I'm not a computer nerd at all but I do use one daily in my editing/writing/history business. I feel now about computers the way I do about cars -- there is no reason at all to buy a new one unless for some reason you have daily work that requires the very latest thing (which is to say, basically nobody except maybe the people who are making the computers and apps themselves).
I have been going with refurbished scratch-dent 3+-year-old laptops & desktops for a long time with no issues. (The MacBook I am currently typing on literally came with a dent in one corner. Saved me like $200 from the other refurbs.) I typically go five or more years between machines.
As a computer nerd, this is 100% accurate. I wouldn't say the only people that need the latest/greatest are software developers, but the masses absolutely do not need it. Any decent computer from the last 10 years will do what at least 90% of people want to do at least 90% of the time.
That being said...
(To me the entire computer business looks more like a racket every day. I don't get why we all just decided it was a good idea for everyone to shell out thousands of dollars for gear on a regular basis -- plus $100+ month for internet & cell service -- just to have an everyday life or run your everyday business. But then I'm a Gen X geezer who made it to young adulthood before any of this started happening, with memories of doing basically the same thing that I do now without having to regularly drop piles of cash on stuff that you were expected to throw away after 3 years. I'm also a historian, and the more you look at the history of computing post-1980s, the more it seems like the only people who have really benefitted are the tech companies. Not that I'm against cute cat videos or anything.)
Sort of off topic, but there was a great essay in the Baffler recently about the end of the internet by one of my favorite contemporary writers (Kate Wagner of McMansion Hell): https://thebaffler.com/salvos/404-page-not-found-wagner
Disclaimer: I'm probably biased as hell, as I work in IT. And I'm 27, so millennial as fuck.
I would hardly call the "computer business" a racket. If anything, it's becoming less and less so. Do you remember the "thousands of dollars" for computer gear in the 90s!? That shit was way more expensive than it is now, and was obsolete far faster. If you were running a 1992-era Compaq 486 in 2000, you might as well be driving a stagecoach. Now it's 2019, and a PC from 2011 can be perfectly adequate for plenty of people.
My GF has a 2010 laptop (Thinkpad T510) that only recently had the hard drive die, and a new $50 SSD and it would be on its way (we haven't bothered, since we did buy its replacement in 2016). You can buy a refurb business grade PC that will run the current version of Windows just fine for as little as $200 (less if you score a deal); when in the past has that ever been possible outside of the last ~5 years or so?
Even brand new PCs are amazingly cheaper and longer-lasting compared to before. I remember my dad buying a Windows 95 PC in 1998 (after Win98 came out, so this was some closeout bargain) for $1300. It was kind-of obsolete right away, and replaced with an XP machine by 2003. These days at work, I'm buying Dell Optiplex 3060s from Dell for about $700 with Win10, a six-core i5, 8GB of RAM, and and SSD. They will be infinitely more useful five years from now than my dad's POS was in 2003.
Smartphones are now finally slowing down (in terms of technical progress) too, so people are finally holding onto them longer. Apple's recent earning report reflects this (and they seemed to be taken aback by this). A new iPhone in 2019 for a person with a two-year-old model is a much harder sell now than it was in 2013. My iPhone 7 is over two years old now and just fine, and with the latest iOS and security patches. I literally have zero complaints (apart from certain Apple-y quirks, but those aren't because it's 2+ years old) and while I would accept an iPhone XS if it was given to me for free, it would mostly be a non-event. I had a new-to-me 2011-era Samsung Galaxy S (the first one, a flagship model at the time) that I bought used in 2013, and I dealt with it for a few years because I'm a stubborn asshole, but it was clearly past its prime from the start, and its eventual replacement was an amazing breath of fresh air.
$100+/mo for internet and cell service? If you're paying that much you better be getting your money's worth out of that. We are, actually, at $140/mo total for shitty DSL and two unlimited smartphone lines. But we use the hell out of them. If we weren't, we'd be paying probably more like $80/mo all-in for a household of two. We'd also probably pay less if our area was anywhere near competitive (our only wireline internet option literally is $50/mo 6mbps/768kbps DSL).
Since the 1980s, the only people that have benefited from computing advances are big tech companies? Seriously?
