At present I daily drive a 1.67GHz, 15" PowerBook G4. It's currently 17 years old, single-core, 32-bit. Does what I need to do with no issues --
KDP's web panel, Fiverr, cpanel and Namesilo for hosting my website,
Apple's website, YouTube all work on it, as do LibreOffice, Gmail, iTunes web radio and FreeBSD 13.1. The only reason I'm even thinking about a 13" Pro is because of video conferencing. And that's just what I daily drive -- I occasionally play around with a 19-year-old iBook G3 and a 23-year-old PowerBook G3, both go online sometimes too. And that's not even getting into the emerging takeover of the PC market by smartphones and tablet PDAs that are often weaker than a decade old laptop.
We're coming fairly close to an
end of history with silicon; last I read it's not entirely clear if transistors
can physically be
smaller than 1nm (and even 5nm is a stretch), and if they can, I can't see what objective use that would actually be for 80% of people. Render farms and scientific use, sure, but the progress bar basically no longer exists already unless you're waiting a whole agonizing... six minutes to render a 4K video. What
does exist is the
energy and resources put into manufacturing consumer electronics, most of the metals of which are unrecyclable.