>>Unless we have developed Star Wars holograms for common use, computers are pretty much topping out on anything that we need to do with them.
I mostly agree with this - I used to upgrade my machine every 18-24 months for most of my career, and saw huge gains in performance each time I did, that made it worth it - now for 99% of what I do, I don’t even notice any improvement in my day-to-day experience as a software developer.
MY employer sent me a brand new top-of-the-line laptop a few months ago, to replace my three year old model (I didn’t even request it), and it sat unopened on my desk for 3 months before I finally bothered to set it up knowing it would function exactly as my old one.
I still use a 2010 Macbook, and it’s fine, performance wise.
>>MY employer sent me a brand new top-of-the-line laptop a few months ago, to replace my three year old model (I didn’t even request it), and it sat unopened on my desk for 3 months before I finally bothered to set it up knowing it would function exactly as my old one.<<
Your company didn’t send you a new laptop because they want to give you a faster computer. They sent you one because disk drives, even solid-state drives, tend to start failing after 3-5 years.
How would you be affected if your laptop’s disk died right now, taking your data with it? (I hope you back up important work to your company’s network)
https://www.newegg.com/insider/how-long-do-hard-drives-and-ssds-last/
The i7-2600k with 32 GB RAM that I built for my personal use in Sept 2013 is still running today. I built a new box with an i9-10850K with 64 GB RAM, 2 x 1 TB nVME disk, water cooled with a 360 mm radiator. I don't bother with fancy graphics cards, but I may cave to put an nVidia card in the box for access to a GPU for TensorFlow AI/ML engines.