I was computerless for a while in the late '80s, mostly using a roommate's XT to dial in to local BBSes, before buying an XT of my own in '91. I used that computer and a Mac SE/30 until I bought a 486DX/66 in 1994.
The 486 was replaced with a Compaq Deskpro with a Pentium 120 in early '96, which was itself supplanted by a PII-266 powered Compaq Presario in 1999. Early 2001 saw a home-built Celeron machine that got relegated to guest computer status in 2003 when I brought home a 2.2GHz P4...and I used that computer, with short breaks on Macs, until 2012. Then an HP commodity gaming tower in 2013, which was so forgettable I can't even remember what the CPU was, but it did have a neat red glowing light inside the case.
When the HP's hard drive croaked, rather than replace the machine I just limped along on laptops for a few years before buying a dual core i5 Mac mini from Marko in early 2018 and used it until just this month when it got supplanted by by the M4 Mac mini, which I similarly hope to get six or seven years out of.
Notice something about the general pace of CPU acquisition? It's on a downward trend. Uneven, but definitely downward.
That seems to be broadly true across a lot of areas. My first smartphone (LG Optimus) lasted me two years before being replaced with a Samsung Galaxy SII, which in turn was replaced after three years by an iPhone 6S. That first iPhone only made it a year and a half before getting supplanted by a 7 Plus, and that phone went five years before getting replace with the current one three years ago...and I don't see any compelling reason to swap this one out on the horizon short of it no longer being supported, which shouldn't happen for another three to four years at minimum.
We gotta pump up demand for CPUs somehow, now that the churn of Moore's Law seems to be slowing.
Hey, buddy, wanna buy some stock in AI?
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| Remember when you had to upgrade every other year? |
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