> The trend seems to be that we get only a little bit of extra utility out of a lot of extra hardware performance.

"hardware giveth, and software taketh away"

Nice! Another (slightly more pessimistic) one is "Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster".

Andy Giveth, Bill Taketh

Andy Grove and Bill gates

Is that the case for our highly centralized clouds? No one's putting a liquid nitrogen cooled desktop in their office so this type of hardware would be owned by companies who are financially incentivized to drive down the overhead costs of commoditized functionality like networking, data replication and storage, etc. leaving just inefficient developer logic which I assume is high value enough to justify it.

It's quite common in the cloud industry to trade hardware for shorter development cycle these days too. I think that's because there is still very high growth in the sector and companies all want to be the first offering feature X. As cloud services become more mature I expect people will be more cost sensitive. Though when that will happen I cannot say.

I think it's largely because deceloper time is so expensive. Hardware seems cheap in comparison in many contexts.

I'm sure a lot of developers upgrade their PCs (they were called workstations at a time) because of material problems - keyboards getting mechanically worse, and laptops can't easily get keyboard fixed, screens getting dead pixels, sockets getting loose, hard-to-find batteries getting less charge, and maybe some electronics degradation.

Another reason is upgrades to software, which maintain general bloat, and which is hard to control; new hardware is easier. That's however is very noticeable.

On top of that, just "better" hardware - say, in a decade one can have significantly better screen, more cores and memory, faster storage; makes easier for large software tasks (video transcoding, big rebuilds of whole toolchains and apps, compute-hungry apps like ML...)

>laptops can't easily get keyboard fixed

This is a frustrating part of recent laptops, but it doesn't have to be this way - my X230's keyboard is removable with a few screws.

So by dropping support for old CPUs, the Linux kernel burns a bridge. That conversation makes more sense now.

If the developer doesn't notice the performance issues, maybe they move on to the next thing more quickly and get more done overall?

I'm not sure if that's the case, but it may be we aren't looking for utility in the right places.