Why Your Chair Will Outlast Your Laptop (And Why That Matters)

Laptops and office chairs depreciate at completely different rates. This is obvious when you say it out loud. It is almost never reflected in how people actually decide what to buy.

The useful heuristic: for anything you will replace in under four years, optimize for fit to current need. For anything you will replace in over seven years, optimize for range of adjustment and parts availability.

A laptop bought for today's workflow is almost always the right call. A chair bought for today's body — today's weight, today's back, today's preferences — is almost always the wrong one, because you will be a different person by the time that chair is still sitting under your desk in 2032.

This is why warranty length is a more meaningful signal for chairs than for electronics. A 7-year warranty on a chair is underwriting; a 1-year warranty is a shrug. On a laptop it's the reverse — 1 year is the industry standard and extensions rarely pay off.