Some people doesn't know that, aside of media creation and consumption, we don't need so much power to do other things.
Most of my university assignments were done on a Acer Aspire One netbook (1.3/1.6 GHz Dual Core Atom, 2 GB DDR2 RAM) and I had no problem. To program in C, C++, and Python in Debian is simple great, and to simulate circuits with SPICE related software on Windows 7 is also good.
I started using it because it was more light and more comfortable than the newer laptop I had (15" 4th gen Intel i5 laptop), and as a small device for reading PDF is great, so i ended up using it more and more, and for more tasks, leaving it for exclusive academic usage and letting the other for games and media.
I still have my Samsung NC10, had it running an IRC bot until recently in power save mode with no fans. Opening a modern version of a browser is pretty revealing about how heavier the web has become though.
The NC10 was/is a great machine. Considering the dimensions, it had a remarkably good keyboard. I also liked the "fanless mode". It felt quite sturdy, and, iirc, you could open the screen all the way down, to 180 degrees. The one I had for some time did suffer from its symptomatic "white screen" issue, though.
I did some writing on this machine, and I always felt really concentrated, quite possibly because of the small screen.
Seconding this. The NC10 was an amazing little thing for writing a lot when on the go. Too bad the white screen issues have killed most of them off by now.
As for media creation, SaaS is where its at for weak endpoints. My ancient chromebook battery is going and it could never run CAD, office, or video editing natively, but it runs onshape which is SaaS 3-d CAD, and Google Workspace/suite/apps whatever its called this week, and Wevideo SaaS video editing perfectly fast no slowdowns or problems pretty much ever. The onshape viewer works great on my phone and tablet so if I'm building something far away from my desk, I've got the prints with me. Unlike my desktop keyboard, my tablet touch screen is sawdust-proof.
Another discovery I made a long time ago was network connections are usually fast enough and small battery friendly CPUs are slow enough that its faster to send a video file to AWS (or have it there to begin with), spawn a linux box on AWS, run handbrake in CLI mode to convert the video to some obscure format on a very CPU beefy machine, and download the converted file, and delete the huge (and expensive) AWS instance, than it is to transcode video locally. Some CPU based transcoding is very slow if you don't have a lot of cores and its brutal thermally and to the battery.
If you only have one SaaS app in your life, the old meme was what do you do when the internet is down? Well, the internet is almost never down for me, I'd pick up my laptop and go to a cafe or library if it was, and everything I do is online or SaaS or VPN'd in so I wouldn't crabby about one app being down I'd be crabby about being completely and totally shut down.
That anti-SaaS argument in 2020's is like arguing that people have to drink bottled water because what would they do if tap water stopped working one day? If we're in a situation where the tap water stops working then we got bigger problems than which bottled water company to enrichen.
The linked article seemed surprised that a 2009 device could play video, but I had been using Mythtv for 7 years by that point including occasional HD video on a relatively weak settop box class of computer and doing youtube for awhile so his specs for playback seem very low compared to what I was doing in '09 on small devices, but whatever.
Most of my university assignments were done on a Acer Aspire One netbook (1.3/1.6 GHz Dual Core Atom, 2 GB DDR2 RAM) and I had no problem. To program in C, C++, and Python in Debian is simple great, and to simulate circuits with SPICE related software on Windows 7 is also good.
I started using it because it was more light and more comfortable than the newer laptop I had (15" 4th gen Intel i5 laptop), and as a small device for reading PDF is great, so i ended up using it more and more, and for more tasks, leaving it for exclusive academic usage and letting the other for games and media.