> other than AI stuff, where does a non powerful computer limit you?

Running Electron apps and browsing React-based websites, of course.

The big one for me is ballooning dependency trees in popular npm/cargo frameworks. I had to trade a perfectly good i9-based MacBook Pro up to an M2, just to get compile times under control at work.

The constant increases in website and electron app weight don't feel great either.

3D CAD/CAM is still CPU (and to a lesser extent memory) bound --- I do joinery, and my last attempt at a test joint for a project I'm still working up to was a 1" x 2" x 1" area (two 1" x 1" x 1" halves which mated) which took an entry-level CAM program some 18--20 minutes to calculate and made a ~140MB file including G-code toolpaths.... (really should have tracked memory usage....)

Simulation, analysis, rendering... All those gobbles memory, CPU, sometimes graphic card. Real time works also: huge data set in real time — sensor for production line or environmental monitoring for example.

For word processing, basic image manipulation, electron app (well...) even the "cheap" Macbook Neo is good enough, and it's a last year phone CPU. But that's not enough for a lot of use case.

> My phone has 16gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage, laptops today are ridiculous compared to anything I studied with.

Most affordable laptops have exactly that, 16gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage. Think about THAT!

I've never have a personal computer that came even close to powerful enough to do what i want. Compiles that take 15 minutes, is really annoying for instance.

>My phone has 16gigs of ram and a terabyte of storage

That's "non powerful" to you?

I’d love it if a clean build and test on the biggest project I work in would finish instantly instead of taking an hour.

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