[MovedGoalPosts]

Thanks for the thoughts.

I suppose it comes down to what an individual buyer considers to be budget components. I still see laptops being marketed with celeron and pentium processors. That to me is the bottom end.

It still strikes me odd that manufacturers seem happy with these low speed HDDs and yet will otehrwise go for a reasonable spec CPU,sometimes a mobile version of a GPU rather than the embedded CPU's graphics, current networking and alls sorts, and yet with SSD's becoming mainstream affordability, there are so few apparent options, even from manufacturers such as Dell who have previously allowed so much customisation.

The hybrid HDD/SDD generally has a slow platter hard drive, coupled with a small amount of the NAND type stuff. Effectively the solid state memory part of the drive acts as a cache and can't be sufficient to hold the relevant parts of the OS and say office to really speed up all of the loading times. Any new data is going to be loaded at normal HDD speeds as it needs to be recorded on the HDD that is the main store. So yes a hybrid helps but only if the user is doing a lot of repetitive stuff.