So how long does it take...

For the technology in a budget $500 laptop to catch up to a top-of-the-line $2500+ laptop of X years ago? Excluding GPU's as that would skew the results.

 

When and where you buy will make a big difference. If you're patient you could probably get a T60p for around $500 on eBay. It was top dog about three years ago, though the notebook market has changed considerably since then.

 

I think 3 years

 

Any basic laptop now with a Celeron 900 is going to have better performance than any laptop until the Core Duos came out in early 2006. You can do a lot better than that, say a T4200, for a $500 laptop with some ram and hard drive space. For $500 the kind of laptop you can get will be the same or better than the most expensive laptop you could buy until 2007. So 2.5 years is a good estimate. Also the modern laptop can be lighter and have more battery life, but these are on top of the traditional 'performance' aspects considered here.

He's not talking about buying one for $500 that was $2500 several years ago, but buying a current one for $500 that has the performance of an older $2500 one.

 

Bottom line is quite the same.. if you got a lot of cash , a $2500 laptop will own a $500 laptop.. however a $500 desktop can own a $2500 laptop...

 

You're not even close to what he asked. he was asking about comparing a 500$ laptop from today to a 2500$ laptop from X years ago in performance. He's basically asking what the "X" would be in this case.

Basically, my mom's 1000$ Pentium laptop can't compare to a 600$ Core 2 Duo(or even Pentium Dual Core for that matter) so he's asking for a similar type of logic. What amount of time does it take for a high end of one generation to become the low end of another?

 

I'll just clarify by adding that Trottel and Forever Melody have the correct interpretation.

 

Given that excepting the GPU it is hard to push a laptop that high in price to begin with, I'm not sure the question has much validity. I mean, even if you go with the top line CPU, a high capacity SSD, and 8GB of RAM in a modern machine, which carry incredibly high price premiums, you still come in under $2500 in most cases if you stick with an IGP. So if you mean to say, "how long does it take top end technology to become bottom end technology", that's one thing, but when you start talking prices, it becomes less meaningful, especially with GPUs excepted.

In any case, I would say roughly 6-8 years, in answer to that question. Basically, look how long it takes for a top end part to be discontinued, then chop off 10%-20% of that time. I'm looking a P4s here, the first ones released in 2000, and they were discontinued in 2008. So around 6-7 years to go top to bottom.

 

Compare any laptop from 6-7 years ago and see how the cheapest piece of junk today has more ram, hard drive, processing power, and battery life. It takes a lot less than 6 years for the top of the line to be outclassed by the budget end.