I don’t think many consumers with an old PC like actually leave the house they walk from room to room in their home, plugging it in wherever they go or leave it in one place like a desktop. Sure, I could buy a new battery for around $150 to get back to that 2-3 hours, but does that make sense I can spend $399 and get a brand new PC?. I didn’t even want to leave the house with the old notebook and wondered how others do it. In 2008, my PC was advertised to run a little over two hours, but now that that notebook is around 5 years old, I get about 15-30 minutes on a single charge because the battery was just done, out of gas. Now, let’s look at mobility.Īt nearly 6 pounds and nearly 1 ¾ of an inch thick, my old PC was a nightmare to carry in a briefcase or alone under my arm. I’m no professional benchmarker, but my lousy web experience with a legacy PC matches up with some of the simple, web benchmarks I ran. Net-net, my experience matched the benchmarks I outline below. To make sure I wasn’t inventing something in my head, I wanted to check my experiences with some simple web benchmarks.

On top of that, trying out showcase Flash and HTML 5 sites was downright painful, which gives us an indication of the future, mainstream web. Many of the sites I go to, including, , Amazon Prime Video, Pandora, Google+ Photos, Google Street View felt a lot slower than on my modern PC. To put it bluntly, surfing with an older PC on the modern, 2013 web with rich media that includes a lot of rich ads, Java-script, CSS, and HTML5 stinks.

So let’s dive into how the specs influence the experience into some logical, important elements of web, mobility, photos, video, games, and some intangibles. It’s hard to believe what you get today at a lower price versus what you could get 5 years ago, but better specs don’t always equate to better experiences. USB3, RJ45 10/100, HDMI, VGA, mic, headphoneĭisplay Port or miniHDMI, USB3, RJ45 1K, dock, combo audio I don’t want to identify exactly which systems I used to “protect the innocent” or skew anyone’s thinking, but I do want to list out specifications to give you a specification taste, then dive into the experience: I want to share my insights with you as I now believe I have a better handle on the “good enough” phenomenon and whether there is true merit to upgrading.Ī good place to start is to identify what a consumer could get 4-5 years ago for $699 and compare to newer PCs ranging from $399 to $699. To gain a better insight into understanding what it’s like to use an old PC and if there’s value in an upgrade, I used a four year old PC for some basic tasks for around 10 days. As someone who refreshes their PC every 6 months to perform contextual research, it’s been hard for me to personally relate to using a 4-5 year old PC. Therefore, digging deeper into the differential experience between new and old is important. Simply put, if the experience doesn’t incrementally deliver consumer value, there is little need to upgrade to a new PC. The biggest question consumers have is, “should I upgrade”? After doing some of my own contextual research, I can confidently say “it’s a good time to upgrade”, and I wanted to share my analysis with you. 100s of millions of PCs are still in active use using old operating systems, hardware and software which combines to deliver an historic experience. While none of the three devices can replace any of the other right now, data does indicate that consumers are waiting a bit longer to replace their current PC. In my line of work as a technology industry analyst, I have had a lot of discussions recently about the current and future popularity of notebooks versus smartphones and tablets.

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