Five years ago, I bought a MacBook Pro to replace my PowerBook G4, which was itself five years old. The list of obsolescences was enormous: It had only USB 1.1

Five years ago, I bought a MacBook Pro to replace my PowerBook G4, which was itself five years old. The list of obsolescences was enormous: It had only USB 1.1 in a market teeming with new USB 2.0 hardware that couldn't have existed with the slower speeds; it had a single-touch trackpad just as OS X was introducing all sorts of useful multi-touch gestures; it relied on clumsy external solutions for wi-fi and Bluetooth; it had a slow-to-warm CFL LCD that had been supplanted by bright new LED backlit screens; it was even built on a dead-end CPU architecture that Apple had traded for vastly more powerful, energy-efficient, multi-core x86 processors. Today, the calendar says it's time for me to upgrade again. Yet the pain of obsolescence of a five-year-old laptop in 2013 just isn't the same as in 2008: USB 3.0? What new applications is it enabling? Anything I need Thunderbolt for? Not yet. New Intel architectures and SSDs at least promise less waiting in everyday use... but I'm hardly unproductive with my old machine.