now that phones are quite fast and have good cameras, what is the main driver towards upgrading? so that you go from 300ppi to 500ppi? not going to make much of a difference and for most people not worth the upgrade costs.
The only issue is that phone manufacturers have even more of an incentive to bloat the OS more and more (and make it slower and slower on old models) and to deprecate it faster (on older models) so they can sell more hardware if people want to get the latest security fixes / software
in general, hardware improvements will drive new swanky software, and make computing on smartphones closer to a first class citizen (remember motorola's laptop+phone dock, where the phone powers the laptop?).
another big pain point is battery (and battery consumption). still waiting on hardware (and software in conjunction) to get more efficient. you'll remember how power hungry PCs were in the beginning and how much better they are now (laptops notably).
feels to me like we still have many years to go, and many more "big" technology investments.
yet for the most part PCs dropped significantly in price but smartphones seem to be holding the 400+ range which is still woefully overpriced for most of the phone buying populace because not only are you putting out 400 bucks but usually under obligation to send forty to eighty more a month. That is a good chunk of the the lower and middle classes.
The PC have not dropped significantly in price. High end gaming PC (that you build yourself) always costed about 1500-2000$. It is just that the majority of tasks could be done in lower and lower segments of the market.
Mac SE w/ HD in 1987 — $3900, $8,175 adjusted for inflation. Makes the head spin, remarkable that I even got to see computers like that during my childhood.
I guess your opinion and mine greatly differ on the history of high end gaming pcs.. (building highend pc's since riva tnt and diamond monster 3d days..)
High-end PCs at that time were Compaq computers. Not cheap knockoffs that were made by no-name brands. The Compaq 386 had a launch price of $6500 to $10,000+
The "Jade" PC you see in that image is probably more comparable to "Gateway" brand now-a-days.
Computers are a hell-of-a-lot cheaper today than in the past.
EDIT: I looked it up, and I can't believe I forgot about this. Back then, every mom-and-pop store was able to build their own brand of PCs. The clone wars were unstoppable I tell you! Jade Computers was apparently a small business with just a few retail locations running out of California.
Compaq's pricing was clever. If you bought one, everyone knew you bought it because it was better, not because it was cheaper than the IBM model. (And it was better because Compaq was shipping 386 machines when the IBM PC AT still had a crappy 286.)
Except inflation... "The same price as it has always been" over a long period (like, say, the 90s) is actually a substantial price drop.
$1500 in 1995 is about $2300 today. A $1500 computer today is ~35% cheaper than the "same price" computer from before.
Having been a gaming rig builder since around that time, high-end performance desktops have gotten way cheaper, with more realistic performance tiers to boot.
It took PCs 20+ years to get good enough, smartphones managed the same in much less than 10 it seems.