[jbcohen]

Certainly the price reductions in the newer technology makes it easier to justify the upgrades.

However I had an incident a few years ago where keeping computers till they break would be a very silly idea - I had a four year old desktop PC from emachines and the hard drive controller simply could not keep up. Many times I would have to stop doing what I was doing to give the hard drive controller some time to get caught up and a few times I would stop what I was doing and go upstairs for dinner and come back in a half hour and maybe the controller had caught up. The hard drive controller is the component in your PC that actually spins the hard drive and in my case the controller was so old that it could not keep pace with the demans put on it. I replaced the PC and the new one, with a new controller, could easily keep up with the software. So that's one incident where replacement when it breaks does not make sense, the older technology could no longer do the job.

However I am getting off the subject here, my kindle three by no means is in the same boat as the old emachine was, the software has some problem but nothing that I can't live with. Tube moneky does have a point about the increased battery life and the $49 price tag lowers the boundry a bit. As the price of the electronics goes higher I require more to compensate me for the cost, conversly as the price goes down I don't need as much compensation as I would at the higher price. JS Widen's point about the pearl screens is another of what I am talking about, that's a technological change but still is that enough compensation for the price tag? I am thinking of the touch with the front light, thats two technolgical jumps there, but for how much $? $100 for the touch, I don't know if thats enough compensation for the dollars.