In that regard, I really don't understand what's happening with smartphones/tablets that suddenly makes them incapable of performing the same tasks, at the same performance, they always did. It's not like I'm suddenly trying to use some performance hungry app/game I never used before, it's the same apps I always use, but they simply perform worse.

If it wasn't for this simple fact I'd probably be still on my iPhone 4s, but after a while, that became even too slow for simple stuff like using WhatsApp. It can't be that the apps become that much more demanding, WhatsApp still did what it always does: Sending and receiving messages, so I really don't understand where that extra demand for performance comes from which suddenly turns whole generations of portable hardware into fancier paper weights.

Plus factor in that the app frameworks themselves get more complex, and the current trend of using-browser-as-frontend (plus all the bloat of the web) and one can see how old devices don't cut it as much. And since each iteration gets bigger, the longer an OEM maintains support the worse it performs.

It would be interesting to compare how well old devices function by how soon OS support is cut -- I'd bet that the earlier a given device is left behind, the better it ends up running.

Competition, that’s what happening.

On PCs we had no competition for many years, that’s why performance has stalled. For example, cpubenchmark.net gives 8739 points to i7-2700K from 2011, and 12078 points to i7-7700K from 2016. Very modest 38% improvement in 5 years and 5 generations of CPUs. Same 4 cores/8 threads, same 8MB cache.

You think WhatsApp of today is the exact same app or backend server logic from a year or two ago?

Any online service is constantly adding functionality on the server side even if the app code is constant ( given its a mobile app this is simply unlikely)

Unless you have an app that's not been upgraded and running in offline mode it's definitely not doing the same thing as a year ago.

To me as a user, it does exactly the very, mundane, same thing it always did: Sending and receiving messages. It's not like WhatsApp now has become an awesome 4k video player, it still does the very same thing it always did.

In that regard, "Added functionality on the server side" does literally nothing for me except make the usability worse by making my client perform worse, so what's in it for me except being forced into buying new hardware? As far as I can tell: Nothing at all.

Tell someone around 2000 that a 7ish year old PC would be adequate and you'd get laughed at. 1993 to 2000, for instance: You'd be comparing a Pentium at 60Mhz (some quick googling says 60Mhz was first hit this year) on the high end to a 1Ghz Athlon. Probably >20x real performance improvement (the clock alone is 16.7x).

Mobile devices will catch up and stagnate too, sadly.

Then somewhere around when people started to expect Windows on a computer the lifespans got quite a bit shorter, and that seemed to stick into the late 00s. And it's swung back the other direction now... my late 2011 MacBook Pro is good with current Mac OS or current Windows 10 installations, and is only being retired because its soldered-on discrete GPU has started to flake in a way that makes it unusable. (And a replacement motherboard would be stupid expensive.)

The advent of hard disks, and installable OS environments changed the model. Outside of zOS, and maybe IBMi, there simply aren't any OSs that actually have provided a fairly stable OS API over time. Even windows has decided they don't care about backwards compatibility despite the fact that for most purposes the core win32 API present in win2k provides basically everything needed to host the vast majority of modern applications. Games might be the exception but people forget the directX was an install-able component until MS decided to tie to to the OS with vista).

I can run 25-year-old Windows 3.1 applications on a 32-bit Windows 10 box and they work correctly. If I have upgraded to 64-bit, I am merely constrained to 22-year-old Windows 95 applications.

"Mobile devices will catch up and stagnate too, sadly."

Uh, if they catch up to my point, then they will still be useful at 5 - 7 years, thus the opposite of stagnant.

I believe the GP meant that the rapid progress of feature improvement will stagnate, which means older devices won't 'age' as quickly.

Plenty of people used 7-year-old computers in 2000.

My grandpa never got a smart phone. But he was never more than 5 years behind in Home computing well into his 80s.

Gadget nerds have criteria for computers which are not necessarily related to predictability, sturdiness, or fitness for a particular narrow purpose. Instead there is a mix of excitement about technology qua technology, new toys to experiment with, status signaling, etc., in addition to functional improvements for doing real work.

Not everyone shares a gadget nerd’s sensibilities. It’s fine for people to be happy watching TV on a 18" CRT, listening to music on a cassette player, reading paper books instead of a screen, rolling down their car windows with a little crank, playing card games instead of VR games, etc.

1: https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_classic/specs/mac_se....

Fixed that for you. Remember that every time you experience an unresponsive GUI anywhere, and that's the easy case.

Beyond that, parallelization is generally not easy.

E.g. Qualcomm SDM845 has 8 cores in total, 4 faster ones that are only used rarely, and 4 power efficient ones.

Also they offload increasing amount of work from less power efficient general-purpose CPUs to other on-chip hardware, DSPs (for many years), and now GPUs (marketing folks call them neural engines or AI chips).

The death of older mobile hardware is at least somewhat exaggerated.