"PCs became “good enough”, elongating the upgrade cycle"
This is really visible for me. I had historically owned relatively recent hardware. No longer. My various PC's are all 4th, 5th, and 6th gen Intel. I do not a lot, but a non-trivial amount of software development, use a fair amount of native apps, etc. In other words, not just "surfing the web". And the performance is fine/acceptable. I care much more about 16GB of memory and an SSD than I do about the CPU or even the GPU.
I don't know, however, how common that is. I'm sure there are a lot of people for whom recent hardware still matters a lot.
This is really visible for me. I had historically owned relatively recent hardware. No longer. My various PC's are all 4th, 5th, and 6th gen Intel. I do not a lot, but a non-trivial amount of software development, use a fair amount of native apps, etc. In other words, not just "surfing the web". And the performance is fine/acceptable. I care much more about 16GB of memory and an SSD than I do about the CPU or even the GPU.
I don't know, however, how common that is. I'm sure there are a lot of people for whom recent hardware still matters a lot.