What's an expensive purchase you've made recently and was it worth it?

picking up a new skateboard deck today! i need to get out and get moving again to help recover from a recent injury. it’s been years since i’ve ridden but i am super excited! i’d like to also depend less on a car so i can eventually sell it. baby steps, though.

Fuck yeah! I am excited for you :) Remember, start slow, and if you skated in your youth don't be bummed if you can't do the same tricks right away/progress seems slower than it should. Just cruising around is fun as shit no matter who you are (once you get used to maintaining the necessary balance/speed control techniques).
Signed, dude in his 30s who stops and restarts skateboarding on a schedule dictated by ankle injuries.
- yikes! hope the ankles get better!
  thanks for the kind words! i am def gonna be rusty, but since im older im not really focused on tricks or anything like that (yet). im gonna focus on the basics & mostly cruising around/getting my body moving.
  didnt see an active skating comm on lemmy but hoping to help change that bc i am super stoked!
That sounds like great fun! What do you like doing with it?
- i used to try to learn tricks and such, but i think this time around i will mostly use it for commuting around town/cruising.

Litter-Robot 4, which was a painful $800.

Best purchase ever.

I bought a dehumidifier in January it was a couple of hundred. I fucking love it don't know how I lived without it.

crazy, I was thinking of buying an humidifier!
- It's 100% worth it! I got a delonghi Tbf I've only had it since December so I can't comment on longevity, but clothes dry far faster and I don't have manky black bits on the kitchen wall.
- I got a cheap ultrasonic-type humidifier recently and it was a huge mistake. The water particulates killed one of my houseplants and put two more on life support.
  I definitely felt more comfortable with it around but I'm gonna have to get a different type next winter.

Tri clad stainless steel cookware. Getting rid of non-stick pans for healthier living. They're still a thing to get used to, right heat settings and such, but I'm excited.

I bought a classic Kamado Joe last year. It was a spicy meatball but the meats I make on it are far and above anything I would make with a cheap smoker and it gives me the option to use it as a grill not just a smoker.

We redid the kids/guest/common bathroom recently. But I bought a pretty pricey toilet for the second bathroom that's closer our our room. It has a seat warmer and a washlet seat. I build and remodel houses for work so a lot of my week is using a portable toilet. I figured weekends should be a little nicer and parts of me deserved some pampering. Man, I was right. 10/10 would recommend.

I moved out to the middle of nowhere for work. The sky is amazing at night, so I don't run visible lights outside. It's dark as hell. I picked up a set of night vision. Pricey but worth it.

I went to engineering school in the US. Twice.

No. Lol.

Come to Europe. The Fraunhofer needs engineers.

Sony WF-1000XM5s. The ANC is better than anything I have tried in years. I got them because I tried loops and was disappointed with how little they did. The quality of music through them is a really positive secondary purpose for me.

I have XM4s and MDR-v6 headphones. Sony headphones are great.

Never in my life did I expect to get excitement and antipation waiting on our very first manure spreader to arrive but here I am, cannot wait for it to get here.

Let me tell you, if you need a manure spreader and don't have one....shit piles up quick.

I'm not sure if it's worth it yet because it has not been delivered yet, but it's a new Synthesiser I've wanted for a number of years.

Looking forward to the wave of creativity that usually follows when I get new gear

Whatcha getting?
- I grabbed the OP-1 Field off the back of their (sorta) choose your own price thing they're doing this month.
  I've messed around with a friend's original OP-1 a number of times and I just find it a really creative way to get some ideas down quickly. It's also quite different from my usual workflow, so it means I don't fall into the same comfortable techniques.
As a tinkerer musician, even a mini MIDI keyboard with some drum pads and minor synth options was 🔥 I can't imagine a full on synth! 🤘🏻

Heat pump water heater, and fuck yeah, it's neat!

new glasses for €1300. they had to be customised to fit my head. so far, they have fucked up my prescription twice. so no.

