I still run on a Core 2 Duo from January 2009 as my main machine (a laptop) and it is still plenty fast enough for me. I just don't find the latest generation CPUs to offer me anything that I don't have except doing things "a little bit quicker" but that isn't all that noticeable to me. I suspect this machine will die (in a way that makes fixing it financially unviable) before I out grow it. Visual Studio 2012 starts in ~1 second (warm startup) and performs great. The only issue I have is that Hyper-V (as part of Win8) requires SLAT which my CPU does not support which is annoying but I just use VMware Workstation instead.
For me there has not been enough improvement in CPU features since the Core 2 range was introduced for me to need to upgrade. Sure a Haswell would be nice from a battery life POV but as I am plugged in 99.9% of the time that isn't an issue to me.
For me there has not been enough improvement in CPU features since the Core 2 range was introduced for me to need to upgrade. Sure a Haswell would be nice from a battery life POV but as I am plugged in 99.9% of the time that isn't an issue to me.