I understand that disappointment, but it is inevitable with two trends: the end of Moore's law for CPUs and the fact that four year-old specs are good for the b

I understand that disappointment, but it is inevitable with two trends: the end of Moore's law for CPUs and the fact that four year-old specs are good for the bulk of users doesn't help to drive prices down. The primary thing that has been improving since 2012 is the death of spinning platters across the boards (though a lot of sub-$1000 laptops still seem to have them) and larger SSDs in base models. Of course, for some scenarios newer generation CPUs help tremendously. E.g. AVX2 can be a large improvement if your work relies a lot on SIMD instructions.