They just used to get really dramatic upgrades because the period of time they released have been big growth periods.
That was most of the tech industry when I was growing up. When I was 13, a computer with a 66 Mhz processor and 32Mb RAM was a beast of a machine, and only 6 years later in '99, we had broken the 1Ghz CPU barrier and were typically installing 256Mb to a whole Gigabyte of RAM.
These days, I can still decently run the majority of modern games on a 12 year old machine. The “home computer revolution” that started in the 80s has most definitely flatlined and nothing very interesting is happening anymore. Kinda the same thing that happened to smartphones. Where now taking shit away (like the headphone jack) is considered “innovation”.
Edit: There used to be a joke in the 90s that when you bought a new PC, it was already obsolete by the time you carried it out of the store.
That was most of the tech industry when I was growing up. When I was 13, a computer with a 66 Mhz processor and 32Mb RAM was a beast of a machine, and only 6 years later in '99, we had broken the 1Ghz CPU barrier and were typically installing 256Mb to a whole Gigabyte of RAM.
These days, I can still decently run the majority of modern games on a 12 year old machine. The “home computer revolution” that started in the 80s has most definitely flatlined and nothing very interesting is happening anymore. Kinda the same thing that happened to smartphones. Where now taking shit away (like the headphone jack) is considered “innovation”.
Edit: There used to be a joke in the 90s that when you bought a new PC, it was already obsolete by the time you carried it out of the store.
That joke still applies to mostly everything now 🤷♂️