Spinning rust and fans are the outliers when it comes to longevity in compute hardware. I’ve had to replace a disk or two in my rack at home, but at the end of the day the CPUs, RAM, NICs, etc. all continue to tick along just fine.

When it comes to enterprise deployments, the lifecycle always revolves around price/performance. Why pay for old gear that sucks up power and runs 30% slower than the new hotness, after all!

But, here we are, hitting limits of transistor density. There’s a reason I still can’t get 13th or 14th gen poweredge boxes for the price I paid for my 12th gen ones years ago.