The era of "good enough" computing

So we shouldn't have been surprised when Windows 7 came along, bringing all that better performance on the same hardware. There wasn't a reason to buy a new PC for a new Windows any more.

We could just buy a cheap upgrade and get more life from our PCs. My Vista-era desktop systems got a performance bump because the software got better, taking advantage of the older hardware. I didn't need new PCs, I didn't even need a new graphics card.

I only bought my current PC last year because a hardware failure fried the Vista machine's motherboard. If I hadn't had a hardware failure I suspect I'd still be using that PC today.

The new machine has the same hard disks, even the same graphics card, using the same multi-monitor setup as that original Vista-era machine. It wasn't any faster, but it got another performance bump when I upgraded it to Windows 8 last summer. We even saw significant improvements on XP-era test hardware.

So yes, that means Windows 8 is one thing that's to blame for a slow-down in PC sales. You don't need a new PC to see a benefit from it, especially when you're getting a 10 percent speed bump over Windows 7 running on Vista-era hardware, and an extra hour or so battery life on a three year old laptop.

A cheap upgrade download and your old PC gets a new lease of life. Why do you need to spend several hundred pounds or dollars for extra performance when it comes with an operating system upgrade for a fraction of the cost?

So if our software gets better on older hardware, so what about all that new hardware?

First we need to look at the trends that drive the PC industry. Like all consumer industries it has to respond to customer needs, and those customer demands have changed over the last couple of decades; changes that are having a significant impact on more than just the PC market.

Fed up with planned obsolescence, we now demand things that last. How long did you keep your last washing machine, your vacuum cleaner, your last car?

Devices may not be user serviceable, but they just don't break the way they used to. Our dishwasher has moved house with us more than once, as has our washing machine. My car is thirteen years old, and still gets great mileage. Why would I need to change them?

The fact that today's software gets better performance out of yesterday's hardware can't be ignored. It's changing more than the PC industry – just look at Ford's Sync strategy for in-car entertainment.

Why rely on fixed car hardware that'll be with the driver for most of a decade, if you can have an API and an app ecosystem? Each time Pandora upgrades on my phone I get an improved experience, and Ford hasn't had to change my car.

That trend accounts for one aspect of the longevity of PCs. They've stopped breaking, because we don't want PCs that break. But there's another aspect, the Moore's Law elephant in the room.

A few years back PCs stopped getting faster. They just got more cores. As transistor density increased, the faster processors got, the hotter they got. And the hotter they got, the greater the risk of quantum instabilities in the billions of transistors that new processes were capable of making.