I'll leave my own career (again, IT) out of this since that part's obvious, but the company I work for is a contract service lab, and being able to email clients and delivery results electronically is a boon for productivity, leaving apart the fact that literally every scientific instrument in the lab is connected to a computer doing all the heavy lifting. Until recently, we did actually have a 1980s era instrument connected to a 1980s computer, and the owner of the company literally popped a bottle of champagne in celebration when we finally put that thing to bed. It was great for its day, but a colossal pain in the ass in the modern world compared to modern instrumentation. Would you like to take thousands of images through a microscope by hand, assemble them into a composite, hand-measure the particle size of everything on the slide (100,000s of particles), and report the distribution on a graph? Modern tech lets us do it for our clients in a few hours for a few hundred bucks.
My girlfriend's career wouldn't exist without modern tech. She is a self-employed professional photographer in a very niche industry. Without DSLRs, her cost of shooting would be hilariously more expensive on film (she shoots over 100k photos per year; I'm not even going to do the math on film stock/processing cost). She's able to turn around results far faster. She did a photoshoot yesterday morning, and by 3pm, she had sent the client a few edited complete photos already, and gotten feedback. If she were shooting on film, or even sending discs through the mail vs sending photos online, that would be measured in days instead of hours. Her new-in-2017 PC saves her a ton of time vs her previous new-in-2011 PC. Her new-in-2015 4K monitor allows her far more control over her work vs her old crappy 2009-era 1920x1080 display. Her 2016 laptop is actually useful for editing on the road compared to her 2010 laptop. As much as I despise it, without Facebook, her work would not have gotten as much traction and attention, so she's likely still be working a shitty "day job" instead of quitting that four and a half years ago. Every advance in DSLR camera tech, desktop computing, display tech, storage tech, internet speeds (yes, our crappy DSL is holding her back a bit), and online infrastructure has made her business better, faster, easier, and more profitable.
Not to mention the day-to-day improvements to our lives that technology has brought. Plenty of it is unnecessary fluff (I don't need a "home assistant" to talk to me when my dryer is done running), but things like GPS on phones, Wikipedia, Google, Uber, eBay, Amazon, Google Translate, etc. all have made life way easier in their respective areas than before. Hell, even PayPal. Even simple stuff like Google-ing a recipe for curry powder while making dinner. I could go on here, but I'll restrain myself. Some of those things I mentioned are indeed "big tech companies" but they're big because they do provide legitimate value.
I read that article too, and I get some of the ethos behind it. The main thing she seems to be decrying though is the consolidation of websites onto social media platforms, and the App-ification of the internet. This I agree with, and I tend to avoid such things personally. I can't stand mobile-oriented websites on a PC. I don't really have any smartphone apps that don't have a specific reason to be their own app, whether due to convenience (weather, online banking, Evernote, work email), complexity (MS Excel, remote desktop client, Xero) or the need for them to work in the background (Google Maps, Pandora, Uber).
The only "social media" I use are web forums and Reddit. I have a Facebook account, but that's mostly due to inertia, and I think I've posted on their twice in the past six or seven years, and both times I was just updating my profile picture to be slightly less embarrassing and slightly more bald. I certainly don't have the Facebook or Messenger app on my smartphone, or check it any more than maaaybe once a month if we're being generous.
Of "the FAANGs" (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google, new term I hadn't seen before), the only ones I'd say are specifically not providing proportional value to consumers are Facebook (who provides plenty of value to advertisers and businesses) and and maybe Apple. Amazon provides tremendous value, especially with AWS (which is of course the reason their stock value has ballooned in the last few years). Netflix is the perfect anti-cable, at least for now. Google has their teeth in all kinds of things.
She also puts an odd amount of emphasis on websites deleting old user-posted content and painting it as some sort of tragedy. I don't think anyone can reasonably expect that anything you post anywhere will be archived forever on your behalf (unless you're paying for a service that stores it or something, like typical paid web hosting). If you have important information, it's on you to back it up as needed. Though it is cool to see things like old Usenet groups archived by Google (like Linus Torvalds first post in 1991 to comp.os.minix about his OS he was writing, which became Linux:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/comp.os.minix/dlNtH7RRrGA/SwRavCzVE7gJ ).
This kind of turned into a long rant, which was really not my intention. Carry on, on-topic posters.