The four-year PC refresh cycle that became standard in enterprise IT during the 2010s was a budget optimization made under specific conditions: hardware improvements were incremental, Windows 7 was stable, and the marginal productivity gain from newer hardware was not large enough to justify more frequent refresh. Those conditions no longer hold. The PC refresh cycle at many organizations has stretched to five, six, and in some cases seven years without a corresponding assessment of whether the extended cycle is actually saving money.