This seems to be an argument for not buying new computers. I don’t entirely disagree with you. I would say that a lot of compute resources are used to make us

This seems to be an argument for not buying new computers. I don’t entirely disagree with you. I would say that a lot of compute resources are used to make user interfaces more impressive, but not necessarily better than what could be done if we designed interfaces around lower resources. However that isn’t what we’ve done. Older computers often can’t run software that is useful today even if the software they could run when they were new still does the job. Things like file formats and web standards have moved on and are not backwards compatible, and a lot of what people use computers for is communication, so that matters.