Sorry to hear

A decent camera, and yeah. I’ve had a fairly good camera for a while, but getting one that takes the photos I see has been a game changer - previously I always felt they needed editing, and I never really had the inclination to learn that very well. Now they mostly look like what I want straight out of camera, so I’m printing them more often, and enjoying the whole process a lot more

Awesome! What'd you get?
- A Fuji X-T5, with 16mm f1.4, 35mm f1.4, and 90mm f2 lenses. I’m sure there are technically better cameras and lenses out there, but it’s fun to use, and takes magic pictures without any real need to edit them. I’ve got a small photo printer, so it works very much like a film camera in the process - shoot, print, look at a physical photo, almost no screen involved

Electronic Unicycle: it's likely going to kill me, but it's a ton of fun to ride. Mines capable of 60mph/95kmph. Took about a week to ride confidently but definitely worth it.

Whhhaaattt?? 60mph?! What brand, I must know!
- InMotion Cruiser models. Currently out of stock :(

A laundry basket with legs that you can fold out.

I have to hang-dry my laundry (I live in Japan), so being able to raise the basket high enough so that I don't have to bend to the ground every time to grab the next item is worth it.

Technically, it's not that recent, nor that expensive, but it was like double the price of the laundry basket next to it at the store.

My Berkey water filtration system. I got the travel size (1.5 gal). It's efficient enough to filter out food coloring, the water is a perfect pH 7, the water doesn't irritate my mouth sores like tap or bottled water (looking at you, Aquafina!) and the water just tastes better. Plus the filters are rated for 6,000 gallons. I'm better hydrated than I ever was.

Last year, one of my friends' parents were driving a decent way (around 12 hours) to spend a week in our area around 4th of July. They brought their 3 gallon Berkey with them. It was so big, I initially scoffed, like "That must have taken up so much room in the car!"
I very quickly understood why they brought it. That was the best damn water I have ever tasted. And I'm normally a big water person, straight from the tap for life, I mostly prefer water over other beverages, but this water... Idk, maybe they put some kind of undetectable addiction agent in their filters.

I bought an Ember Mug, and while it was expensive the quality of life it has given me has actually been worth it. Always having your coffee at the right temperature even after sipping it slowly over the course of an hour is such an upgrade over re-heating it every 15 minutes it's actually wild.

I got my wife one of those for an Xmas present a couple of years ago. She balked when she found out how much it was. But less than a week later she said she'd die before giving it up.
- I think James Hoffman said it best in one of his videos:
  "It's expensive, it's ridiculous... and I hate myself for how much I love it"

Carbon wheels and a power meter crankset for my bike. I'm having so much fun with it.

It was kind of expensive, but in relative terms it was fine since I got them on AliExpress

I got a new RC airplane. A SIG Kadet LT-40 ARF (Almost Ready to Fly). It's a trainer with a 70" wingspan (~1.8 meters)

A lot of RC airplanes these days come ready to go... almost everything is pre-installed including the electric motor, ESC (electronic speed controller), servos, control surface hinges, you name it. The problem is they're all made out of styrofoam, and while they work and fly well enough, they don't appeal to me as much as a balsa and plywood model where you pick all of the components yourself.

To me it's like the difference between buying a prebuilt computer that comes with Windows on it vs building my own computer.

This one is an ARF, which means the major components are pre-built, but there is some final gluing and assembly to do.

The Kadet LT-40 is a trainer, and I only got it so I can teach other people how to fly should the need arise. All in, I've spent about $950 on it. I bought good quality stuff which increases the cost, plus I even bought a 2nd transmitter to use as a buddy box during training. The student will use one transmitter, and I'll have my transmitter in hand ready to take over before they crash.

With cheaper components I could have reduced the cost by $200 at least. To me it's worth the extra in order to have stuff that I know is good quality.

