I'm not sure that's true. I suspect the MacBook Air is as successful as it is because most people want portability a lot more than they need raw power. I would

I'm not sure that's true. I suspect the MacBook Air is as successful as it is because most people want portability a lot more than they need raw power. I wouldn't build a render farm out of 11" MacBook Airs, but I bet they're a lot easier to pull out on a crowded flight than my 15" MacBook Pro. This does raise an interesting question: how often do normal users grow past their hardware's limits? I'm not a typical laptop user. My machine serves as a portable desktop replacement, and I spawn virtual machines to work on software for Linux and Windows. Even so, my 4-year-old machine is serving me pretty well. It wasn't the base model, but its specs are pretty pathetic by modern standards. It doesn't take a mini supercomputer to maintain a photo collection and edit documents. Some people will be satisfied with a base model MacBook Air for a good while. Though I admit, buying a machine with 4GB RAM today is a bit sketchy. Maybe the SSD cures it, but OS X does not take heavy swapping well at all.