Back around 1993, I worked doing digital editing and post-production on Macintosh Quadra 800/840AVs which had 96MB of RAM and 40MHz processors. A lot of the vi

Back around 1993, I worked doing digital editing and post-production on Macintosh Quadra 800/840AVs which had 96MB of RAM and 40MHz processors. A lot of the video work was done on co-processor boards (Media 100 and Avid), but almost all of the After Effects renders were done using the base Mac. My first job was to supervise a render of an animated banner on a commercial, it took 48 hours to render 30 seconds worth of video. I had to be there the whole time to ensure that a crash didn't stop the render. Things change and it is foolish to underestimate what CPUs and GPUs will be capable of. There are some pretty stunning games taking advantage of the iPad's GPUs, I would surprised if tablets in 5 years couldn't do what your professional workstations do today (the problem will be that professional standards will go up in the meantime and you'd turn your nose up at what you can do today).