In a way, it's fortunate that hardware performance improvements have all but ground to a halt; according to online benchmarks, the CPU in my nearly 7 year old (

In a way, it's fortunate that hardware performance improvements have all but ground to a halt; according to online benchmarks, the CPU in my nearly 7 year old (3rd gen Intel M series) Thinkpad is only something like 50% slower than the most recent comparable models. (This is partly because after 3rd gen, they all switched to U-series CPUs, which were significantly slower.) This way, even if approved-OS-only hardware suddenly becomes the universal norm in the same way that chiclet keyboards did around then, I imagine I will still be set for a long time. (Just imagine using a computer from 1993 in 2000, for comparison...)