Sometimes they rush them to the market and then do more research and testing and find a way to make a smaller version; it just takes some time.

that technology!

because thats technology for you. Faster better sleeker smaller, thats what sells and company research departments continually strive to have the edge over their competition, and it also serves them well because the smaller it is, the lower the cost of materials, packaging, shipping, handling, etc.

It's called 'evolution'.

Over time, manufacturing techniques improve. For instance, my old P4 uses a 130nm die for it's CPU while newer chips use as small as 45nm. That alone allows chips to run cooler, requiring less weight/bulk for cooling, and more efficiently, allowing for either longer battery life or smaller batteries. Similar advances have occurred in other areas, such as LCDs. It used to be that a 15" LCD monitor cost two arms, a leg, and a testicle. Now they are cost-competitive with CRTs. And Batteries too. When I was into R/C cars, a 7.2V 1200maH battery pack was a big thing; about the size and weight of 6 C-cells (they used "sub-C" cells). The AA bateries in my digital camera hold 2500maH; twice as much. And RAM. My GAWD!!! I could pick up 4GB for my tower for half of what 1MB used to cost for a Mac Plus. That leads into another area: cost. If an item costs too much then consumers won't buy it. If consumers won't buy it then companies won't make it. Now, is something costs a company $500 to make then they won't sell it for less than $1000. However, if they can cut costs by going with something bigger, heavier, but cheaper then they can cut their costs remarkably, which in turn lowers the street price of the end product to the point where a consumer may at least consider it. And once they start making a profit off of the product, the people that supply parts to them realize a profit too, do a little R&D to figure out how to cut THEIR costs, and so on. Next thing you know, there is something 20% lighter and smaller at the same cost to the company making the end product (and thus, the same cost to the consumer). And since companies like to refresh their designs every so often to enhance salability, why not take advantage of the new advances in technology that allows something smaller, sleeker, and sexier? Of course, there are always high-end guys who will get the sleek, sexy stuff years ahead of time, and they pay a premium for that. Look at all of the people who paid $1,500 for a 15" LCD monitor only to have them made obsolete a few months later by a $900 17" model. So it's a balance between technological advance and the laws of supply and demand. If you wanted to spend $1,000,000 then you could get a netbook faster than many supercomputers out there, but as time and technology march on, that will seem increasingly quaint at best. The $130 HP48G calculator I bought 10 years ago has more computing power than our entire planet did a century ago and more than Collosus and Eniac did half a century ago. Even the ECU in your car that controls the fuel injectors and ignition timing is more powerful than anything the US government had access to in WWII, and those systems occupied warehouses. The ECU in my 1990 Civi

Technology, isn't great.