The market for PCs has stalled so much that I'm still using a 2015 Dell XPS as my main driver - for comparison, try to imagine using a 1996 Pentium machine as your main driver in 2004.
A new laptop with similar specs to mine would still cost at least $800 today - again, try to imagine a world where a Pentium One lost almost no market value eight years later.
8GB of RAM is still the norm, and today's CPUs have just tiny improvements over those produced 8 years ago.
In the past eight years, technological innovation in the industry has literally plateaued, with everyone going after easier-to-monetize mobile users rather than thinking of those who want a big screen.
And it definitely didn't help that the manufacturer who held a total monopoly on the market (Intel) has been managed in an embarrassing way for the past few years, has missed all the trains, has actively lobbied to keep its dominant position while delivering literally zero added value, and it's now in a state where, despite billions in generous government subsidies, despite a position of total monopoly consolidated over seven decades, despite having hired the most brilliant mind in electronics for decades, its market share is challenged by competitors such as AMD, ARM, RISC-V and Nvidia.
Things have gotten so depressing for this industry that the only way left to boost product sales is to sunset Windows 10. In other words, to force customers to swallow planned obsolescence in order to force them to buy a new computer.
Whoever says that capitalism fosters innovation and competition has clearly no clue of how the world works.
@blacklight
I agree that devices are lasting longer; I call it an improvement. Who wants to spend more? I am happy my computer is useful for 5 or even 10 years.
And yet, your final statement is contradicting your 5th paragraph, where you say competition is challenging and dethroning Intel. How? By innovation.
And if we didn't have a State to be lobbied for handouts, tax-breaks, subsidies and regulation, it would have been harder for the giant corps to hang on to their power.
@niclas both public support and the private market can create a situation where monopolies are consolidated and not incentivised to risk and innovate.
In a purely capitalist market, that happens when a business has reached such a size and market share that the entry barriers to compete with it are just too high for anybody to actually be able to compete with it, and the regulators did nothing to prevent that business from growing so fat.
On the public side, it happens when administrators pick winners instead of will.
Funding one specific company that has "great strategic importance" and is "too big to fail", like Biden did with Intel, is fundamentally wrong.
It would have been much fairer to announce a plan (e.g. "we want to build a factory on American soil that can produce chips at scale with a 3 nm litography process") and then grant the funding to whoever presented the most sensible plan at a public tender, rather than just handing out money to a company that has achieved NOTHING in the past decade. This goes against any idea of meritocracy.
All in all, I'm happy that my 8-year-old laptop is still doing a good job today, but at least I'd expect to have some alternatives on the market today that are much better and would at least make me consider an upgrade.
Instead, most of the laptops on the market today have specs that aren't much different from my laptop, and that's the problem: why would anybody spend $1000 to buy something that is basically a copycat of what they have already?
It eventually becomes a self-fullfilling prophecy: people don't buy new laptops because the old ones are still doing fine and the new ones don't offer many exciting features to justify the investment. As people are less incentivised to buy new product, the revenue stream for these companies dries up as well and they have less money and resources to invest in innovation. As they invest less in innovation, their products become more mediocre and people have even less incentives to upgrade. Until the only way left to push people to buy a new product is through the largely immoral planned obsolescence pattern.