The IT equipment landscape has dramatically changed over the last 20 years. I recall in the early 2000’s everyone relied on Moore’s law (co-founder of Intel), that states that CPU’s power should double every two years thanks to improvement in chip manufacturing. A computer became obsolete extremely quickly as gains in power and other capabilities (access to more RAM, larger storage management, multimedia and so on) allowed software manufacturers to make their products more powerful and therefore more resource consuming.
The advent of mobile technology, probably as early as 2005 with WAP and 2007 with the first iPhone, made Moore’s law redundant. We observed a shift in consumer’s behaviour, embracing smaller and less powerful devices, forcing hardware manufacturer and software developers to rethink everything: simplicity became the ultimate sophistication.
For example, Windows XP consumed a lot more resources on a PC than Windows 98. Windows Vista was an ogre when it came to resources. With Windows 7 we saw a move towards better resources management. Windows 10 was possibly the epitome of frugality when it came to resources requirement. I recall installing Windows 10 on a Windows XP machine and noticing substantial performance improvement, which was totally counter intuitive. So back in the days, buying a new machine was common and affordable. Upgrading a machine was reserved for geeks.
Having said that, up until COVID times, upgrading a machine was very sensible: adding a solid state drive or a few gigs of RAM was economical and worked wonders. Investing in a new generation graphics card was way cheaper than buying a game console and would allow anyone to add multiple monitors to their desks.
With COVID, everything changed again. We noticed that the price of equipment increased very substantially and some parts are still, as of Nov 2021, very hard to get by (especially graphics cards and mother boards).
Fortunately, for the average desktop user, the need for large increase in power is quite limited. Office software, web browsing, collaboration platform, photo management and so on work very well with most machines manufactured over the last 10 years.
So when I am asked whether to buy or upgrade, I always check whether the machine can be upgraded. Some machines can’t be upgraded, either because they are too old or because the manufacturer soldiered everything to the board (we see you Microsoft Surface Pro). For those that can be upgraded, we look at the cost of new parts (SSD, RAM, motherboard, CPU, graphics cards….) and compare it to the price of a new machine.
Alternatively, we can also look into the second hand market. With one of my customers, we bought dozens of second hand small form desktops. They cost a fraction of a new machine and they are typically between 4 and 8 years old. There is always a risk and 5% of the machines were not usable and had to be returned.
There are other parameters than cost when looking at upgrading or buying new. Setting-up a new machine and transferring all data and software is a lot more involved than changing a mobile phone. Professional software usually require developers’ involvement for installation. We can help you with that.
If you are looking at what to do with your infrastructure, do not hesitate to contact us for a chat.