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Comment by debreuil | Hacker News Reader

The gold rush is over because everyone who wants a PC has a PC. -2005ish

The hardware hasn't really gotten significantly better in the last 10 years to get people on the upgrade treadmill again. Phones are on that curve now, but eventually they are going to top out too, and your iPhone 10 won't be that significant an upgrade from your iPhone 9.

I guess it depends how you measure getting better. If you're just looking at Mhz then maybe I can understand.

For me, 10 years ago I had to use a desktop to achieve much of anything. These days I have the power of my desktop except it weighs 2.65 pounds, wireless transfer speeds up to 1300 Mbit/s, has a 13.3in 3200x1800 touch screen, 256GB drive I can read and write much faster than my 3ware RAID0 setup I had back then. Its the size of an actual notebook and runs all day long without getting plugged into anything. Not to mention it only cost me $750 bucks compared to at least twice that for my old desktops.

For me, it feels like things have improved fairly significantly.

We're sort of out on one end of the bell-curve, really. For Joe Blow, average computer user, email and Word and YouTube works on their decade old hardware. Unless you're a gamer, there's not a lot of call to have the latest and greatest - and you can still run a lot of stuff on lower settings on old hardware. Long-lived console generations and the paucity of PC-first development have kept the minimum specs on even AAA titles pretty low.

For instance, my parents are happy as clams using a G4 Macbook and a second-hand HP Pavilion laptop

We are already at that stage. Apple is going to have to push out some very inefficient new software before my 5s is too slow and needs an upgrade.

Well, actually that wasn't completely inaccurate. The PC has been a place of declining margins, interest, and activity...

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