"...a 39 percent plunge in Windows-related license revenues paid by PC makers."

This might explain why Windows 11 is requiring that we replace all the corporate users computers ... in the early days (Windows XP) all the computer manufacturers were complaining that people were not buying new computers - nowadays Microsoft makes money by creating a situation that makes users to buy new computers. If the income level stays down then will be be seeing Windows 12 soon?

There's an easy solution to that - don't run Windows. My home laptop is from 2014-ish, and was definitely not top-of-the-line when it was new. Got it secondhand myself; it was too slow for the previous owner, but when running Ubuntu it's pretty reasonable for normal office work and web surfing.

Of course, most corporations (including my employer) are so deeply steeped in Microsoft Everything that they can't envision using anything else, even if it's cheaper, faster, and more secure.

Of course, most corporations (including my employer) are so deeply steeped in Microsoft Everything that they can't envision using anything else, even if it's cheaper, faster, and more secure.

I take it that you included the cost of replacing all of the document management systems used, as well as the case management system because they require office running on windows when you allowed for it being "cheaper"?

What I might run at home myself might not be suitable for my workplace.

"...Of course, most corporations (including my employer) are so deeply steeped in Microsoft Everything that they can't envision using anything else, even if it's cheaper, faster, and more secure..."

This is all too often the refrain from non-Windows users.

It isn't cheaper when you factor in training, migrations from current systems and support + support contracts (with the latter often being a significant cost even if the only perceivable benefit is having someone to escalate to/shout at).

Then there is the oft-overlooked aspect that many many businesses run on Excel. They have third party plugins from very large vendors (SAP, being one example) that they need to do day-to-day business. And there are simply no alternatives to these in the OSS market.

Like it or not, the corporate world almost entirely relies on the Microsoft stack. Show me an open source equivalent of Exchange - not the email component but things like calendars etc, that can be synched/shared across devices etc. (Not saying they aren't out there - asking the question).

The simple fact is that if it really were cheaper and quick-and-easy to do, an awful lot of places would've done it.

Companies have been sweating assets for longer now for years. 2015+ era hardware is perfectly capable of running Windows (notwithstanding the artificial hardware requirements baked in by MS) - throw in an SSD on the ones with spinning rust + maybe an extra bit of RAM where needed and the difference is night and day for a fraction of the price of a new machine.

Add to that that an awful lot of companies and people purchased new machines at the start/early days of lockdown and they are still going strong, why would they rush off to buy new?

There are more than a few examples of organisations that have tried to switch because of some idealist tech-bore has climbed enough rungs to instigate the idea. It's not too long before they abandon the project or switch back.

The anti-windows gaslighting attempts on Register comments are at least quite amusing though.

I have WIndows 11 Pro on a Dell M6800 that's at least nine years old. I am also running 11 Pro on a Ryzen 7 1700 which is about the same age, in that case I had to add the TPM to the GigaByte motherboard, which was hard to find. So no, Windows 11 doesn't require you to change all the systems.

Why would techies by new PCs if the new is the same as the old?

I mean Intel has been releasing "new" CPUs for years and people got wise.

Just so that your Excel loads 0.01s quicker?

If you want people buy new PCs, just make something worthy of buying. It's not a rocket science?

Your old computer used binary with only 1 and 0, Windows 11 will use New Binary (tm) with 1, 0 and peppermint.

Nah, MS Windows does not require a quantum computer -- yet!

Techies also buy more expensive gear, and can do upgrades themselves. The cheapest SKUs are often yesteryear (or several) old.

Techies buy new gear for work and "recycle" the old gear for themselves.

Techies buy 3 year old off-lease kit and install Linux

I haven't bought a "new" system for myself since college

I've not had cause to replace my regular daily driver machine in at least 5 years. It's fine . It does everything it did back then and there have been no real improvements in hardware that would warrant it. Screen is a perfectly acceptable 15" at 1080p affair, and my eyesight really isn't good enough for it to be worth getting a 4K one. Storage is a respectable 512G of NVME making it more than large enough and fast enough. I did put another 16G of ram in it last year to take it up to 32 - but that was only so I could play Cities Skylines on it with more mods loaded - it wasn't really necessary .

I'm not seeing anything compelling in new desktop or laptop offerings at the moment. GPUs continue to march on, but outside of gaming who cares, ML guys? Most people are not doing ML, and the ones that are are more likely to be interested in big server-grade stuff. We've really not had a compelling "Get a new machine this is so much better!" in years, and outside of gaming even the incremental improvements have been largely unnecessary for daily "browse the web" "watch netflix" "send emails" type tasks.

To be honest, the only upgrade I'm looking for in the nearish future is some faster drives - possible silicon - for the file server.

Like you I replace my daily driver only when it can't cope with what I need it for - I'm not a gamer - and the biggest impact this will have on me is that my usual strategy of purchasing an ex-manager's overspecced laptop when the company upgrades will have to wait a year or two before they appear on ebay. But as that's something that happens only every four or five years, I'm not worried. And obviously, nor am I in the immediate market for something shiny and new.

