I think a part of this is that we hit a bottleneck on human data absorption. There's lots of real and hypothetical media formats (like VR) that won't run on a 2009 computer. But so long as you've got your email and websites and video, your machine is still perfectly useful. New computers are doing all those same things. But I remember when the concept of a video running on a computer was just wild.

Moore's law was about transistor counts which have continued upwards, though not at the same place recently. Saying that Moore's law has been long dead because serial performance has not increased by many orders of magnitude is a severe misunderstanding.

>I'm using mid-range CPU from 2009 and performance is still reasonable.

Performance was reasonable ... until the whole speculative execution happened. How reasonable is no Hyper Threading?