Comment Re:Three years is too short nowadays (Score 2) 28
Just because an asset is fully depreciated on the books does not mean a business has to throw it away.
They may want to because a new asset might be more efficent, more reliable, have lower maintenance costs, and of course it might be safer which could translate in to lower insurance rates, and obviously a depreciation goes against profitability and therefore gains you some favorable tax treatment which shifts the margin at which you might replace a appreciable asset forward.
That said I worked a company about a decade ago that was running a punch press built in 1898 regularly. Pretty sure that was fully depreciated. It was still shaping metal cases just fine and nobody saw a reason to buy a new one.
I think we are just now experiencing an age of computing where decade+ old hardware really is really might do a given job as well as anything new. Depending on the scale other concerns like energy consumption might not be much a of a concern.
if you look at just PCs (server/data center applications are more complicated) from the mid 1970s up until maybe the mid 2000s, each generation was obviously a significant leap forward for the typical home user. Electron, more complex cryptography etc, mean that c2005 PC is pretty much hopeless, however by the time you get to 2015 or so you can still be using that system today if it was high-end at the time. For most business applications a 2017 or newer system if probably indistinguishable for the latest and greatest for all but most demanding users (recognize Slashdot bias probably means you're a demanding user) as far as Jim in AP is concerned when he selects re-calculate from the menu in Excel it was then, its fast now, and the pie chart he sends his VP to include in the executive briefing looks about the same in terms of resolution and color.
It really is though quite a new thing for the response to 'new pcs' being 'why?'
Which is I think why this AI hype cycle seems outsides even as tech hype cycles go; If the industry can sell you AI accelerators, they don't really know what else to do...