Saving like that on computers is a difference of about $60/month. I think most developers reading Hacker News can add more value than that with the faster hardware.
Not if your only income is a ~500$ a month side business.
The effort of upgrading hardware take quite a bit of development time. Even if hardware was free I don’t think a 2 year upgrade cycle is worth it based on how slowly hardware is improving.
As to buying 1k vs 2k computers without a gaming graphics card or the need for massive storage you hit real diminishing returns at around 1k. 500gb SSD (90$) case (30$) PSU (40$) CPU (200$) MB (100$) RAM (200$) -= 660 for the guts, buy two 22 inch 1080P monitors for 100$ and you got 140$ for an OS keyboard and mouse. Sure you could spend 4x that but it’s not going to make that much difference.
