[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.