What’s truly scary is how much of this capacity and power is wasted
You might think that.. but how many people want to watch a bluray on their laptop, or maybe edit that video they took on their fancy phone? As above, video used to be very intenstive, and HD video was a few years ago. Also ripping CDs used to take quite a while.
I bet a lot of the websites you see nowadays wouldn’t work very well on a PC from 2000. I think you forget how much better the overall experience is now than it was then. Remember we don’t demand all this power just to enable us to have semi-transparent windows on our desktops – the likes of Intel, AMD, Nvidia and ATI are making new stuff because they can and because numbers sell PCs and they need to compete. Microsoft and co just use it because it’s there.
Also don’t underestimate how much cheaper basic stuff is now. Back in the early 90s when a 50MHz cpu seemed pie in the sky, everyday desktop PCs were about a grand. Now you can get a pretty decent sub notebook with a very useable spec for a third of that in actual money terms, never mind real terms accounting for inflation.