If they bought a “budget conscious” PC, what are the odds that they’ll have hit the limits of their RAM but not any other component? If they bought a cheap laptop, for example, what are the odds that the hardware isn’t starting to fail? If it’s a desktop, what are the odds that by the time they need a new CPU a worthwhile upgrade will still be socket-compatible? Usually the budget options are already well into the service lifecycle for things like that and at least anecdotally the budget buyers I know buy a new one 1-2 times per decade rather than upgrading anything.
> If they bought a “budget conscious” PC, what are the odds that they’ll have hit the limits of their RAM but not any other component?
20 years ago, a budget-conscious 1.3GHz CPU for $130 was just a binned version of a high-end 1.6GHz $339 CPU. So the budget-conscious CPU would have pretty much the same longevity as a higher-end CPU.
10 years ago, a budget-conscious user could pick up a 4-physical-core ~3GHz CPU for ~$192 (like the i5-4590). Today you'd be due for an upgrade, but it wouldn't be unusably slow. Indeed, Intel are still selling 4-physical-core ~3GHz CPUs to this day, like the i3-14100.
And of course components like sound cards and gigabit ethernet ports don't really 'hit their limits'. You'll probably want to upgrade your wifi, admittedly - but a USB dongle is what, $20?
Yes, but the question was how often you only need one of those. You can toss a slightly better CPU into that socket but how likely is it that you’re limited by only that much? Your memory bus, storage subsystem, etc. won’t get noticeably faster and those are what most people notice - especially when their starting point was low end on the day it was released.
That Wi-Fi dongle is a good example: your $20 dongle is probably a waste of money because it won’t reach the maximum for whatever wifi spec it claims to support and it tends to be the case that cheap hardware does not reach the maximum USB speeds promised so the performance impact is likely to be unnoticeable.
Allow me to rephrase, then. I have personally upgraded PCs many times.
The most common upgrade for me has been adding more disk space. Back in 1995, a 1 Gigabyte hard drive for $250 was just the thing for your new installation of Windows 95.
The second-most-common upgrade is getting an employer-issued machine with a baseline spec and needing it to be a bit beefier. If you're running virtual machines or dealing with large datasets or analysing large heap dumps you might need some extra RAM; if you're doing machine learning you might need more disk space.
The third-most-common upgrade is a better GPU. PCI Express means modern cards will plug into 10-year-old motherboards. Maybe your PC was just short of what you needed for that 4K display, or you'd like to play some newer games.
Of course, if you're informed enough to do this, you're undoubtedly informed enough to know not to expect to upgrade these modern Macs.
Me too, but it’s increasingly uncommon. Going from a 500MB to 1GB drive back in the day was huge but since the late 2000s most normal people I know seem to have plateaued, both because they’re not generating data as fast as storage densities increased and because cloud storage has soaked up a lot of use-cases. Even the gamers I know don’t upgrade as often as they used to.
