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A year or two ago I built a machine with a 9600k (yet another 14nm++++++ cpu), thinking I'd upgrade to Zen 3 or Rocket Lake later on. Now that later on has arrived, I see little reason to upgrade: I use my machine mainly for browsing the web, watching Netflix, and occasionally running scripts in Python/R/Matlab, etc. Most of these tasks would not run noticably faster on a beefier cpu; those that would are not really slowing down my overall productivity. Of course, this only describes my personal situation, but I do wonder if we have past the point where hardware upgrades matter for 95% of the population. Except for really hard-core gamers who really demand the best and people who do a lot of video processing/ML/scientific computing, I doubt most people would really benefit from switching from a last generation cpu to a newer one. I'm happy to wait another ten years to upgrade.