>Am I getting old or is the "buzz" that used to accompany new technology disappearing?
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>I remember getting my TRS-80. What a buzz that was. I still have it. The Tandy handhelds were slightly exciting. The Amstrad. The Amiga. Wow, what a machine. Then came the PC. I remember the first PC I bought. A hot 286. Seriously cool. I remember the arrival of scaling truetype fonts and a $1500 HP inkjet! Oh, wow! Then came the 15" 70hz monitors, the 17" monitors, the Rockwell aluminium notebook, the AMD notebook, IBM notebook, cool all the way, then Dell notebooks with huge monitors ever since...
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>But what now? I'm due a new notebook but there's no killer app or other justification that absolutely needs a new machine. To get one with XP rather than Vista I'd have to buy the expensive XPS gaming variant. I'm left cold by the whole prospect.
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>And software? I see nothing much in any of the packages that used to create heaps of "wow" to make me want to spend $. I'm spending less on tech now than I've done for 20 years. The killer "wow gotta have it" factor just isn't there. the only "wow" I've seen recently was installing a whole lot of stuff on a PIII and using it as a Linux server but that cost me nothing. I can't find anything techy I want to spend $ on.
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>Has tech truly run out of steam? Or am I looking in the wrong place?

This probably only proves how shallow I am but those red Dell laptops get my pulse racing a bit. And the new Macs, of course.

In general I agree with you that new products aren't as exciting as they used to be, and I don't think that's just a byproduct of getting older. It's the same way with software. There are always some nice new features in an upgrade but it just doesn't seem the same as the excitement surrounding a dot version upgrade 20 years ago. Maybe because there are so many more programs and so many more upgrades now.