I don't think this is very true. Let's take word processing for example, with say Word 5.1 on a Quadra 700 as a highish end (probably $10k in today's dollars) s

I don't think this is very true. Let's take word processing for example, with say Word 5.1 on a Quadra 700 as a highish end (probably $10k in today's dollars) setup available in around 1992: In a narrow sense typing US English on a keyboard and being able to print it was fairly well solved. It would feel slow to someone with today's machines but it wasn't that bad. On the other hand if you shared with someone else in the early 90s odds are it was by handing off a floppy disk. Did you remember to include the necessary fonts? Oh wait, does the other end have a new enough version of PostScript installed? Does it all fit on one disk? Most languages in the world either required a different OS install or were fully unsupported. Today all of this stuff is pretty well resolved, but at a cost. Easy sharing and interactive collaboration over network is built on protocols like TLS that would be very slow even on the Quadra. The networks that runs over use an amount of compute that rivals supercomputers of the 90s (for one example just look at channel correction in MIMO radios). The disk footprint of all the fonts, languages, etc, is mitigated by storing them server-side, but this is all usable due to how fast networks are now. Machine translation means you can work across a language divide. Dictation is a win for accessibility and avoiding RSI. All of this is available on a Chromebook or iPad that is more reliable than the Quadra, runs on a battery, and is 50x cheaper. We're not done, just as today spell check and grammar check are widely accepted as table stakes in another ten years features like built-in writing coach, editing, and research assistant features will likely be considered basic requirements with all the hardware needed to support that. And that's just word processing.