It depends on the use case, really. Outside of gaming, I've not felt the need to upgrade for raw performance reasons since ~2012. That was the year I bought by

It depends on the use case, really. Outside of gaming, I've not felt the need to upgrade for raw performance reasons since ~2012. That was the year I bought by first MacBook Pro. That's not to say that "Mac" was the turning point - that MBP was just the first laptop I've owned where the build quality was sufficient that it wasn't the limiting factor for device longevity. That particular laptop lasted me until late 2016, when my youngest daughter spilled a full glass of milk onto the keyboard. The one I bought to replace it was thinner and lighter, but only enough "faster" to be barely noticeable. Most of my personal and professional computer use relates to development. There's a point where want I'm working on grow to be complex enough that _no_ laptop is going to be sufficient, and I switch to using some sort of hosted runtime. A powerful desktop would push that point a bit further, but again, not enough to be worth the added expense and inconvenience. I use CLI tools 90% of the time or more; the only real use I have for a GUI is a web browser. As a result, I've used some pretty limited environments productively and without real issues - I used a Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB) at home for a few months between "real computers" a couple of years ago, and went without a laptop for almost a year before that. I used an iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard and a remote developement environment (a Digital Ocean droplet running ArchLinux, using Blink+MOSH) and Safari was fine for checking incremental progress. Lately I've become more active with my photography and have begun doing some videography as well with various drones. The M1 Macs are substantially better for that kind of work, but I don't see myself falling back into a frequent upgrade cycle. TL;DR: My upgrade cycle doubled from ~12-18 months to 3+ years in ~2012 for general computing.