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No doubt. I don't think he was suggesting that new stuff stop, only that the planned obsolescence do so. Does your Mom really need that 1.8GHz Pentium 4 with 768MB RAM and an 80 GB hard drive that uses a video chipset with enough power to put the computers that made Toy Story to shame? Nope.

Yep. Because she does more then "basic" tasks. She uses iTunes now to rip CDs to her hard disk, then uses it to burn custom CDs back for her car. She still is a computer novice, but can find things to do with it beyond typing. She has also used her laptop to watch DVD movies in bed, something she never thought of before.

My grandparents are the same way. I got them an iBook last christmas, and already they took it with them on vacation for DVD playback. If she gets a new camera, it's likely to be a digital one, now that she has iPhoto.

The faster the computer goes, the less impatient they are with them, and more likely to use it for more then e-mail. Want to explain to my mother why it takes 3 hours to rip a CD to the hard drive if it was a Pentium 200?

This is one reason I started liking Apple more once Jobs came back. He showed the company selling solutions is better then selling a computer. Advertise the iMac as a movie editing machine, and not a computer, and look what happened. If you show consumers new uses for the computer, they may adopt one to do it. And again, they don't care how or why, but how fast it can do it. So, the need for faster systems.