I have been a big fan of the CULV (consumer ultra low voltage) Celeron CPUs ever since they came out. I felt they were a great compromise between a netbook and full featured laptop. I am a really big fan of small laptops, because I need something to do office work and internet browsing on while I'm on the go. My last three have all been 11.6" models in the $300-$400 price range. My first one had a 1.2GHz Celeron dual core, which I bought in 2009. I was really impressed by the power of this CPU considering how little heat it produced. In 2013 I upgraded to a 1.5GHz Celeron (1007U, also great), which still runs just fine, but I have decided to replace it since it will likely fail at some point in the near future due to the number of hours I've put on it.

When I was shopping for a new laptop, I was shocked by some really disturbing trends. First, basically no new models have user removable batteries. I can live with that, but I don't like it. Second, very few of the newer models have upgradable RAM (unless you get something high-end), which is fucking nuts. Third, I cannot seem to find any of the CULV Celerons in the 11.6 or 13.3" form factors. Most of the newer entry levels are based on these awful Braswell N-class Celerons.

The laptop I bought is the Asus E202 (Celeron N3060 2.48GHz in Turbo mode), which has great build quality, but seems to be a lot slower than my four year old Sandy Bridge based 1.5GHZ Celeron. I realise that these are not expensive laptops, but they are in the same class, so it blows my mind how my new laptop fails to deliver. My theory is that the OEMs figured out that the CULV celerons were too good for what they were, and purposely stopped using them so cheapskates like me would be forced to buy a more expensive model.

Can anyone else relate to this experience? Am I the only one that still uses a laptop rather than a fucking phone or tablet?