What's interesting is if you extrapolate this out to the future. This would be more accurately stated as "the hardware we were building five or six years ago on

What's interesting is if you extrapolate this out to the future. This would be more accurately stated as "the hardware we were building five or six years ago only needs updating now". Now, there's obviously different needs that drive that, but what worries me is what it means for the PCs built now. It's entirely possible that we've seen the last full refresh of hardware we'll ever see. It's not inconceivable to imagine that today's hardware will now never be less than good enough, unless VR really explodes. And that's far from a given. If a PC five years ago lasted five years, it's quite possible one today might go 10-15 years. At some point, the new box market is going to slow to such a crawl, and be so commoditised that it's not worth anyone's time building new ones at scale. I suspect this is what we're starting to see in the mobile device world too as part of the reason for the slowdown there. Everyone has a smartphone, and mostly now they're good enough. Replacements will increasingly require either massive jumps in some area (battery life most likely), or device failures/damage.