I'm sorry, but I downvoted you for being inaccurate. Northwood core Pentium 4 CPUs and motherboards using DDR SDRAM were released in 2002. Two years later, the

I'm sorry, but I downvoted you for being inaccurate. Northwood core Pentium 4 CPUs and motherboards using DDR SDRAM were released in 2002. Two years later, the latest and greatest were Prescott cores Pentium 4s, and DDR was in its last stages of being better than DDR2. It would have been a large performance difference, to be sure, but for most applications it would not have been a deal-breaker. You wouldn't have issues running well-maintained XP on your Northwood, which could arguably tide you over until the Windows 7 release in 2009 quite well. More importantly, the considerable hardware upgrades still hold today - there is no shortage of people who update their MacBook Pros to the newest every year let alone every two years (and these aren't exactly gamers), the mid-2010 13" MacBook Pro still had a Core 2 Duo, none of the 2010 refresh MacBooks had Thunderbolt, only yesterday there was angst about the Mac Pro still using two-year-old CPUs, and the difference between an October 2010 old MacBook Air, the unupgradeable poster child, and a current one is considerable: the former has a Core 2 Duo, 4 GB of RAM if you upgraded during checkout, and a maximum of 128/256 GB hard drive on the 11"/13" respectively. Stepping back to the mid-2009 revision, which you would have had to order in June 2010, the difference is even larger.