I go back to the early days of the PC revolution. Back then, the machine you wanted always cost about $3000 (in 1980s dollars!), and you really needed to upgrade about every 3 years.
Today you can get an awesome PC for $2000 that will last 4-5 years.
I figure a $1k smartphone that I make last 4 years is pretty cheap.
I still have my 2010 MacBook, I upgraded the hard drive and memory, and it still runs fast, the only drawback is I can no long upgrade the OS, but really, I don’t need it for much more than web browsing.
Dude, if you're spending $2K on a PC, it will last for a decade. I built a new desktop last year, and spent about $1500 to get a serious upgrade (16 freaking cores!). I was willing to spend the money, because I really do expect it to last for 10 years. My last one was about 9 years old before I finally bit the bullet and built my new desktop.
And that was for a cheap PC. Me and my friends were buying machines costing $3000 to $8000 in the early 1980s, that quickly became obsolete. I spent $3000 on a PC that was considered fast at the time, 6MHz with a speed option to 8MHz. Within two years it was junk. Sigh... I appreciate the relative cheap prices now that are under $3000 but thousands of times more powerful .