One might think that people who buy cheap gear have a choice between buying cheap gear now and newer cheap gear in a few years or spending the same amount of money on more expensive gear that they won't have to replace that quickly. This simply isn't true.

I spend a lot of time in virtual worlds, also reading about virtual worlds. Second Life requires hardware with at least some oomph nowadays. However, there are Second Life users with 15-year-old bottom-of-the-line consumer notebooks. The stuff that supermarkets used to sell from pallets. 2 or 4GB of system RAM (you need this much as VRAM nowadays), on-board graphics etc. They've probably bought it used, but still quite a while ago.

Why are they still using that old clunker? Because they've never been able to acquire any other more powerful computer ever since.

I think it's even worse in OpenSim where those end up who can't even afford Second Life.