Hadn't noticed before but speakers haven't suffered the same fate as other tech where additions and improvements of tangential aspects haven't affected the core performance. A modern low/mid-end laptop has increased battery life and lower weight, at the expense of CPU power. Your new printer might have Wi-Fi and bluetooth, but jams and leaks too often and probably has increasingly restrictive cartridge DRM.
A typical $30 bluetooth speaker has great battery life, is portable, usually rugged and often visually well designed too, and still sound as nice or nicer than I (non-audiophile) would expect from such a versatile budget device.
> A modern low/mid-end laptop has increased battery life and lower weight, at the expense of CPU power.
I don't know if I can agree with that. An M1 MacBook Air costs less than a thousand bucks and has more CPU power than anything that was on the market, mobile or not, before 2020.
I bought a $400 laptop in 2011. Trying to upgrade it in the years after for something at the same price point was an exercise in frustration - when almost every new mobile Intel CPU ended with a "U" and had the computation reduction that came with that.
I think you're fooling yourself. A characteristic 2011 mobile part would have been something like a Core i3-2350M, and a very comparable more recent part would have been the i3-8121U. They both had similar prices at launch, same core and thread count, but the later U-series processor is 2-4x faster depending on application and uses less than half the power.
The 2011 laptop was similar to that (i5-2410M) but the one you cite is from 2018. From 2012-2015 browsing for laptop deals to find an equivalent laptop for the same price point wasn't possible, never mind an improvement - I was worried about what to do if mine broke.
And yes the CPUs saw improvements at the same component cost, but actually finding a real laptop with even an equivalent CPU inside at the budget end wasn't possible. The laptops got features in some places, but at a cut processor cost. I'm talking about the lower end of the market (the M1 you mentioned is way way wayyy above there) for people who can afford the bare minimum. As you go up in price you get more options, but the low end was noticeably more difficult to purchase in if you weren't looking for the newer features and just wanted the same benchmarks.
A typical $30 bluetooth speaker has great battery life, is portable, usually rugged and often visually well designed too, and still sound as nice or nicer than I (non-audiophile) would expect from such a versatile budget device.