I'd argue that's a myth. If you use peripherals from 2012, and do simple office tasks, maybe. Try watching 4K (or FHD 50 fps) video on a 4K display on Sandy Bridge with a GPU from that era. Try editing iPhone video and raw photos. Even compiling Linux is order of magnitude faster, because of 20 faster threads instead of 4.

I agree. I/O has improved substantially and AMD _isnt_ uncompetitive anymore. It’s kind of wild watching the CPU space change every six months or so.

Speaking as someone who did have a computer from 10 years ago as the main computer until a year ago, no, it's very realistic. At no point did I come across a game that was "my computer isn't powerful enough to play this game." Even compiling large projects is less helpful than you'd think: a clobber build is still context-switch-while-it-finishes, and incremental builds usually don't build enough for all of the extra threads to be worth it.

Sure, maybe my computer might have screamed at me if I tried to watch AV1 or H.265 4K video, but... my computer is 10 years old and so is my monitor, so I don't have a 4K monitor. And, quite frankly, I don't see the point upgrading from 1080 to 4K.

Try editing iPhone footage on a modern CPU with a chunky GPU, I dare you.

It saves footage in a very inefficient format which is horrible to edit with, so it'll be slow and clunky on anything.

I wonder what percentage of the population edits video on their computer. I don’t but I have no idea if I’m just weird or something.

Probably not that many, but the parent post to mine specifically mentioned editing iPhone footage.

A lot of people editing iPhone footage are going to use a phone-native app like CapCut, but even with that coping with the horribly inefficient compression of h.264 and h.265 footage gets them up to egg-frying temperature very quickly.

Editing 4k videos/raw photos is an outlier as far as PC tasks go.

Your argument "that's a myth" is based on a task that's so small in terms of percentage it's literally a rounding error.

I'm typing this on a 2010 computer (i7 870 @ 2.93GHz, 16GB RAM), which I also use to write software (C, Lazarus, JS, Go using VSCode, Vim, Emacs), browse web, use web apps (miro, tinkercad, asciiflow, a few others).

Inkscape works acceptably, light image retouching using Gimp works acceptably.

I used to play Starcraft II, Far Cry 3/4/5 on this machine until an upgrade nuked my Wine installation and I didn't bother to fix that.

My steam library is filled with games that work on this machine.

Out of the thousands of tasks that people use their computer for, two of them can't be done acceptably on this machine.

From a reliability perspective, 28nm planar transistors are more durable than the FINFETs of later generations.

Components using planar transistors will last longer.

This does not help save your electrolytic capacitors, which are a primary limiter of an electronic device's longevity.

> electrolytic capacitors

I still need to get around to replacing mine with tantalums…

My wife was rocking an Ivy Bridge MacBook Air until just this year and it was working totally fine on all non-browser activities. The only thing that caused her to switch (which she didn't want to do) was that her browser with the 300 tabs open was crawling to a halt.