Upgrade fatigue?

[twowheels]

Originally Posted by Freeshadow

Back in the 386/486 time hardware changes mattered in terms of functionality. There were new things coming out which factually needed more computing power in terms of number crunching capabilities. Nowdays even the eldest computer an average user might still have up running would be still enough in terms of power to get stuff done without a "set it up and return after lunch" scenario. So they stuff the new gui and os versions with useless optical frills to make them waste computing power on.

Hrm... maybe I'm sitting here waiting 20 minutes for this distributed computing job that is currently running on 72 CPUs for a total of 190 GHz of processing power for no reason. Maybe I should downgrade! Maybe that computing task that I started at 11:30 am which finished at 5:30 pm, also distributed to about 70 CPUs was also slow because I have "too fast" computers.

[voracious71]

I finally decided to get off of the upgrade merry go round. I'm partly glad Apple did this because it snapped me back to reality. As much as I love gadgets, I will not upgrade something that works fine and that I've only had for 7 months. Especially the iPad, which is not cheap. The nonsense with the iPhone 5 showing up chipped and scratched out of the box influenced me too.

[Freeshadow]

Originally Posted by twowheels

Hrm... maybe I'm sitting here waiting 20 minutes for this distributed computing job that is currently running on 72 CPUs for a total of 190 GHz of processing power for no reason. Maybe I should downgrade! Maybe that computing task that I started at 11:30 am which finished at 5:30 pm, also distributed to about 70 CPUs was also slow because I have "too fast" computers.

Ok, now go and tell me, that it was an "average user" case of use .
Honestly the last time I've seen a mass case of increased need of computing power among average users was mp3 becoming popular.
The last time I experienced such a need in a way which could be expected to happen among non-techies was compressing my ScummVM playable game data.

[vxf]

Long live progress.
It does not make my gadget any worse - so why would I care?

The only instance of new models being released too soon is when the producer stops supporting the old one. SONY and its readers is a case in point. They really have been not-fixing problems with current models (and I mean, not even simple firmware fixes, at times, of obvious problems) while releasing new ones. That's just not right.

But I just bought an iPad3 last spring. I had an iPad1 and I used it until the touchscreen died on me. At that point, I jumped and bought the 3. But I was never tempted to upgrade.
Yet, this year is different. I have lots of PDF files of whole textbooks and it really bugs me at times how slow my iPad 3 is at scrolling through them. I wonder if the new processor would make a difference. If so, I might talk to my IT department and see if I can justify the expense to them

[JoHunt]

Originally Posted by voracious71

I finally decided to get off of the upgrade merry go round. I'm partly glad Apple did this because it snapped me back to reality. As much as I love gadgets, I will not upgrade something that works fine and that I've only had for 7 months. Especially the iPad, which is not cheap.

This is exactly what happened to me. The only gadget I will now update yearly is my ereader - my iPad 3 has to stop working before I will even consider getting a new one.

[ProfCrash]

Heck, the DXG stopped receiving firmware fixes and improvements about three months after it was released.