My daily driver is four-five years old, and to be honest I could happily still be using the *previous* machine, never mind this one. Even my battery's still good, due to careful charge control, it's still at 83% of design capacity. The only reason I might upgrade is I'm learning CUDA, and support for my GPU is due to be dropped in a coming version.

Totally with you. My machine is a mid 2014 MacBook Pro, upgraded to 1 TB and with a newish battery. Upgrading would save me a couple of 100g, but I would loose the SD card slot.

Speed? Don’t think I would notice.

To be fair, for the. new M1 MacBook Pro is quicker, but more importantly cooler and lasts much longer on battery than the previous Intel based MacBook Pro it replaced. I don't think I know what the fan sounds like on this thing.

And worry not: the SD slot is back on the Arm MB Pros at least!

I ran a 2013 Macbook pro from new for about 7 years. Then it got a minor bump to a 2015 with 2TB stick. Couldn't go any newer because of butterfly-gate. End of last year upgraded to a 2020 *Air*. Nice wee machine, does more than I need it to. So that's basically 2 computers in a decade, and the most recent one is down a level in the pecking order. Same with phones, my iphone 6 went for about 5 years before being passed down to my son who ran it for another 3 years.

Don't look to me for revenue growth.

The only possible reason for upgrading is power efficiency. But that's not really Intel's thing. I used to always have an EOL Sun server or 2 whirring away in the garage for email and DNS but the constant power draw would be painful nowadays.

outside of gaming even the incremental improvements have been largely unnecessary

I do play games, and the incremental improvements have been largely unnecessary. (mostly courtesy of most games being designed for every gaming platform, so they have to work on the worst console meaning that as long as you have greater performance than the worst mainstream console then your not going to run into performance problems)

The (non work) system I use most is a fanless Wyse 5070 system running FreeBSD - it's perfectly viable for web browsing, Libre Office, Youtube, VS Code and running some (very old) games. 20GB RAM and 1TB. Cost : under 200 quid [1].

My main system is a top end system for 2013, partly new, partly second hand (Dual E5 2667v2, 64GB RAM, Vega 56) which generally gets used for gaming and was intended for virtualisation. The only reason I'm considering another system is because I'm getting back into VR, I don't think it'll run the latest games, and I want a dedicated system rather than running cables into another room as I am currently (Rift CV1. Yes, I know Airplay on a Quest 2 is an option).

I also have a Core2Quad system that was used for Blurays and Britbox. However, a PS3 now handles Blurays without hassle, and since I upgraded my FireTV to a second generation box the Britbox app now works - so I don't need a power guzzling PC on.

[1] Upgrade the BIOS before using larger memory modules otherwise it won't work.

As others have pointed out, new PCs offer no practical performance or functional improvement for my uses. Indeed, different PSUs, connectors and interfaces on new Macs will require a significant spend on peripherals and adapters when I eventually upgrade, so I'll be putting it off as long as possible. Phones are just getting stupidly big for no added benefit (for me) and, fingers crossed, I'll be hanging on to my current one for a few years yet until the security upgrades stop.

I can only assume that device makers will now invent ways to make their equipment stop working after a couple of years.

As far as portable devices, it's already been invented and it's called a battery :/

What annoys me the most is that low-mid specs computers have stagnated in the last 13 or so years. The only thing new is the processor, but RAM and storage offered are more or less the same, for the same price: Some weak Celeron or low end i3, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD or 500GB HDD.

To me, the machine you describe is not low-mid...it's just low.

Up it to 8 GB RAM, exclude celeron, spec at least 256GB SSD, I'd call that low-mid spec.

I had a little Dell system as a media PC and that was impossible to update for Windows 11, so I swapped it for my main machine which was a six year old Ryzen 7 1700. I updated that old machine to Windows 11 Pro, which required adding a TPM to the Gigabyte motherboard.

I am not updating my 2014 Dell M6800 laptop because that installed Windows 11 Pro quite happily and is still fast enough.

That's the thing with most of these machines, I use at work and home, they are fast enough. My work laptop gets changed every three years, but my other assets, the lab machines, they soldier on for at least ten years. We mostly use them as serial terminals into embedded hardware. So a twenty year old machine would do if we could get the updates for security requirements. We only keep the FPGA development and science machines up to date, because those take significant time to run their compilations and to execute their models. I don't need a 13th generation processor to run Word, Outlook, and MobaXterm.

Similar story here. The machine at work has to compile so I'm happy for them to upgrade that thing whenever possible. However, I connect to it with a Sandy Bridge CPU (motherboard from a jukebox unusually). I also have a passively cooled Zima board in the workshop, which is perfectly fine for anything I need to do down there. The only PC I personally keep with decent hardware is my main desktop, and that's only because I use it for games (and sometimes a graphics development side-project).