Nice. Now try to do the same as (some types of) programmer or 3d modeller or video editor. The newest MacBook with an M2 chip compiles and runs my projects drastically faster than the 2015 Dell XPS Skylake-i7 laptop I used to have and the GPU on the M2 is so ridiculously more powerful it's like going from 3dfx voodoo to a modern GPU.
Did you read the article? The author is, well, an author. They don't program or 3d model. Computation sped wasn't even mentioned in the point they were making.
I guess I don't see the reason to read an article about a specific use-case/point of view, only to follow up and say, "yeah well it wouldn't work for this completely different thing you weren't talking about". It's not the 'gotcha' you think it is.
I’m an author, sometimes. My 2015 MacBook Air has slowed down so much, due to software bloat, it’s painful to use. You need to constantly buy new hardware to run peoples literally exponentially less efficient software
Yes! It's frustrating. I have a perfectly good 2015 MBP 13" that runs as fast as the day I bought it but is now unusable for much of the web, especially video or high Javascript situations. To use YouTube without it being a jetengine you need to force YouTube to return you mp4s instead of vp8 or whatever they use now. Twitch is just unusable is chat moves slightly faster than not at all. Everything in general is a frustrating sluggish mess. My phone is going the same way as well, becoming less and less usable.
But it's not the laptop or phone that's changed, it's the rising tide of tech enthusiasts constantly buying new computers, having their performance QC be "feels OK to me", and that raising everyone's minimum spec.
The worst offender imo is VScode. it won't run smoothly on my 2010 era Thinkpad. yeah it's old, but we're talking about a text editor here. without any plugins it should still be able to do at least that much smoothly.
I don't need AAA games to run on it, but text editing!
I am forced to use VSCode because some disability plugin[1] I use only (for now!) exists for it, but having to switch to it over SublimeText + Vim was annoying. If you don't need to use it definitely try either of those options