I just turned my 5 year old Core 2 Duo Thinkpad into my home server. I was able to put two 1TB drives into it. (Using a laptop has the advantage of builtin screen, keyboard, wifi and wired networking, and most importantly a builtin UPS.) It replaced my previous server (single core AMD from ~2005.) Most noticeably power consumption has dropped from 75W to 14W.

I need 16GB of RAM in order to work with development data sets, and the old Thinkpad chipset can't take more than 4GB. Heck my brand new one is limited to 32GB, so that is probably what will cause my next upgrade. (I'll omit my rant about laptop screens getting worse.)

It is funny that hardware has taken a turn towards slower/lower-end. Appliance computing, I guess. There was a mad dash to make everything as fast as possible, then when it was faster than really required, attention shifted to making computers that are specifically designed for various tasks. Why have one computer that's not really good at anything (but does it fast enough to not care) when you can have a half dozen tiny and power-efficient computers that are great at their job (so good that you don't notice how slow they really are)?

Maybe I live in a different universe, but I feel like computers are so slow these days. How is everyone claiming that are sufficiently fast?

Starting up Outlook takes 10 full seconds (just the splash screen consumes half of that time). When I open up a web browser or click a link in an email, it takes about 5 seconds to fully load. Even distilling a file to pdf or loading Facebook takes almost 5 seconds.

I don't think it's an issue of my computer being particularly slow. Everyone at work with their quad core processors and 6gb of ram seem to just sit and wait without noticing. Have you ever been in someone's office while they search for an email? It takes minutes! And don't even try doing any work while Adobe is trying to update or the Antivirus scanner is running...

I spend so much time waiting for a computer. Waiting for IDEs to redraw, waiting for my computer to let me disconnect my usb drive, waiting for splash screens. What is going on?

There's always going to be slow code. That's a fact of life. That's also part of the "not really good at anything" point I made about general purpose computing. You complain about waiting seconds or minutes like it's outrageous. Instead sit back and think about what that computer is actually doing. I do, and I marvel that it only takes seconds or minutes.

Do you have an SSD?

I do on one computer, and it does make things noticeably faster, but still feels slow compared to how people are describing their computers. I am constantly waiting a couple seconds in between actions.

Indeed. My 2009, 15" 2.53GHz C2D (with 8GB RAM) is still ridiculously fast for most things. I don't play any games, but for development, I don't feel a need to upgrade. I would love to upgrade of course, but that would be out of pure whim, not a need. I'll probably wait till next year's rMBP (hopefully it'll be cheaper and more powerful) and fully expect that machine to work for me till 2018 (that is, unless the battery dies on me).

There were a few features released even after Nehalem which makes me basically uninterested in pre-Westmere CPUs.

AES-NI is the big one. Improvements to VT-x and VT-d for virtualization performance and security are other big ones.

Pure CPU clock hasn't been increasing, and number of cores isn't useful for many tasks due to difficulty programming, but CPU features are still a big deal. FMA with Haswell is going to be a big deal too.

AES is huge. It's the difference between "let me resume that VM for one second and suspend it again" and "well, I'll just wait until the next time I resume it and hope I remember what I was going to do". (Given VMs that live on an encrypted drive.)

Personally, I'm on a 2008 Dell Business Vostro 200 with an Intel Pentium Dual Core (same under the hood as Core 2 Duo, maybe?). I'm gonna upgrade someday, but if this thing is sluggish I don't really notice it at all.

I agree that there was a plateau slightly earlier, but I imagine Nehalem was used as an example because it's consistent with the 4 year cycle mentioned earlier.