In 2006 I made a video for my Australia study abroad program. The final cut took a day and a half of continuous rendering on a 800Mhz G4 with 1.5 GB of RAM. And the video produced was only at VGA res. Wimpy, I know.
Here we are in 2011 and I'm on a three year old dual core 2.4Ghz MacBook Pro with 4GB of memory. I cannot even play back three layers of fully-rendered 1080p content in FCP without a decent number of frames being dropped.
Takeaway:
If I don't buy a new computer every year or two, I'm immediately left behind in the world of Steve Jobs.