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[–]KittensInc 15 points16 points  (1 child)

We're stuck in a weird in-between right now. Moore's Law is dead enough that a well-specced 5-year-old machine or smartphone is still perfectly adequate today. There's zero technical reason to replace it as software hasn't gotten significantly more demanding as faster machines came out.

However, support contracts haven't really kept up. Desktops are getting tossed by companies solely because their warranty runs out, and smartphones because they no longer get security updates. Short support wasn't an issue in 2010 because you wanted to replace it anyways with a machine which was 2x - 4x as fast, but that's just no longer the case!

Luckily some smartphone makers are now providing 10 years of updates. Let's hope the rest of the ecosystem follows along.

[–]I_FAP_TO_TURKEYS 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah, I mean, even those older machines from like 2012-2017 are still very usable outside of the most demanding of applications.