I kind of disagree. At this point Flash really hasn’t done anything for 6 years except for upgrade small bits here and there, heck they still haven’t released a 64bit version for Vista or Windows 7. On another note CPU technology is starting to get stale a bit. While the Phenom II and C2D offer a fairly decent boost in performance in some areas, in others like internet browsing they offer no real boost to old first gen dual cores like the Athlon64 Dual Cores or even the single core Athlon 64. Which I can personally attest too, having 3 different generation cpu’s at my house. One is the internet machine which has the 5 year old Athlon 64, another a newer Phenom 4 core and another(my laptop) has a C2D and for internet use and word documents I notice no real difference in usage, at times even my single core actually outperforms both because I have more ram(4GB) than the other two which has three. Now if we are talking databases like Access or games, the newer the better, especially with the very large databases, which would want a fast cpu to peruse very large db’s) or newer games which of course rely on better hardware all around.
Flash itself hasn’t gotten any beefier, but site designers feel more and more free to use bigger Flash movies. Auto-loading movies are a lot more common than they used to be, for one thing. One helpful trend is that as DHTML has gotten better, a lot of designers who actually have a clue have used it instead, which has slowed down processor demands, but overloaded sites — what a friend of mine calls “Flash-f-—ed” — are still all too common, and getting more bloated.
Word processing apps also get more bloated with each revision, and while most of the new features don’t mean squat to most users, running a few versions behind is problematic if you need to exchange files with others.