Fast forward to today. I have a Macbook Air released in late 2010 (although I didn't dive in until early 2011). This laptop comes with a solid state drive (SSD) that has no moving parts. It also has a processor that was 2 years old when released. 2 YEARS! Think about computers these days. What is 2 years in computer processor terms. This is like 10 dog years which is about 77 human years!
What Apple did was take a known upside to SSD's in that they have super fast read/write times for data compared to traditional hard drives, and attached to an older, cheaper processor. Remember as well, (generally) slower processors use less energy. Less energy in a laptop is more time off it can be untethered form the power cord. The SSD's speed made up for the processor's age but you still had a very competitive laptop for the market.
I have an old 2007 iMac. I love it. 24" screen, aftermarket 1TB hard drive, 4 Gigs of RAM. It generally does what I need it to do. A problem of late I have been having is if Parallels is running (and another user account is logged in) RAM becomes scarce and processing slows to a crawl. My idea? Stick an internal SSD with SATA interface for my OS and key applications and convert my internal SATA drive into an external firewire drive. I already keep my media files on a Drobo so I don't really need that much storage.
If the MB Air is any indication, for about $120 bucks I can take an old iMac and make it new again. I won't be pounding away at the newest video game or editing 250MB files in photoshop, but I bet it'll do everything else I ask it to quite quickly.
This is just a hypothesis currently. Changes will occur soon and I'll post my benchmarks. Until then, Happy Birthday.
