Indeed. If you have a late 2008 all Intel laptop with a Penryn CPU and an X25-M SSD (fiendishly expensive at that time) to this day, six years later, it's hard to see what's the point of getting another laptop.

For a few more years, the decreasing costs of SSDs were giving incentive but yes, once you have that, what incentive remains? The high resolution screen is still more trouble than advantage.

I was purchasing newer and newer ThinkPads for a few more years, until I could put 16GB (for a sw developer, having lots of RAM is helpful) in a 14" model, then stopped at the T420 in 2011 and that's the end of laptops for me for the foreseeable future.

The substantial improvements in battery? Better screens (brighter, better fov, more resolution 2008 laptops had atrocious screens)? More portable designs? USB3? Better trackpads and keyboards? More durable designs?

I second the battery and screen improvements.

And perhaps increased CPU performance because I like short compile times please.