There are
over a billion PCs in use today that are more than three years old (according to Intel, I've not personally counted them, but I assume they have their finger on the pulse), and around half of those it is claimed are four to five years old. While that sounds like a massive opportunity for the OEMs to cash in on an upgrade wave, the truth is that there's little reason for people to spend the money to replace a working PC.
There's a dirty little secret that PC makers don't want you to know, and it's this - take a middle-of-the-road PC from three years ago and put it next to a brand new middle-of-the-road PC and you'll be hard-pressed to see any difference.
Sure, on paper it's going to be advertised as being faster, and benchmark tests will support this, but in the real world - assuming that the old one isn't all kludged up and ailing - you're just not going to see much difference. Sure, there might be a slightly faster boot up time, or it might be a little snappier, but most of the gains that new PC owners see are nothing more than
confirmation bias. Sure, if you go to the performance end of the scale then things are different, but you average home or office PC spends most of their time running a web browser or a word processor application.
