If you’re tired of new hardware, wonders Jon Honeyball, are you tired of life?

Have we reached stagnation in computer technology? It’s a question that I ponder all the time these days. I’ve been testing laptops and PCs since 1986, and that’s over 30 years. There’s probably only a handful of PCs since the dawn of the PC era that haven’t gone through my hands. Much the same can be said of tablets, and most of the smartphones out there.

I’m particularly interested in the cutting edge – as soon as something comes available, we have it in the lab. So you would expect that I would be at the “staring off into the abyss” of that cutting edge on my personal devices. In the past that was true – in the 1990s, I was one of the first to bring multi-CPU Windows NT desktop computing into the high-end mainstream. I remember buying an Asus motherboard, and two Intel Pentium Pro 100 CPUs. They were around £800 each, which was enough to buy a semi-detached house at the time. In 1990, I complained to Samsung that my newly purchased S800 386/20 desktop couldn’t be expanded beyond 8MB of RAM because the company hadn’t got around to building the expansion card that took it to 16MB.

But I have just looked around my desktop. In front of me is a first series iMac 5K 27in, which Apple dates as “late 2014”. This is my daily workhorse. To my right is a cylindrical Mac Pro, which Apple says is “late 2013”. My main laptop is an i7 MacBook Pro, which is about four years old. My Microsoft Surface Book is the original version from two years ago. I wear an Apple Watch 2, not a 3. My phone is an iPhone 8 Plus, and that only replaced a 7 Plus because my husband’s 6 had died so I moved it down the family hierarchy. I bought an iPhone X and decided I didn’t like it. It’s now used in the lab as a scratch iOS device, powered up when needed.

I used to have huge servers that sat in the corner and hummed loudly. Now my definition of a server is a Synology NAS box stuffed with storage; any large computational power I might need is available for rent in the cloud.

And I was left wondering if I had actually lost my mojo. Had the definition of a “Honeybyte” from years past simply slipped into obscurity?

To find out, I loaded up my shopping basket. A new iMac Pro would be nice – especially one with the 18-core CPU, 128GB of RAM and the 4TB SSD options. There would be almost no computing tasks that this couldn’t master, and it would last me for the next five years. But £12,279 inc VAT? Maybe not.

How about replacing the laptop with a new 15in MacBook Pro with 32GB of RAM and 4TB of SSD storage? Hmm, the £6,209 inc VAT might be an issue. A newer Apple Watch? The one with built-in LTE support? Great, but it probably wouldn’t work any better than my Watch 2 out here in Fenland, where LTE support is patchy at best.

How about a shiny Microsoft Surface Studio instead of the iMac? Even the recent price drop to £3,225 from £4,249 isn’t enough to convince me, and indeed suggests an end of life product.

The reality is that what I have does everything I need, and newer versions add nothing to the mix that are killer improvements. The touch bar on the MacBook Pro looks gorgeous, but doesn’t really help day to day. The Surface Studio is lovely hardware, but it’s hobbled by Windows 10. The iMac Pro is yet another iThing of beauty, and would run everything in Parallels and VMware with aplomb, but is it really any better than my current 32GB RAM version? And therein lies the problem. In any meaningful sense, the prices aren’t unreasonable. That dual-CPU motherboard from 1995 would be some £4,386 today, and that’s ignoring the large Sony monitor I had flanked by two Silicon Graphics TFT panels. Or the RAM. Or the storage or all the other bits.

So the issue isn’t really the cost. The problem is that they don’t do anything any better than my serviceable hardware. And this is a significant issue for the industry. If a power user such as myself can’t find any big reason to upgrade, then the best that the industry can do is try to end-of-life hardware as quickly as possible. Look at the moves by Microsoft relating to some Intel CPUs, or how Apple pushes people onto the newest version of its OSes. Of course, there are upsides – an up-to-date OS means better security. But at some point, people will cry “enough is enough”. In the lab we have an early MacBook Air, probably the first generation. It won’t get the next version of macOS, because it lacks apparently critical hardware components. Well, it works just fine today doing the basic workload of email and Excel.

So will I be tempted to crack open my wallet and indulge my power fantasies with new hardware? Unless the hardware has been deliberately end-of-lifed by the OS, I can’t see this happening. And that thought leaves me perplexed. Or is it just a sign of getting old?

The reality is that what I have does everything I need. And newer versions add nothing to the mix