A 6502 is capable of most actual workloads people have, whose profiles actually haven’t changed much. Almost all of our compute goes to GUI and rendering stacks that decorate our actual work.

The superpower of the PC over the previous generation was an order of magnitude more memory.

The machine itself was not necessarily faster, but the extra memory was a real game changer.

Even segmented like on the 8086 was a better solution than the banking options on 8 bit hardware. The ‘86 segment registers were much more flexible.

Long term, 640k may not have been enough, but in a text based environment, 640k is just so much more from both a data and code aspect to be really empowering.

256k and Lotus 1-2-3 was much more capable than anything an Apple could do. Having much more room for more capable code aspect as well as richer and more data.

You could do gymnastics with code overlays and data paging, but that was hard software to write and just painfully slow.

Extra memory just made things that much better.

I favor simpler machines, but that seems a bit of a stretch. Most people would like to communicate over the internet without every intermediate hop seeing their traffic (so, their emails, their chats, their credit card number, ...), therefore they want TLS which I don't think is practical on a 6502? To say nothing of watching videos and listening to music.

Those people you speak of, how big are their numbers all in all you think? And is that a subgroup of a subgroup?

Because most people I know certainly have different workloads and need their rendering as part of the work, not to decorate it nicely.

But for keeping a distraction free digital diary, it might be a nice device.

Zoom calls?

Maybe Bullshit Jobs was onto something, it seems that my entire work day consists of work decoration.