But like weed species, they have limited lifetimes. They’re depending on r-selection, still. Not K-selection, which is what you want. I expect r-selection is part of the marketing culture surrounding all this tech.

And now I think about it, I wonder if maybe it works the other way around: you can’t “market” something that’s long-lived, especially something you interact with communicatively and increasingly like a peer (unlike your pen or your watch).

I think it’s time for a new shade tree in the back yard. That cow is looking kindof slow compared to these new cows they have, maybe we should replace it. I was thinking of a new left hand; what do you think of yours?

That’ll be the real Andy Clark moment, by the way. And the counterpoint to the one you’re waiting for.

Apart from that, I think we’ll see a lot more throwing away of the various hacks and optimization that let us do what we wanted on lesser hardware. Smooth video playback is a solved problem? Let’s funnel low-quality video through a proprietary browser plugin that chews so much CPU that you can’t watch it even in a tiny window without skipping and juddering! Mmm, Flash. You make me party like it’s 1999. Of course, using something like youtube-dl and playing the video with a dedicated player works fine. Perhaps the Flash folks are part of a massive conspiracy to keep us juicing up our hardware, eh?

I do think that some components can’t be reasonably manufactured to last for fifteen years of continuous use, like power supplies and hard drives, but that’s more of a corner case.

And if you’d like to consider a field moving from a tradition of finely-manufactured heirloom objects that you could leave to your grandkids, to the upgrade treadmill of the eighteen-month semiconductor manufacturing cycle, consider photography. Yes, the marginal cost of a digital photo is nil, but instead of buying new film, you have to buy a new camera every year or two. People who work in the field have written on this.

I have a (roughly?) five year old DSLR, and I can’t tell if it feels ancient because I’m used to electronics aging like that, or because it was one of the first non-professional (i.e., affordable by mere mortals) models. If I could afford it, I’d have probably bought a new one by now.

Why haven’t I upgraded before? Because the AMD system met my needs for that long. I do mostly C development, and it’s been a good workhorse for all that time. And now that computers have pretty much settled down, my new machine should be good for at least a decade if not more.

I also still use my Apple MessagePad 2100 every day. It’s an extremely reliable and well-featured PDA and I see no need to replace it.

Finally we have an old P4 PC running XP. It’s real slow but the kids use it for homework and web browsing and it’ll stay for while yet.

So I agree, we may have reached that sweet spot already.

I have several PCs around the house in daily use that are at least 8 years old. Drives may have been upgraded and RAM added here and there, but essentially they’re still the same. Some run Win2K (there’s something that hit a sweet spot and only got worse thereafter) while others run up-to-date Ubuntu or Debian. Whichever, they’re perfectly usable for web browsing, document editing, email, and even development.

I’m not claiming my daily workhorse laptop is quite such an antique, but it must be a couple of years old and I have no urge to upgrade it yet.