Have laptops improved in the past four years?

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ChrisHB Feb 2016 10:29am, 26 Feb 2016 12,596 posts	0 ChrisHB I've broken the USB ports on my laptop and I'm looking at buying a new one. It looks to me as if what I can get for £300-£400 hasn't changed in four years. There is a bit more memory (I want that), and the hard drive is a bit bigger (don't need it). I want more than two processors. That doesn't seem to be an option. I've only looked at half-a-dozen, but if it's a pointless task, I'll save myself the effort
simbil Feb 2016 11:40am, 26 Feb 2016 7,184 posts	0 simbil Off the top of my head, you should be able to get an i3 in that price range - they have 2 cores. You'd need an i5 for quad core and they are more like £400+ machines, but you might find something. Biggest change recently has been SSDs being cheaper and more common. My laptop has an SSD for the OS and spinning disk for data. Works very nicely - boots up in less than 5 seconds and most things run a bit more quickly. I'm not sure you will get an SSD at your price point, but worth a look.
ChrisHB Feb 2016 12:01pm, 26 Feb 2016 12,597 posts	0 ChrisHB Thank you. I was reading only the other day that SSDs get slower with age - is that a factor in a laptop? I would guess not. I don't mind going up in price for a real benefit.
CStar Feb 2016 12:35pm, 26 Feb 2016 5,492 posts	0 CStar Can't see why SSD's would get slower. There are no physical parts to wear out unlike a trad HDD. I got an SSD equipped laptop as I broke several HDD's through cycling to work.
simbil Feb 2016 1:03pm, 26 Feb 2016 7,186 posts	0 simbil SSDs have a limited number of read and writes before they wear out. As bits wear out they get flagged as bad blocks and data gets fragmented as it has to fit around the problem areas and so it slows down. So you want to put stuff on them that does not change too much and is easily replaceable, like the OS, and you want to get a good one that lives for millions of cycles rather than thousands.