I suppose you could file this under "Digital Granddad", but my Dad is buying another PC. Now my Dad has been buying PCs since 1980, so that should give you an idea of his contribution to the PC economy. TRS-80, IBM PC-1, IBM PS/2 and on and on and on...
My brother and I were the primary benefactors of his largesse when we were kids, but for quite some time he has bought a series of PCs to 1) read/write email 2) look at digital photos and 3) browse/read the web.
To give you an idea of why the PC industry should give him an award, he is now moving from a 2Ghz Dell to a 3Ghz Dell. The "old" 2GHz Dell will go into another house, replacing the "even older" 500Mhz HP. There will be one big improvement for the new system and that will be the display. He is buying the 18" flat panel display from Dell, which quite a stunning value.
His lives out on Cape Cod and has a dial-up connection. I expect he'll move to broadband soon now that it has reached his fairly remote area.
This is the cycle, as Dad's, that we are in. We buy technology, it gets old quick, and we buy more. The challenge is figuring out what we want to do and then buying the technology to do it. That's why we seem to spend more and more dollars on functionally specific gear (like cameras, scanner, MP3 players, phones, robotic vacuum cleaners, Tivo's, etc.) and less on a general purpose PC.
But it's still cool to get a new one.
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