I haven't bought a desktop in many years now, but I refreshed my laptop this past month after four years of service. The story is a little bit different but als

I haven't bought a desktop in many years now, but I refreshed my laptop this past month after four years of service. The story is a little bit different but also points to a change in what drives the market. The old one was a lower end machine of its era (Lenovo model 4446, Intel T4200, 2Gb stock) and clearly becoming too slow for some applications; higher-end video could not play at full speed, and streaming apps like Google Hangout were essentially non-functional. Add to it the fact that the battery was shot, the keyboard was dead, the fans were dying, and the CCFL backlighting occasionally flickered to half-brightness; there was a pretty good case for me to make the move before it stopped booting altogether. While the new one(Lenovo model 20182, AMD A10, 6Gb stock) is definitely fast enough to do everything, including the majority of games, this aspect feels more like "pain relief" than "improvement" - the positive differences in upgrading are most visible in physical aspects of the package - screen brightness, build and weight, average heat output, keyboard and touchpad feel. Mostly better, although I dislike the touchpad - the multitouch is not as accurate as the older ones, even after disabling all the features. And this is not a top-end laptop - it's a <$600 machine from late last year, purchased at $100 off as a refurb. The biggest bottleneck in its performance profile is the use of spinning disk storage(which, I should add, is more than I'm ever likely to use as long as I have it). And, I should reiterate - the performance problems of the previous one only came into play with some newer apps, mostly those that relied on GPU acceleration for video or 3D. To a lesser extent it had problems on CPU-hungry stuff(music production) as the fans gave out, but it was a very gradual degradation. I think the most intriguing part of the new environment is in how it is informing how we write programs - a huge "style gap" has emerged between applications that can never get enough power, and those that can be unfathomably wasteful of power. For a lot of things, we can really say, "Given unlimited computational resources, how do we best solve this problem?" And the benefits of that thought process turn out to uncover new optimizations at the same time that they improve the code quality.