My computers from 15 years ago, PC or Mac, did all of these things--even high-res FPS games--beautifully. If all you do is surf/email/music/video/games--and I

My computers from 15 years ago, PC or Mac, did all of these things--even high-res FPS games--beautifully. If all you do is surf/email/music/video/games--and I don't think it requires a citation to believe that this is the lion's share of users--current speeds are beyond sufficient. The quality issues in modern machines are the byproduct of a quantity-cult pissing contest rather than necessity. If anything, the excesses are only wasted by sloppier software (which was enabled by the excess to begin with), piggier websites, covert crypto miners, etc. Wirth's law is a vicious cycle. And it's a false economy: cut corners on the clean-up of discarded speculative branches, get some great numbers on the latest benchmark; the chipmakers who stoop to this get an edge in the market, but by the time it hits the consumer (who has no understanding of such things), the mitigation costs exceed the original "improvement". Because it is such a multi-variate & workload-dependent situation, it may not be cut-and-dry fraud, even though it smells a lot like it.