For everyday user computing tasks, it’s not that Moore’s law is dead so much as just irrelevant. We’ve hit the point of diminishing returns on CPUs getting faster.

Many users have flipped to prioritize power efficiency and quiet operation over speed. And even despite those optimizations, most of their tasks are still bottlenecked as often by their available memory and the quality of their network connection as as their processor.

We just haven’t figured out what to do with all that power in the hands of a user who isn’t super technical, so we’re just spending it on inefficient cruft instead.