I embraced Minimalism a lot and I've really got my wife on board with it since being married. I also made a switch to MAC after years of being a die hard PC/Windows only guy. And I was socked when buying used at the prices of used Apple products, but I was so excited when my 09 Unibody 15 inch MacBook Pro sold for the same price I paid for it a full year earlier on ebay. I rolled that into my existing Macbook Air which I bought refurbished from Apple and only needed an additional $200.00.
While others say you're paying for an Apple logo I strongly disagree. The fact is, I had an HP Laptop I paid $800 for (high end, I'm a web developer remember) that I could barely get anyone to pay 250$ for a year and half later. PC's hold almost no value. So unless you want to keep buying $300.00 one's it's actually been cheaper swapping Apple products every few years and paying a very minimal upgrade fee.
Minimalism is what led me to ERE and MMM, and is something that's really improved my life and my attitudes greatly. Never considered frugality as a means towards free time before but the savings was always a nice byproduct of minimalism!
I'm a recent Mac covert, and it was pretty much after like 2 years of buying my first PC laptop and having it fail, and having the worst experience with customer support, buying another to replace it, having THAT one mechanically break due to faulty design (became well known with other owners), and getting fed up with having wasted all that time and money on such bad products. I sold them all off and (somewhat out of anger) threw down for the biggest, baddest iMac at the time (27" i7 quad core w/ SSD, probably a little too much in retrospect). Wow, it is so fast and amazing, and much nicer to use. I scoffed at Macs before (mostly because I didn't understand them) but got the chance to use them in audio school in 2008-10 and started to appreciate the quality the more familiar I became. I use them now at work and even simple tasks are much easier on them than PC. And yes, even though it was super expensive, I can't see myself ever needing to buy another computer for a while, since it's so powerful, and the build quality is easily way above any PC made out of plastic. And if I do sell, they do seem to hold their value more than PCs, a LOT more.
I agree with this, but only if you buy gear used. Guitars are marked up incredible amounts when they are new and often lose 25%-50% of their value as soon as they are considered used. I bought my current bass "used" even though it was only a couple of months old for 25% less than the new price. And that included a $75 dollar hard case. If I ever decided to sell that bass, I should be able to get pretty close to what I paid for it. Most other music hardware is the same way, but nothing at the scale of guitars.
You're totally right, and yes my past purchases that I used to flip were all on the used market. Definitely taught me the truth about gear at a young age, especially since all of my purchases were in almost store-bought condition. I pretty much never bought a new guitar until I was working many years later (and I fully intend on keeping it).