The trouble with this attitude, is that it misses the fact that the _range_ of computing power of devices which ordinary people use is probably greater now than

The trouble with this attitude, is that it misses the fact that the _range_ of computing power of devices which ordinary people use is probably greater now than it's ever been. Let's not even get into low end phones in developing countries or bargain basement android tablets, let's stick with something straightforward - an ordinary PC. I took a quick look online, sorting by cheapest first I found something with an AMD 3015e in. Based on cpubenchmark.net that gets a benchmark of 2691. Taking a look at the big list of CPUs I see that's equivalent to a powerful desktop CPU from 2008, or a decent laptop from 2012. (The Apple M2 in the current Macbook Air gets a score of 15369, just for comparison.) So, if you're writing PC software or making a fancy web app and you want everyone to have a good experience with it then you should see how it runs on a terrible new laptop, or a 12 year old good laptop, or a 15 year old powerful desktop. (And yeah we all have SSDs now which is much better than in the old days, and JS is generally single thread, and single threaded CPU performance has not improved so much - but I think my point still stands.)