It is related to supply and demand curves. The more supply is available for the same cost, the more demand increases to use it. In any case, technology moves forward stimulating increased electricity usage and we are healthier because of it. My heat pump and electric car eliminate nitrous oxide and sulfur oxide emissions, as well as particulate emissions. Respiratory health is improved because of it.
That’s only true up to a point. PC prices fell dramatically in real terms over time as people didn’t need to spend 2000$ mid 90’s dollars to get vastly more performance at home.
But more interesting is the trend to upgraded less frequently.
Not in a way that makes those trends correlate. Worldwide PC sales peaked in 2011, but they continued to get cheaper in real terms.
Sales trends for new technology should be broken down into new customers and replacement devices for existing customers if you want to understand what’s going on. Falling prices did little for either trend but replacements were providing an eco of earlier growth. Until that was offset by people taking ever longer to buy replacements.
2011 is long after the major price drops of the 90s and early 00s, where demand kept increasing with price drops. Not only that, but every few years, you could buy a computer that was a few times better than the one that preceded it at a lower price.
PC sales began to drop in 2012 due to the iPhone and iPad causing people to not need PCs as much. Improvements in PC technology had also started to slow and would reach a crawl a few years later. All of this meant market saturation. Supply and demand still apply, but increases in sales volume from lower pricing are much more limited than they used to be.
For anyone who does not remember, on May 7, 1997, Intel introduced the Pentium II at 300MHz at a cost of $1981. On March 8, 2000, Intel introduced a the Pentium III at 1000MHz at a cost of $990. It was roughly 3 times faster on average, while being half the price of the older processor that launched less than 3 years prior. The performance had jumped so much that unfortunately no one seems to have included the two chips in a comparison. Anyway, no three year period in 2011 onward had performance jump so much with pricing halving. The closest was the Ryzen 7 1800X to the Ryzen 9 3950X, but the performance increase was more tame (~2.5x best case compared to ~3x average case) and the price went up by 50% instead of halving. However, you can see similar improvements if you go further back in time, such as 3 years before the Pentium II launch to the 100MHz Pentium (I cannot find how much that cost sadly).
I noticed a vastly larger jump between HDD and SSD’s, which hit for most people after 2011, than between PII vs PIII’s. People generally buy systems not individual components and in practice it’s mostly bottlenecks that matter. PII’s and PIII’s had the same RAM latency as earlier and later CPU’s because that’s bound by the speed of light, thus the explosion in cache size.
> 2011 is long after the major price drops of the 90s and early 00s
Not in terms of actual average PC prices which are down ~40% from their 2011 average. That’s a big discount in real world prices. Your price comparison on 1+k CPU’s is irrelevant when so few of them entered customers hands at those prices. Sure nVidia is selling 2000$ GPU’s today, but the average PC is ~650$ that’s the number that matters.
Being down 40% is nothing compared to how you used to be able to get a PC that is many times more capable of one from a few years ago for half the price.
As for NAND flash SSDs, the Intel X25-M came out in 2008:
Being available isn’t becoming mainstream. Most new computers in 2011 still had HDD due to cost.
Similarly, the average price people actually paid for a PC didn’t suddenly drop by half over 3 years as you proposed. Over 15 years that kind of price declines would mean people when from 4k in 2025 dollars to 125$ which simply didn’t happen.
I could cherry pick numbers suggesting opposite trends. nVidia’s top of the line card more than doubled in price when adjusted for inflation between 1999 and now. But back then most people didn’t even buy 3D graphics cards and today integrated graphics is by far the most common.
