Friday Rant - Busting the 'upgrade' myth

People upgrade their computers all the time and don't want to buy tech that they can't upgrade, right?

Wrong!

One of the most persistent myths in tech is that everyone is concerned being able to upgrade and augment their computers and notebooks. To listen to some, you'd think that people are constantly ripping apart their systems and changing everything inside on a regular basis. The idea is that people care about the upgradability and longevity of thing they buy and that people won't buy thing that they can't open, won't buy things that have sealed batteries and won't buy things that don't have components that can be swapped out.

This is simply not true any more.

It's fair to say that it was true (ish) to a point maybe a decade ago when kit was more expensive and a greater proportion of the buyers were more sophisticated and tech savvy (Did I just say that? Yes, yes I did.). But as PCs and notebooks became mass market, so did the attitudes and mindsets of most of the buyers. Rather than looking at a tech purchase as a platform for future upgrades, computers and notebooks are now seen as something with a finite lifespan. In fact, the shocking thing that I'm seeing with hardware nowadays is now long it takes for the shine to wear off and for people to start thinking about their next purchase. To most people a computer is much like a cellphone or camera ... life-limited, disposable kit. They buy it with the idea that it'll last a year or three, and when it gets old or slow (or the shine wears off) it's not time to upgrade, it's time to buy new.

Note: A sure sign that people are keeping their computers for less time now is the fact that I can't remember when I was last asked about replacing the CMOS battery on a motherboard.

There are two categories that still upgrade regularly:

• Tech geeks - Because they can!
• Hardcore gamers - Because their upgrade cycle is so short they need to upgrade in order to stay at the cutting edge

I used to get a LOT of questions in relating to upgrades, everything from PSUs to CPUs, but nowadays upgrades seem confined to three components )listed in order of popularity):

• RAM upgrades - By far the most popular (and easy, and best bang-for-the-buck) upgrade
• Graphics card upgrades - Mostly people looking to upgrade the poor on-board graphics for something with a little more kick!
• Storage upgrades - Not so much replacing hard drives though, but adding external storage

What does this all mean? Well, the upgrade market isn't as broad as it once was. It's still big but the proportion of people who fall into the 'upgraders' category is smaller than it was a decade ago (which was itself smaller than the decade before that). It also means that people are moving their data and applications to new systems every few years. For people with a lot of photos and video, this can be somewhat traumatic.

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But ... people are doing more in the cloud through their browser. When you're living in a Facebook/Twitter/Flickr/Google/Microsoft cloud world, the actual computer you're working on doesn't really matter that much.

... and maybe that's why people don't upgrade their computers as much. The actual bond to the hardware might not be that strong any more.

We upgraders are a dying breed!