Yep. Most things most users do on our computers could be done just fine on a computer from 10 years ago. I think we're on a performance treadmill like this:
- Developers get new, fast devices (yay). We make our software just fast enough to run smoothly (enough) on our own devices. Then we ship it.
- Users' computers are slower than the developers' computers. Users experience is bad because the software is slow.
- Users buy new computers too. Money is poured into R&D for even faster computers.
- Hardware companies release faster hardware
- Developers buy new, fast computers
And the cycle continues.
For general purpose computing, there's not really any meaningful difference between my computer today and my computer 15 years ago. But I can't use that old computer, because modern programs don't work well on it any more. I can't imagine how slow modern Discord or Microsoft Teams would run on my old 2012 macbook air - even though that machine is orders of magnitude faster than the computer I was using to chat on IRC in the late 90s.
I'm low key convinced that if computers and phones stopped getting faster tomorrow, the software industry would grumble but get on with things and adapt. Users wouldn't really notice anything change, except we'd all be richer because we would no longer need to buy new computers every few years.
There's a few notable exceptions of course: modern AI, video production & animation, and massive cloud services (like Google and Netflix) who actually optimize their code. I'm on the fence about compilers - do LLVM & rustc really need to be that slow? Netflix might never make it to 8k video (boo hoo). And ray traced video games might not happen. But the average consumer would probably be delighted. And the savings to the environment would be insane.