[eropple]

> They can barely run Safari, iPhoto, Mail.app, and Skype at the same time without constant beachballing

I am skeptical of your anecdote. My 2010 MBP was perfectly happy running Xcode, IntelliJ, and pretty much any other applications I'd care to run, and that was before I put a SSD in it (which, naturally, helped a lot).

I think you're stretching the truth by a great deal.

[path411]

The only application performance a SSD provides is initial load time, and write times.

[eropple]

Depends on what you're doing. It helps noticeably if you're swapping, which I can see an "underspecced" older MBP doing. For me, however, it was disk indexing, Maven being able to quickly read in jars when I hit the go-button, etc.