[Mordisquitos]

The trend over the past three decades of personal computing has been for devices to become exponentially more powerful regardless of the actual computing needs of users. The excess computing power has famously been requested by projects such as SETI@Home and Folding@Home, and been exploited by bad actors for crypto mining. The most basic laptop today used only for web browsing and word processing would be a powerful workstation 20 years ago, when the most basic laptop was also used only for web browsing and word processing (and arguably for more things, as it was all mostly local software).

There is no ceiling to the power of consumer hardware. If it's cheap enough, it will be bought.

[VMG]

most crypto mining has moved to specialists, even where there were deliberate attempts to make it ASIC-resistant

SETI@Home is a very niche use case

and web browsing still happens by connecting to data centers and server farms, not by connecting to another laptop

[Mordisquitos]

I think you missed the point of my message. Web browsing still happens by connecting to data centres, so why are consumer laptops so much more (unnecessarily) powerful today than they were 20 years ago? All the more so given that, at that time, you were running MS Office locally rather than using Office 365 or Google Docs remotely.