The headline + intro is written to infuriate. If you respond to that and not the article you're taking the bait.
The main topic the article is talking about is a drag on business efficiency from a slower upgrade cycle and running workloads less efficiently on old equipment.
>Small businesses, in particular, lose valuable hours each year due to lagging systems, creating what economists call a ‘productivity drag,’” Benabess said. On a national scale, this translates to billions of dollars in lost output and reduced innovation. “While keeping devices longer may seem financially or environmentally responsible, the hidden cost is a quieter erosion of economic dynamism and competitiveness,” she added.
Of course it's on CNBC for writing the article this was. It likely never would have made it here without that spin however. State of the media environment.
The problem is, it's never not been this way. That's why it's called an "upgrade treadmill." The treadmill never stops accelerating no matter how many times we redouble our efforts to catch up. New devices with higher processing power are inevitably filled with bloated apps that consume all that productivity. Without some kind of regulating force preventing app developers from being inefficient, this will never stop.
Not the whole story. As an example I just got a new scanner. It's almost twice as fast as the ten year old scanner it replaced.
Or I got a computer with a larger hard drive. Less mental overhead in managing files.
I loaded my macbook pro from 2015 recently and it runs great (though past security updates). But the fans spin, as they did in 2015 as well. Newer Apple Silicon blow it out of the water, including on say video editing or other areas where bloat isn't the issue.
There's a lot of genuine technical improvements in ten years that aren't just keeping up with bloat. These are prosumer use cases above but the same sort of thing applies to corporate systems.
The main topic the article is talking about is a drag on business efficiency from a slower upgrade cycle and running workloads less efficiently on old equipment.
>Small businesses, in particular, lose valuable hours each year due to lagging systems, creating what economists call a ‘productivity drag,’” Benabess said. On a national scale, this translates to billions of dollars in lost output and reduced innovation. “While keeping devices longer may seem financially or environmentally responsible, the hidden cost is a quieter erosion of economic dynamism and competitiveness,” she added.
Of course it's on CNBC for writing the article this was. It likely never would have made it here without that spin however. State of the media environment.