Was it worth it? I think it will be, yes. I've been flying RC planes on and off for 20 years, and even if I don't have any students, this will be fun for me to fly.

Depends on what someone thinks of as expensive.

But I had been saving up for a new digital SLR.

I had bought an okay point and shoot years ago, and couldn't justify replacing it just because. Then the thing disappeared. Tore the house apart looking for it. Nada. Nobody has been in the house where it was stored at all, so my best guess is that I did something like loan it to someone while half asleep, or otherwise go brain dead and shove it somewhere weird.

Anyway, looked at my budget, guesstimated what I could afford, what I'd need to take the kind of pictures I wanted, and bloody well picked up a decent enough Canon. More camera than I need, but that also means I can use it until it falls apart and be plenty satisfied with anything I shoot. I mostly take pics of my chickens. But they're good pics.

Makes me wish I'd done it ages ago. Not that the pics the previous one took are bad, these are just better.

Pokemon card booster packs to open.

Hell no it wasn’t worth it, but ya gotta gamble sometimes.

Not super expensive, but more than I would normally spend on a countertop appliance. But a small dishwasher. Pour in a gallon and half up top, put the evac hose in the sink, little bit of Cascade powder (the cheap stuff works best I have no clue why people buy the expensive tablets), and it gets them cleaner than I can by hand.

Had to get PC upgraded bcus old one don't work any more . Has enough VRAM for local image generation , ftmp don't hafta deal with limitations of online generation services anymore !

I’ve yet to make that purchase, but I’m about to spend around €1.5k on a new (used) e-fatbike, since I snapped the frame on my old one. The one I spent over €2k on three years ago was absolutely worth it, so I don’t hesitate for a second to spend that much again. I’m just grateful that my finances allow for it - an unexpected cost like that would be devastating for so many other people.

Which one?

Offline AI capable hardware in July of 2023 was my last big purchase and has been well worth it. This is the longest stretch where I have felt engaged with one hobby thing and it has bridged most of my other interests in interesting ways. For an advanced tech capable disabled person in social isolation, this is the way.

What's been your experience? I've to tinkered a bit on my gaming PC/homelab, just got perplexica running so I can run self-hosted research things, but I can't say I've found it overwhelmingly useful as yet

My super mega shiny metallic handbag. Yasssss

Kindle Scribe 2022 discounted to something like €250. My old e-reader was dog slow and I’ve been going through many pages of physical notebooks lately so it looked like it would solve many of my issues. Software is shit but can be worked around and the hardware is just 👌. Very happy with the thing for this price.

On the opposite end of the size spectrum, I bought a Boox Palma (smartphone-sized) a little over a year ago, and $300 felt like a lot for a small e-reader... I had originally bought it as a "companion" device to my dumb-phone, since it runs Android and has google play services, but I found that even that small single layer of friction to use smart-apps (starting up hotspot on my phone, taking out the Palma, disabling airplane mode) made it extremely easy to just quit cold turkey, and I have pretty much only read on it.
I have found that I read SO much more at this form factor. I slip it in my pocket and take it with me when I go for aimless walks around town, to the cafe in the mornings on the weekend, to work every day to read during lunch... I never took my Kindle Oasis nearly that many places, as it necessitated some kind of bag to hold it. Definitely worth it, even if I am only utilizing like 10% of its "features".
I also spent $350 on a pair of Maui Jim sunglasses last summer before a trip to Hawaii, and I can honestly say that even though I was initially sickened by the price, I do not regret it one bit, and I still love them. They're so much better than any random $100 pair I've had in the past. It was one of those things where I walked into a store last minute and very uninformed to try and find a new pair because I extremely inconveniently broke my only good pair 2 weeks before the trip and the company didn't repair them or sell spare lenses. Picked up a pair of MJ's without knowing how much they cost, put them on, absolutely LOVED them, then saw the price and was like "well fuck... I really want these", waffled it over for a week and 3 days, then rushed back to the store the day before my flight and bought them)