Nobody will actually mind if you brag about how you bought a new phone. Also if you are not a rich person you having an expensive phone means you did something smart to “cheat the system.”

As an example I had an old coworker when I used to work at a warehouse and he would combo things like service provider sales to buy an iphone.

He did sound smart when explaining the roundabout way he got the phone despite making same money as us. And I don’t mind what other people chose to spend money on.

What I do mind is college students thinking macbooks are some “programmers’ laptops.”

I had to constantly hand-hold group members that think they can get away with not learning how to code and using AI for all the homeworks because they bought a mac and that makes them a good programmer anyway.

“But I thought the program should automatically wait for the threads on this line since it’s POSIX.”

Yes I love troubleshooting professor’s makefile for an OS I don’t have because you never learned your own laptop has a symlink from gcc to clang.