[citation][nom]cTs Corvette[/nom]The lack of growth in the PC sector is due to one simple fact-computers have gotten so powerful, and Windows has gotten so stable, that it's very rare to have any sort of problem with them, and they are fast enough to handle pretty much anything you throw at them, so the average consumer has no reason to go out and buy a new PC every couple of years. That 5 year old Dell is still chugging happily along, and still runs Word and Netflix like a champ. And in actuality, even though I'm a hardcore gamer, the only thing I've replaced in my PC in years is the GPU. Nothing else needs to be upgraded.[/citation]
QFT!! Freakin heck, how could the author of the article miss this blindingly obvious fact! I can remember back in the day, that my PC NEVER felt fast enough, I was always itching for more speed, faster loading times etc. When the upgrades did come (e.g. 486SX to Cyrix 6x86-P166... who remembers those!?), it was amazing, you just wanted to try running everything to see the speed improvements... Word, Excel, IE, Control Panel loading, heck you'd even fire up MSPaint and see if it performed better! The days of hardware breathlessly running afte software advancements are long gone, as the current generation of hardware (even previous generation), has become so powerful that there are really only a handful of applications that would be relevant to a power everyday user (most notably, gaming, video conversion, 3D modelling etc). But all those uses are very single task centric; if it were only for general computing, email, internet, office etc, I would probably only need to upgrade my current rig in around 10 years (moving parts replacements aside). I'm a bit of a slave to PC gaming, so my upgrade cycle runs around every 4 to 5 years, and even there the cycle has gotten longer and longer! I used to start drooling after like 18 months, wishing for the new GPU hardware, but with consoles beating innovation back so successfully, I can see my Nvidia 560ti going strong for many years to come!