a couple bucks something ergonomic to make you to make it better even if it's a couple bucks something ergonomic to make you make your day to day better, that's worth it. I do think that there is some paralysis factor that can be at play here too, right? You know, the reality is get what you need now, right? That's not saying be uninformed about it, right? But it's like, okay, you need a new computer right now.

There's some capable computers out there. Like, don't wait two years because of a rumor that you read about something maybe coming down the line, right? Like, if you need something, if it's going to impact you. but also like it's also a little bit of a litmus test because if you're having a second guess about it that's somewhere like back in the subconscious going do I really need this like if you're doing that mental math about like if when maybe it could be more of a pointer towards this is not something that I really need it's just something I lust after until you first experience that 120 hertz

UI then all bets are off all right man good good stuff if you guys suffer from technology lust yourself, please let us know in the comments on YouTube or wherever you find the show. Be curious to see what you guys lost after. As a reminder, you can always head over to the Offset Podcast for additional show notes, as well as peruse the entire library of shows. We're getting close to 50 of these doing every two weeks. As a reminder, you can always follow us on Instagram and on Facebook. Just search for the Offset Podcast.

You'll recognize our logo and Joey My Faces. And of course, if you do like the show, we'd really be three. if you'd consider supporting the show by visiting the Buy Me a Coffee link here. Every little bit helps. So we really appreciate that. As always, huge thanks to our sponsor, Flanders Scientific, to our editor, Stella, and to you guys, our audience, for checking out another episode. So, yeah, Joey, good discussion.

This is an ongoing battle. We might have to do a part two later on, you know, Gear addicts anonymous here and see where we're at. But good discussion. So for the Offset Podcast, I'm Robbie Carmen. And I'm Joe. Indiana. Thanks for us.