At some point it has to stop though. Computers have been mass-market products for at least 30 years, depending on how you define "mass-market". How much longer are we going to keep making formerly usable computers obsolete?

> At some point it has to stop though.

No, it doesn't, actually.

> How much longer are we going to keep making formerly usable computers obsolete?

For as long as increases in performance and energy efficiency open up the potential for new uses.

I don't see the problem here. You can still use the old computers with the old applications. Just like you can still use hand-drawn carts – doesn't mean that we shouldn't develop the horse-drawn cart, even though they made the hand-drawn carts obsolete. Same goes for trucks and horse-drawn carts.

Didn’t make them obsolete though… if you look at almost any construction site or gardener, “hand drawn carts” (aka wheelbarrows) are still used a lot.

Exactly my point. A high-performance 2D GPU library won't make older hardware unusable – "the right tool for the job" and all that.