Whenever I upgrade stuff, at first I'm blown away by the new and usually bigger or better thing. Usually, though, after a while you gradually forget what life was like before the upgrade and your perceptions and expectations normalize around the new thing.
Coming up on seven years ago we upgraded from a seven year old, 32 inch CRT television to new 40 inch LCD which at the time if felt like a huge upgrade and I couldn't imagine needing or wanting a bigger TV. Back in 2005 they pretty much didn't make them any bigger than 40". However these days 40" is probably the entry level size for a living room TV.
I tricked my wife into needing my iPhone 3GS when I upgraded to the iPhone 4 in 2010. Again, I remember the shift to the new high resolution display was stunning for a few days, then gradually you get used to it. It's only whenever I'm messing with the old 3GS - usually trying to fix some FUBAR'd up iCloud contact sync issue - that I'm reminded of how bad the 3GS display looks. Back in 2009 it looked fine, today it just looks like shit.
What's also interesting, sitting at a macro level above all this, is how used we've become to this phenomena, how we simply expect things to be replaced or fall redundant after a relatively short space of time - at least relative to the pace of change ten or more years ago. In a sense it's like we're living in a modern renaissance where we expect nothing short of revolutionary improvements in either service, material integrity or capability every few months. Our collective expectations have become re-normalized.
And if product lifecycles continue to be compressed in this way, I wonder if we'll eventually lose our upgrade sensitivity, whether we'll cease to be bothered about the next ground breaking improvement. And if this will then bring our new renaissance to a close, to be followed by a long dark wilderness of homogenized banality where, ironically, we'll be living the equivalent of a latter-day 1974 all over again, only this time without all the sci-fi ambition that led us to this present era.
Um....