But its performance-per-watt that people want today, which leads to smaller batteries and longer laptop-time per charge. You can't just buy low-power chips from 5 years ago and hope to keep up with today's technology, the process advantage from smaller transistors is just too powerful to keep up with.

As today's laptops reach 24+ hours per charge, its less about "compute power" and more about "battery life" for most people. The fact is, today's laptops get you both.

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This is actually why I'm intrigued by Intel's P+E cores. The E-cores are from the Atom-line, meaning Intel has effectively made all 12th gen / 13th gen laptops Intel Atoms to some extent. So you have the "netbook" portion of your laptop offering incredible battery life, with the P-cores if you need to run Blender, video games, or some other high-compute problem.

If you're just gonna surf the web and watch videos, the E-cores are more than sufficient and will last over 24 hours (ex: LG Gram)