“However, smartphones become obsolete a lot quicker than PCs, and thus, people might end up purchasing 2 or 3 or more smartphones, as opposed to just a single PC that lasts 5 or more years, and for which the OS gets support for 10 years or more.“
PCs hang around a lot longer than that. The computer I am using is 13 years old and is still running XP. It’s a dual core. Only had to reinstall XP once back about six years ago. So this installation is pushing 7 years old without reinstall.
The only problem I have seen so far is it’s stuck at IE8. firefox and chrome run perfectly fine.
It is still powerful enough to run win 8 if I wanted to install it. That is a testament to the staying power of PCs in the field. It’s 13 years old and can still run the most modern OS available. That is also partially caused by the fact that resource requirements for desktop operating systems has kind of plateaued for a while now.
I have the license and installation disk for win 7 but I have never seen a reason to upgrade.
I also have a computer on the work bench in the back of the house that I still regularly use that is still running Windows ME. It’s 20 years old. I use it for basic dos/win electronics related programs. I use it to browse the web once in a while, but I am stuck with using the Opera browser because it’s the most recent browser that supported ME.
I have one computer under the workbench that is around 25 years old. It’s set up for win 3.11. I sometime fire it up and surf the web with IE5 just for grins and giggles. It makes the sys admins scratch their head when they see a win 3.11 user agent string in their log files.
I still utilize some 486DX4-120 machines for certain dedicated tasks and files, some Pentium machines for other slightly more intensive tasks, and have recently dropped down as far as the 98SE OS on certain machines for certain programs that simply do not work at all well on the newer machines.
Linux has been a blessing in this regard, and working with it for so many years has taught that for many projects, working with an OS that only requires about 8MB per X-window session allows quite a lot of processing to occur.
Heck, I may someday even see if I still have some of those 8086 and 286 machines are still functional after all this time, lol! After all, how much processing power do you REALLY need to type words on the screen and save them to a text file, and then perhaps; upload them to be read on the net or as an email?