Name the most expensive personal item you’ve ever purchased (not your home or car).

There are two ways I’m looking at this prompt that I’m going to try and explain for you all. The first will be more literal, following what I’m going to call the “standard response”, and the second will be focused on an “end result”.

Starting with that standard response logic, I’m taking the prompt to mean the purchased item is a whole and complete object at time of purchase. In this case I figured that my most expensive purchase was my current laptop. I had inherited a laptop a couple years ago, and wasn’t planning to game on it. I had planned to use it for personal work, document processing and writing. That’s all I needed it for. Unfortunately, it was already 5 or 6 generations behind on hardware, and it wasn’t properly connecting to networks. It got to be too much of a hassle, so earlier this year I shopped around for a new one. I went into that process with the mindset of just making it the replacement to meet my original needs and nothing more. It didn’t need anything fancy, and I wanted to avoid spending a lot of money on what would amount to a modern day typewriter for my writing needs. That idea went out the window really quickly. Budget laptops were exceedingly lackluster, and by that I mean they were basically all Chromebooks. For the record, I owned a Chromebook several years ago, and the inherited laptop was what replaced it because Google in their infinite greed and wisdom decided to stop letting Microsoft put their Office apps on ChromeOS (or so I recall, it very well could have been a Microsoft decision.) Either way, I didn’t hate Chromebooks, but they had ceased to meet my needs. Bye-bye budget options. After that, the next step up were laptops that were too small, but if I wanted anything larger than a 14in screen the prices seemed to jump quite a bit because of the higher end components that were packed into them. I eventually lucked out and found a low- to mid-level gaming laptop on sale. So far, best $1,100 I’ve spent on an individual item.

That last bit got away from me for such a simple question, so I’ll keep this part shorter.

The second way I was looking at this question was to consider the purchasing aspect as it would relate to parts of a whole, because my gaming computer (not the laptop I mentioned before) would technically be the most expensive personal item. The current rig I’m running is easily twice as expensive as the laptop, if not a little more. When COVID-19 practically shut down large swathes of the global economy, and everyone in the tech sector went to the Work From Home style of living, they all needed computers. So demand for parts went through the roof while supplies plummeted from low production capacity in the face of pandemic restrictions. When I overhauled my gaming PC we were a year and a half or so through the pandemic and restrictions were lifting. I caught some sales, and AMD was putting out a new line of GPU’s so I switched from Intel and Nvidia. If I had stuck with them my rig would probably have cost me four or five times as much as that laptop…

Gaming as a hobby can be damn expensive, but I love it anyway.