I've been using 5+ year old kit at home for a long time. In fact my main PC is about 10 years old right now.
I buy from the local college surplus when they life-cycle their desktops. For what I do at home (browsing, email, youtube, ssh for work) they are more than adequate.
I do as well, but when I built it, I was doing so with the thought that I would have to replace a lot of components every other year. It's a gaming rig that I maxed out - and it's still capable of playing the latest games on maximum settings at 1920x1080. It's not as good at 4k with the latest titles, but that doesn't bother me a lot.
So despite my plan to replace components constantly, I haven't actually had to do it. This has made me realize how little practical value constant upgrades to these components now provides.
Re:The iPad Mystery
by PascLeRasc on Monday May 15, 2017 @10:18AM
(#14341740)
There are definitely some consumer PC's today that will last 10+ years. Every time a new CPU line comes out the benchmarks aren't vastly different from Intel 2500K/2600K. It seems like Ryzen will be a similar "BIFL" processor.
Now that the Moore's curve has started to flatten, I would not be nearly as opposed to a 30 year machine (especially a repairable one) today as I would have been even 5 years ago.
New processors and RAM are not making the previous generation processors obsolete anymore, which leads me to believe that a 30 year computer is now something which could be realistically considered.