What Happened To Regular PR Updates?

I have not noticed any PR updates or changes in any of my blogs or other websites I visit for a while now. Since I started blogging, I got used to see three or four PR updates each year but now I haven not seen a PR update in months. Maybe internal PR has changed but the toolbar hasn´t.
Page Rank is a website measure important for some webmasters and Internet Marketing but is still ignored by many. I think it all depends on each person’s online activities and goals. One fact is that the major search engine became so important that is now a verb.
Having a website with good page rank has more advantages than the opposite. It can help maximize your online presence, be quickly indexed by search engines, receive free traffic and attention from advertisers. Free traffic from search engines along with a pay per click marketing program can be an extra revenue for many webmasters and bloggers. From my experience, search engine traffic can be very valuable for Internet Marketing if you have a way to convert that traffic into money. I´ve seen results myself with an art niche.
Back to the point. What happened to regular PR updates?
Has anyone noticed any changes or knows what´s going on?

17-01-11
PS: Ok, I just visited a blog and came across a recent post about this topic. This blogger announced that his recent blog just received PR. So...this means the big guys aren´t sleeping :)