>2011 desktop CPUs will perform about half as well as a modern laptop one. Maybe, but the fat client-thin client pendulum has swung back in favor of thin clien

>2011 desktop CPUs will perform about half as well as a modern laptop one. Maybe, but the fat client-thin client pendulum has swung back in favor of thin clients to the point that CPU performance is generally irrelevant (it kind of has to be, since most people browse the Web with their phones). As for games, provided you throw enough GPU at the problem acceptable performance is still absolutely achievable, but that's not new either. >a pretty common requirement these days for zoom, slack, teams and video streaming sites such as YouTube It really isn't: from experience the hard line for acceptable performance is "anything first-gen Core iX (Nehalem) or later"- Core 2 systems are legitimately too old for things like 4K video playback, however. The limiting factor on older machines like that is ultimately RAM (because Electron), but provided you've maxed out a system with 16GB+ and an SSD there's no real performance difference between a first-gen Core system and an 11th-gen Core system for all thin client (read: web) applications. That said, it's also worth noting that the average laptop really took a dive in speed with Haswell and didn't start getting the 10% year-over-year improvements again until Skylake because ultra-low-voltage processors became the norm after that time and set the average laptop about 4 years back in speed compared to their standard-voltage counterparts: those laptops genuinely might not be fast enough now, but the standard-voltage ones absolutely are.