As I sit here using my 2021 MacBook Pro 16” that is twice as fast as my old Mac, with 16 hours of battery life, can run Chrome and Slack without dispersing enough heat to fry an egg all while not sounding like a 747, I can definitely say laptops have changed immensely.
I also have a 2009 Dell Laptop 2.66Ghz Core 2 Duo with 8GB RAM running Windows 2010 that I just cleaned up to give my parents. None of the above is true.
Chrome and Slack are both resource hogs from hell. No one is arguing that the specific innards haven't changed a lot. They are arguing that for a lot of people, depending on what you are doing and what you need, can get by just fine on a laptop that is few years to 15 years old and be perfectly happy.
You are also trying to compare a laptop an entirely different architecture that literally just came out to the other.
I mean, honestly, there were plenty of "arm laptops" the past 20 years and a lot of them ran cold to the touch and got 16+ hours of battery life. I know as I had several (Psion netbooks etc). The new Macs are latest evolution of H/PCs that have been around for decades. They just happen to be much faster ;)
I didn’t choose an obscure use case like compiling the Linux kernel while editing 4K video. Chrome is a popular choice among Mac users.
On the other hand, you would be surprised how well Office365 runs on Windows 10 on my old Core2Duo 2.66Ghz Dell. It also has a beautiful 1920x1200 display before laptops went 16x9 and Gigabit Ethernet.
It was originally a company laptop for a failed startup I worked for and was to use to run Windows CE emulators while developing using .Net compact framework.
I've never seen people refer to processors by their ghz without giving a generation designation. I think stating what generation/model of c2d it is would be a far more effective means of communication that stating its ghz.
I had a dell studio with a t9660 that was a pretty good machine way back in the day. But you should refer to the cpu by its model number rather than by its ghz performance, since nobody will be able to identify it from that.
I also have a 2009 Dell Laptop 2.66Ghz Core 2 Duo with 8GB RAM running Windows 2010 that I just cleaned up to give my parents. None of the above is true.