my main machine is a 7 year old laptop. I do have a fancy newer one but i'm not gonna make much use of that unless i'm traveling. the old one works perfectly still and does everything I need as I've never gamed on it. the days of having to upgrade all the time are over. same goes for phones apart from one upmanship.
I agree 90% of the time.
Unless you are compiling code or a video etc it often make little difference really.
What it will boil down to more is mult-tasking.
For my desktop and my Android Motorola phone it's about just doing less at once.
vs buying newer hardware to do more at once.
I use a AMD Phenom X4 9950 BE edition CPU on a shit motherboard.
But when i set it up a year ago i had to decide which to go with.. that one or my other old PC
I have a Core2Duo E7500 Wolfdale that overclocks like a beast on air ..4ghz with stock cooler LOL
BUT ! ..it's a dual core and the AMD i am typing on now is slower speed wise but a quad.
So the extra two cores although slower has an effect of being faster.. when it's not technically.
I also use a huge CPU fan that sticks out of my case so much i can't get the side cover on.
I think it's the Cooler Master EVO 212 with adapter to go on pretty much any socket.. old + new.
I had bought it from Newegg as a back up in case the water cooler (Corsair H100i) failed on the "good" PC.
I had an Intel 4770k Haswell i bought from Newegg $360+ TAX/SH with a sweet gaming MSI board.
I went all out on it and got a bad ass SSD and then two 1tb WD black HDD's etc
Weirdest of all was the cube case from Cooler Master with 2 levels on it.
I got this case below from Newegg for like 80 buck i think.. (+ tax etc CAN$)
Cooler Master HAF XB EVO (mine had the giant 120mm case fan on top i had to buy separately)
But i sold it to a family member for a super cheap price because they expressed interest in it and i had my fun with it.
If it was not family i prob would have kept it..
So i had to downgrade to a either of the 2 way older PC's ..which was not that big a deal actually.
I advocate getting your money's worth out of PC parts.
I have been swapping mobo's out of a nice silver case i have with front LED's and a side window with a black light since 2003.. since it's a full size large roomy ATX case i can just keep shoveling in new parts
What is more fun though is modding !
It can be more gratifying hobbling shit together than buying stuff off the shelf.