Comment by inetknght

I was working as a janitor, moonlighting as an IT director, in 2010. Back then I told the business that laptops for the past five years (roughly since Nehalem) have plenty of horsepower to run spreadsheets (which is basically all they do) with two cores, 16 GB of RAM, and a 500GB SATA SSD. A couple of users in marketing did need something a little (not much) beefier. Saved a bunch of money by not buying the latest-and-greatest laptops.

I don't work there any more. Today I am convinced that's true today: those computers should still be great for spreadsheets. Their workflow hasn't seriously changed. It's the software that has. If they've continued with updates (can it even "run" MS Windows 10 or 11 today? No idea, I've since moved on to Linux) then there's a solid chance that the amount of bloat and especially move to online-only spreadsheets would tank their productivity.

Further, the internet at that place was terrible. The only offerings were ~16Mbit asynchronous DSL (for $300/mo just because it's a "business", when I could get the same speed for $80/mo at home), or Comcast cable 120Mbit for $500/mo. 120Mbit is barely enough to get by with an online-only spreadsheet, and 16Mbit definitely not. But worse: if internet goes down, then the business ceases to function.

This is the real theft that another commenter [0] mentioned that I wholeheartedly agree with. There's no reason whatsoever that a laptop running spreadsheets in an office environment should require internet to edit and update spreadsheets, or crazy amounts of compute/storage, or even huge amounts of bandwidth.

Computers today have zero excuse for terrible performance except only to offload costs onto customers - private persons and businesses alike.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43971960