My Top 5 Expensive Bits of Tech
I love my tech…but not this much. Here are some eye-wateringly expensive pieces of tech and sports tech plus my opinions on them. Please feel free to suggest your particular favourites in the comments.
Garmin MARQ Athlete
At $950 you might think that the Fenix 6X Pro Solar is Garmin’s most expensive, smart sports watch. But no, it’s the MARQ Athlete coming in at £1,400.00/$1500.00.
It’s a beautiful piece of tech, made with premium materials but it does NOT represent the state-of-the-art sports tech from Garmin. For a start, it lacks SOLAR charging.
Q: Would I buy one?
A: No. Both the Fenix 6 and MARQ ranges are due to be superseded soon. Likely in early 2022 with the Fenix 7.
Buy one here, though you’ll be lucky to find them in stock
Apple Watch 7 Hermes
For a mere $1499 you can get the Apple Watch Hermes complete with Single Tour Deployment Buckle. That beautiful strap and exclusive Hermes Watch face no doubt justify doubling the price of the Apple Watch 7 Stainless Steel with Leather Link strap, which is otherwise identical. Well, you get a nice box too.
Q. Would I buy one?
A. Never! Although I recently bought a Watch 7 Stainless steel because that case variant also includes a sapphire-like screen which is more scratch-resistant than those on the aluminium cased models. OK, Watch 7 has new glass geometry that supposedly makes cracks less likely but, hey, I’ve scratched and cracked my Watch 6 & SE models. #Not Happy.
Buy one here.
iPhone 13 Pro 1TB
Somebody at Apple is not very creative with the pricing. This one is also $1499. Jeez $3k for a watch and a phone. The iPhone 13 Pro is the super-sized one and boasts a different camera to the iPhone 12. I always struggle to find the app option that lets me make a phone call although I have little difficulty using my iPhone’s many and wonderful apps. I have a SLR camera as well. Do I really need to buy a new iPhone just to take more creative pictures?
Q. Would I buy one?
A. Yeah. Probably in a couple of years time. I’m happy with my iPhone 11 right now tho. All my sports apps just pair (almost) the first time with my many sports sensors. That’s why I switched to Apple as it would typically take a day and a half to pair anything to my old Android smartphone (which I preferred in many other ways).
Buy one here.
A Bitcoin
An expensive computer algorithm is a single Bitcoin which in 2021 peaked at a price of around $67,500 for one, single digital coin. It can’t ever be used in a commercially sensible way but, hey, lots of people want one and so it’s worth a LOT of money and might eventually go up further in value.
Q: Would I buy one?
A: Yes. Well at least a fraction of one as I couldn’t afford a whole one. A Binance Coin is the fourth largest crypto coin on the market, you can buy BNB Binance Coin here at a more affordable price of around $500 or a full Bitcoin BTC here.
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 – Graphics Card
What do you think this costs? £800 for a computer graphics card? Nah. The list price is£1399 but there is zero chance of you getting one for that price. More likely you will be able to get the Founder’s Edition for £2700/$3000 (yep twice the price) from someone who knows someone in China who has a few.
This is the creme de la creme of graphics cards and every gamer wants one. Sadly every crypto miner also wants one and they are prepared to pay WAY more than gamers or high-end graphic designers. Plus, the commercial crypto miners go to extraordinary lengths to jump any queues that exist to only let one person buy one of these cards by using automated shopping bots.
With the current price of ETHEREUM close to all-time highs, so the price of the fabled RTX 3090 has skyrocketed and every last RTX has been snapped up. However, with crypto mining now illegal in China, I would imagine that many are coming back on the market. But with ETHEREUM 2.0 moving to a much more energy-efficient model, I’m not entirely sure that these RTX 3090s will be able to mine it anymore…just saying; they can’t profitably mine Bitcoin either if that was your plan. #Shrug.
To spread the cost of your mining rig motherboard and CPU you might want to opt for an 8GPU mining rig. All you need to do is find £25-£30k for the privilege and a friendly electricity supplier. Ouch!
NVIDIA’s strategy to counter Crypto miners buying their products was interesting. They throttle-back cards so that they are less use for miners, so allowing their traditional user base of gamers to be able to find them, buy them and still benefit from improved graphics performance. That happened with the previous RTX 3080 where Nvidia introduced the mining-unfriendly TI variant. There are also other manufacturer versions based on the same tech from Nvidia but they might not be as fast (IDK, probably not)
Q: Would I buy one
A: Hmm maybe. I’m not a gamer and I’ve not owned a TV for VERY many years but I used computers to watch box sets WAY before the rest of the world cottoned on to digital binge-watching. So I might like a super speedy graphics card. Now I just have to find one.
