@arrjay @Shrigglepuss It really was around that exact time, isn't it?

4-8GB of RAM was good enough for almost everything, we had multi-core processors for parallel tasks, we had GHz clock speeds. Our screens were all at least "high definition" LCDs. Nehalem was kind of a game changer, especially for laptops (lower TDP, good iGPU, some good modern features), and SSDs getting cheaper were the last bottleneck surpassed.

Everything since then was either minor, a huge cost/size/power increase, or actually inconvenient as fuck and less durable.