Agreed - my P90 could seamlessly transfer video from a camera, build Mozilla from source, and surf the web while never missing a frame on music playback. Even now that's not a given, although SSDs have made it at lot less common than it used to be with iTunes.
Speaking of SMP, it's also sad that whenever an x86 or ARM or whatever CPU with more than 4 cores is announced, what's the first thing tech media and most people say? "Who can make use of more than 4 cores anyway?" or "There aren't any programs that can take advantage of more than 2 cores.".
I've never understood how people seem to ignore the fact that you can run more than one CPU intensive application at the same time or even have breathing room for light applications while most cores are busy heavy processing.
I can easily saturate all the cores you throw at me with the usual tasks I'm busy with at a computer, so give me more cores, more memory. And I run highly parallel tasks like image or video processing or compiling code.
On latest Linux kernel from SSD to USB or USB to USB with it's easy to lock up the copying application or even whole machine while data is flushed. It's less of an issue with deadline or bfq i/o schedulers, but it's still there. Now, we copy around at least gigabytes these days, but still. When I was using a Mac, the first thing I always did was to completely disable Spotlight (including all indexing).
