[nox101]

"640k is all you need!"

There is always new tech. Local LLMs and other high processing intensive things might be a thing people want. Not directly, but it may enable things they want. More viral TikTok videos. Maybe some kind of health monitoring. Maybe AR will finally get a compelling use case if it can identify everything in your field of view but it requires serious computing power. Maybe AR 3D movies where the characters show up in your house and adapt to your living room. Siri might suck, but lots of people want a "Star Trek" computer that actually understands them.

The point is not any specific example. Rather, it's that there's always something around the corner that needs more computing power. I have no idea what it will be, but I'm confident something will appear.

[II2II]

The author pretty much acknowledges that with the YouTuber example. And yeah, you can create a fairly long list of other reasons why people may want to upgrade.

But here's the thing: in the 1990s, people pretty much needed to upgrade regardless of what they were doing. Sure, you had a few holdouts. These were people who would continue to use Wordstar and had no interest in exchanging documents with people who use that newfangled Microsoft Word. These people were the exception rather than the rule, since most people wanted to be able to share their documents, get onto the internet, or any other number of things. Chances are, they also had multiple reasons to upgrade.

The situation is quite different today. You can get away without upgrading because most of the software, if not all of the software, you need will run just fine on an old PC. As for the other stuff, maybe you'll have one or two reasons to upgrade. Is that enough to justify it? The answer is going to depend upon the person, and the actual task they need to complete. For most people though, I would suggest that they don't feel the same compulsion to upgrade their computer.

[nox101]

I agree there hasn't been a super strong reason to upgrade in the last 10 years. I just disagree with "I will never need to buy a new computer again".

I suspect at some point the new "Youtube" (3d volumetric video, holodeck, or something) will come out, it will be as popular as youtube and as "must have feature" such that 95% of the population will want a computer that can do this new thing and todays computers won't be able to do that new thing.

[paulryanrogers]

I'd argue lack of security updates makes older yet capable systems untrustworthy. You just can't be sure they won't be infected at some point.

Linux can extend the life for a while, until that too is also unsupported and becomes unsupported.

[dzhiurgis]

> Local LLMs

Does anyone use those other than spam?

I guess IDEs and even iOS are shipping them, albeit far in usefulness from the SOTA. Low latency in iOS is noticeable tho.