Buy one here (maybe).
Peloton Tread
At £2870 for the TREAD Family bundle, you will find it hard to get a more expensive consumer-grade treadmill. Good luck.
It’s great that the TREAD was designed with safety in mind. See the image above and then read this to understand why
Peloton is pushing the safety message. Note: Do NOT let your children crawl under the treadmill when it is running!
Q: Would I buy one
A: Almost certainly not. Perhaps if I became an affiliate for them I’d buy one but that’s very unlikely.
Buy one here.
Wahoo Fitness Smart Bike
#Drool
Yes, of course, I want one of these.
No, I can’t afford one nor justify buying one.
Two mates recently bought WattBikes which are perfectly nice and, like the Wahoo Fitness Smart Bike, have the advantage of a small physical footprint but with a bit less built-in cleverness. I tutted at them and told them they should have bought a Kickr for half the price and stuck their road bike on it. What do I know?
Buy one here (or a Kickr, they’re awesome, I have one)
What’s the most you’ve spent on some tech?
Do you know any more ridiculously priced pieces of tech that actually sell in meaningful numbers?
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(To be fair, almost everything subscription based, eg. whoop, is expensive after 1-2 years)
BTW: SS AW7 is said to be more scratch resistant than aluminum one…does anyone know how the titanium version (black or clear) perform in respect to that?
hi no that’s not correct. the AW7 is more CRACK resistant because of the geometry, it’s not the same thing.
better SCRATCH resistance only comes from the sapphire coating on the screens with the stainless steel cases AFAIK. these presumably are also more CRACK resistant
TY. Do the titanium versions of AW7 sport the same sapphire coating on the screens as the SS ones ?
yep!
Sleep pod: https://www.eightsleep.com/eight-pod-sleep-cool/
wow, apparently 30,000 people bought one.
$1300 is the new $499
It is interesting on how so much of the worldwide market continues on at this pricing level, despite that it has started to be less sensible than it had been. It wasn’t that long ago that the intention was to conserve cash and resources by buying things that completely addressed a need and were durable enough that a follow-up purchase wouldn’t be expected. It is natural that the gray market would allow some people to churn over high-end purchases and stay on the bleeding edge. But I think there are a few product lines that depend on people buying more often than they probably should.
The blatant fashion items are probably as explainable as they ever had been. I suspect the upper end tech items will follow fashion goods tactics and switch to low volume production. You either buy it when you find it or you risk having to “settle” for the mid-range.
Far less expensive, but I’m not able to justify a carbon fiber t-shirt. The Patagonia stuff is expensive enough and will probably out last my ownership. Carbon fiber bike stem? Well, that’s entirely different.
The MARQ line was basically obsolete and inferior from the moment it was released, because Garmin put out the Fenix 6 and Forerunner 945 like 3 months later with everything on the MARQ, but hundreds cheaper. Even for the sector of consumers, the MARQ wasn’t the watch line the fility rich looked for to show off wealth.
Remember the Chronos, the pimped-out F3HR with the $1100 price tag?
Hi, another premium product that I’ve been reading about is Hydrow – a rower (https://hydrow.com). On top of the hardware ($2295) you need an expensive subscription to keep it going ($38/month). It’s interesting though, wish I had room for it and that it would work without the subscription (just as a plain rower) – sadly no as they want to lock you in into their content.
i got close to reviewing that one.
Another is the new (2020) Tag Heuer Connected smartwatch. Love the design but it’s waay overpriced for essentially a WearOS watch with a premium case. You can get the Titanium version with the black rubber strap for a “mere” $2350 (https://www.tagheuer.com/us/en/smartwatches/collections/tag-heuer-connected/45-mm/SBG8A80.BT6221.html). Part of me loves it, the other part (the rational one) can’t get past the insane price they’re asking for it. Any thoughts?
a friend of mine collects ‘proper’ watches.
they go up in value, our techie ones mostly become worthless after a few years
Does my £3000 Di2 bike count as tech?
A harsh critic would say it’s just the same as my £700 mechanical bike.
What do they know!
A >£10,000 bike might have made the list.
Di2 normally comes on a better overall package than what you get for £700.
that said, I’m definitely a fan of bumping up the spec of a good second hand bike