Living/working in Cupertino?
grellas: My office is in Cupertino and I live on the Peninsula. It is a great commute if you can take 280 (always against traffic) and it is about 30 minutes door-to-door (say, up to the Redwood City/San Carlos area).Anything in Cupertino will very likely be over $1M, mostly because it is a nice area and also because it has a much sought after school district, one which can command a couple of hundred thousand dollar difference for otherwise like houses that are even across the street from one another.There are homes in the South Bay that are in the range you indicate, and perhaps some nice ones, but you will likely be disappointed by what you will find in that range. If you go too far east, the prices might go down but the commute will likely be miserable if you drive during peak hours.Going north, Palo Alto is beautiful but way out of range, as most of Sunnyvale and Mountain View will likely be as well.Going further north, you can find some reasonable suburban homes in the San Carlos/Redwood City area that are within range and the commute fits so long as you can take 280 for the drive down (not so with 101, where the commute is often bad, even going south in the a.m.; the area, btw, is quiet and the neighborhoods nice, lots of younger and 40ish-type couples). The weather around the Valley is very consistent and temperate year-round - it averages perhaps 10 degrees cooler up toward the mid-Peninsula and so you should like it slightly on the cooler side (still 60s to 70s year round, on average) to live up there.Note: not written from a hacker perspective (I am not a hacker) but from that of someone who has been in Silicon Valley for 40+ years.