> A cell phone from 2 decades ago is an entirely different product from a cell phone today. That needs to be accounted for. A cell phone indeed, but for person

> A cell phone from 2 decades ago is an entirely different product from a cell phone today. That needs to be accounted for. A cell phone indeed, but for personal computers, the gain we got from the technological advances isn't as clear from a consumer's perspective. Sure there are niche activities like video processing or graphic editing, where the performance improvements allows for things barely imaginable 20 years ago, but for most use case people have, there isn't that many significant difference: - boot time: despite SSD, consumer PC still take minutes to boot when they aren't brand new with a fresh install. - web browsing, not even faster. - Word and Excel, barely changed over the period. - video games: sure they have more realistic graphics, but that doesn't make them more enjoyable otherwise. The average house computer is now a laptop that's permanently plugged to the socket (with a long dead battery) instead of a desktop. It takes less room in the house, but also has a much smaller screen, a worse keyboard and no mouse. Is that a net gain?