Yeah, I've been telling myself I'd get a new laptop when power consumption for modern chips reaches that of the ultra-low voltage pentium 4 in my current laptop

Yeah, I've been telling myself I'd get a new laptop when power consumption for modern chips reaches that of the ultra-low voltage pentium 4 in my current laptop (Asus UL30A with about 10 hours of actual battery life). But each time I look at the offerings, I conclude that my $700 PC from 2010 is perhaps not superior, but is certainly adequate enough that I'm not interested in forking out $1k+ to get something with a comparable battery lifetime. Instead I start to look at the Chromebook with Ubuntu on it as a much less expensive option with the primary thing I want (battery life) combined with an almost-real computer that does basically everything my older laptop can do. But even then, sunk cost and all. It's not enough to meet the performance of my three year old laptop, they have to exceed it. And it's amazingly still not there yet. I don't know what exactly Intel has been optimizing, but it sure isn't anything that matters to me.