Doug, I know darn well that Pentium -schmentium has a bigger disk - but you see, it is not the size of the instrument but the quality of the experience I am talking about. How many of those 75Mb of fonts do you really need to effectively communicate your ideas?
To use another example: I was running SPSS PC+ on my XT - and 10 years later I am running SPSS 7.0 on my Pentium-schmentium machine - and I'm getting the same crappy R squareds and regression coefficients as 10 years before. Sure, there are differences: I had to write batch files for every operation on the PC+ and I can do a pointa-clicka-no-thinka job on the 7.0.
PC+ had the limit of 200 variables per file, which meant that I had to extract variables of interest from the master file before running an analysis, whereas now I can simply dump the whole master file on the big disk, pointa-clicka the right variables and get my results.
Sure, it is an improvement - but is worth all the hoopla?
So the bottom line is that planned obsolescence v. progress is not an either/or issue, but the matter of degree. If I were to come up with a guesstimate, I'd say that about 90% of all the 'upgrades' in the PC business is planned obsolescence, and only 10% is real improvement. Of course not all that 90% of excess computing capacity is used up by crappy and inefficient software, such as Windows - a great chunk of it goes to conspicuous consumption - the "my disk is bigger than your disk" stuff.
wojtek