I think they are over-cluttered! They need to cater for so many types of "ordinary" human using them, so do have to be as wide-ranging as possible.
The trouble is that as fast as the computer designers up-rate the memory and processing power, the major "ordinary" software developers and ISPs fill the extra space with gimmicks and junk.
At the same time, companies like Microsoft assume they know better then you, what you want or need. So as they create more and more twaddle they make the application functions harder and harder to find,and cut more and more of anything genuinely useful from programmes like "Excel"!
The AM display at the moment occupies only about a third of the screen. Down one side and across the bottom are advertisements of no relevance or interest to me (but I suppose fund AM). Worst is a ridiculous caption, "Remember 'The Human Barbie'? Well, You Should See Her Now", below a photograph of a beautiful young woman. Well, I don't remember her, but I suspect the link opens a recent photo of her now elderly. Posted by someone called "IcePop", it advertises nothing but if I am right, and I do not intend to fall for it, it is merely cruel, pointless, voyeurism and I am surprised AnswerMug allows it.
More creepily, some ads have my town name attached - in England, on an American web-site. Advertisers track users to aim advertisements in what they think a personally-attractive way. It doesn't work on me!
Not just computers. Telecomms too, are far too complicated. You cannot do a simple task simply these days. Everything has to be as complicated and awkward as possible.
I have a fairly old, very basic Nokia portable 'phone, without azure dentures, Whyfly, Interweb an' all. Advised to change its registration from Orange to EE for better coverage for the same number and still PAYG, I took it to my local EE shop - and came out bamboozled and baffled into signing a total broadband package promising at least 2Mb/s + land-line rates plus a portable 'phone contract, and a brand-new, all-singing-&-dancing LG 'phone of bewildering complexity; and bulkier than the Nokia. Camera, Internet access and all - no, I didn't buy a "selfie-stick"!
The apparent attraction was that the package was significantly cheaper than the BT Broadband + land-line phone package - but the saving would be offset by having to pay a monthly fee to retain my e-post address, and by 'phone contract fees higher than I'd spend on PAYG.
Over the next day I realised I'd been hooked. I used the UK's contract law that allowed me to cancel the EE broadband, and reverted to BT but on a new contract of similar cost as EE's. Unfortunately EE says it cannot cancel the phone part of the agreement: sharp practice?
EE has now switched my phone to the LG. I have no idea how to use it or if it needs further registering with EE or what. It does want me to register with Google - for yet more money? I don't know, so won't risk it.
I worked for 20 years in a physics lab but the sophisticated electronic measuring systems there came with proper manuals and were relatively simple to use once you understood the measurements. This 'phone didn't and isn't, though it seems LG manuals are available on-line.
EE's automatic messages confuse whether it is on contract or PAYG (much cheaper for me). At home I can still contact anyone thanks to BT, but I now have the long and difficult task of trying to learn to use the 'phone feature built into a portable Internet computer otherwise of little real value to me. Until then I no longer have what I want: a portable telephone I can use hopefully at any time anywhere, of genuine need.
All I wanted and needed was an exchanged, same-number, PAYG SIM card for a still-serviceable 'phone! As simple as that!
So to answer your question, not just computers over-powered. So are telephones. And so are the companies who sell all this equipment.
True - but it's not the computer but the software that is the problem. Much of it demands high power, even though for doing the same work you used it for 10 years ago on slower processors, thanks to all the superfluous extras.
I appreciate that point - I don't use my computer as a games or entertainments machine either - but I was thinking of all the rammel attached to what ought be straightforward software for word-processing, calculations and filing, communications etc.
As for ones' own data file... I used to call what ended up on our lab computers at work, "Garden Shed Computing". They became filled with any number of old test-data files, some simply labelled "test" or "crap" from simply ensuring the system was performing properly for its intended use.
"We need a bigger computer" would be the cry. # "Yes", I'd say, "so you can stuff in even more gash data from things tested ages ago and not needed now. Like needing a bigger garden shed because the present ones is bursting at the seams, rather than simply clearing out the broken deck-chairs and rusty tools and gone-off paint!"
Element 99 