As much as it needs. My time is worth a lot more.

You basically just said, "I don't care about the planet or any of the people that live on it, as long as I can get my work done slightly faster".

The power requirements of the machine you describe would easily be more than double that of the Mac, but you probably aren't getting anywhere close to double the performance.

No one who cares about the environment should buy a Mac, where you can't upgrade anything and the entire machine is e-waste when a single component gives up the ghost. I like Macs and the Apple Silicon CPUs but let's be honest here.

No one just throws away a perfectly functioning, fully supported Mac. They hold their value well enough that an “upgrade” is selling your old computer and buying a new one.

Besides, if you care about performance, you’re going to want to do more than just replace the RAM

You completely ignored the part of the sentence where I said "when... a single component gives up the ghost"

No one throws away an entire Mac when a single component fails either. They get it fixed.

>I don't care about the planet or any of the people that live on it, as long as I can get my work done slightly faster

Unless you live in a cave and using your excrement as manure I could apply the same logic to your lifestyle.

Realistically the only practical difference is virtue signaling (I've seen a bunch of hipsters bring up these kind of irrelevant talking points while discussing their vacation in some exotic destination 5 minutes later).

And like someone else said, Apple devices are the definition of throwaway consumer products designed for a limited shelf life.

A difference between 200W and 500W for a single computer in your home isn't going to save the planet.

It's barely going to make a dent in your energy budget, if you use 4 kW/day running a 500W computer for 8 hours (assuming it's pegged at 100% CPU and GPU continuously, which it's not), that's the same as driving 5 miles or as turning down your A/C by 2 degrees.

That is not what he said at all. That's a perfect example of a straw man. Apple has brainwashed you so much that you think you are also saving the planet with its 'amazing' machines. You are not. Collective power saving from computers alone is a drop in the ocean of what all those mega corporations could do if they would just stop pointing the finger of waste management and energy saving on customers.

I wish I had a 5950X that requires less power. I don't. I am going to choose this CPU over any mac any day because it's faster. A lot of other CPUs consume less electricity, I don't use them neither. End of the story.

Maybe the user lives in a place with 100% hydroelectric power.

meanwhile my car's engine is rated for 200kW

I'm gonna hyperventialte to emit more CO2 just to spite you.

Time would be a primary reason to not build your own machine, though.

Who says it is my time? You can just buy custom workstations.

OP did. The original comment was about building your own machine for the cost of a Mac studio.

It's not the same kind of time saving. When I'm working on a particular task having a fast machine lets me stay in the flow with good iteration speed. Realistically I only have X ammount of concentrated effort available and that X is < 8h, building a PC doesn't really bite into that time/energy. But if it's a chore for you - you can just buy prebuilt or even rent bare metal.

No need to assemble. There are services for that.

You need to add the cost of your time into sourcing those parts, assembling it all, troubleshooting issues and then any long term warranty issues that come up.

Just pay Microcenter their $200 fee to do that for you.

My local computer shop did it for $30. It's $60 per hour, and it took them 30 minutes.

To do all the parts research, order them all , build it, troubleshoot and install the OS? Do you get a warranty?

I got a warranty, yes. I live in Australia, so there's a government-enforced 2-year minimum warranty period for durable goods such as electronics.

PS: I once worked on a project where 10 consultants sat around burning money for over a month because the customer couldn't figure out how to spin up a lab environment. We walked down to the local computer shop across the street, ordered the beefiest Xeon workstation tower we could build, packed it with drives, put VMware ESXi on it, and then the work could finally start. The "research, ordering, build, and troubleshooting" took half a day. It saved hundreds of thousands of dollars of lost time and money.