How long is Core 2 Duo going to be relevant?

[Smartazz]

All I need is Office, Chrome and remote desktop connection.

 

[2is]

Is it worth waiting for Haswell Ultrabooks as opposed to Ivy Bridge now?

Well, I'm in a similar boat as you are. I have a C2D Macbook Air that I want to upgrade, but it's good enough to hold me over until Haswell. I would wait if I were you.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I would expect 3 hours of battery life for several older generations of AMD laptops, but not a modern one.

My Acer Aspire One 722 C-60, gets 5-6 hours surfing, or 3 hours Skype.
My Asus X401A B970 gets around 5 hours, doing whatever, it doesn't seem to matter. (Although it is throttled on battery power to 800Mhz, and Aero Glass is disabled.)

 

[imported_PowerHouse]

I am running a Dell Latitude E6400 with a 3.066GHz C2D-M T9900 with 8GB of RAM and an SSD. It handles my tasks with ease; productivity tasks and some programming. When I am running on battery I usually lock the cores down to 800MHz and it is still plenty of power. I have no plans to upgrade to something newer when it handles everything perfectly.

 

[Zodiark1593]

At the moment, my friend has her Core 2 Duo T6600 (Penryn) lappy I underclocked to 1.0 GHz, and it handles anything she throws at it just fine and dandy. Even gaming, only the more demanding of games require anything more than a modest clocked Core 2 due.

 

[Concillian]

I have an SSD in the laptop and it's still pretty fast for what I need it for which is basically just web surfing and office work.

Core2 is pretty adequate for this. I think it'll be quite a while before you can truly "justify" the replacement.

Computers for those kinds of tasks are a lot more like refrigerators now, where there are only 3 good reasons to replace them:

1) it broke and you need to replace it
2) the new models have improved power efficiency to the point that it's cost effective in the long run to buy a new model.
3) you want a better / fancier / more fully featured one and you're willing to spend mone on one even though it doesn't ever reach the point that there is a "return on investment."

For what I've been using MS Office for in the last 15 years (Engineering work in Excel, presenting that information in Power Point and editing procedural documents in Word) there has been VERY little change in the office suite outside from dicking with the UI that only change the keyboard and/or mouse functions of how you access the same functions I've been using. Very, very little adding functionality. These kinds of applications are not going to stress a CPU anytime soon, with the exception of things like running Monte Carlo simulations using an Excel spreadsheet (which I actually have done before.)

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

P.S. With a 1.4GHz low-voltage C2D--I didn't even know they made those--I would hope the Air got decent battery life. My laptop is 4 years older, and is faster (but, gets ~2.5 hours light use, ~1 with the GPU loaded down).

They did. It's the same ULV chip in my 1st generation Alienware M11x.