from pure CPU and battery life perspective, Snapdragon X Elite based Surface Laptop 7 are really quite good -- comparable to M2 Pro and M3 Pro performance and performance per watt. GPU is a bit weak.
the build quality of surface laptop is superb also.
In the nineties, people were talking about n-tier architectures. This was of course before browsers were a common thing. But we did have networks already since the nineteen seventies. And actually, a lot of the architectural solutions people use today aren't that different from what people were doing a few decades ago. Things like resolving names, passing messages, figuring out security, etc. have been things that people have been figuring out for different systems. If you compare Kubernetes to CORBA for example, you'll see some common features between the two. Not surprising because they both provide a solution for allowing networked components to talk to each other.
Basically, the whole frontend/backend distinction is a simplification. There are more than two layers. And you can probably even identify layers in the frontend as well these days given that a typical SPA actually does a lot of stuff before it even talks to a server. Local browser storage for example is a storage layer. And you probably have some layer in between that and e.g. event handlers.
The reason the frontend/backend boundary is important is because they are physically separated by a network but also have relatively independent life cycles. You don't update them at the same time for example. You might have different versions of the frontend talking to the same backend. Or even multiple different frontend applications. And many companies have multiple backends as well. So, it's an ecosystem of frontends and backends talking to each other. Providing some kind of facade layer for that complexity is of course an obvious solution when you have a complicated backend with its complexity spilling over to frontend layers.
Indeed, there was tonnes of n-tier architecture stuff in Java EE land in the 90s. SOAP - Service Orchestration and Automation was/is another concept from the 90s that is conceptually similar to GraphQL.
I don't like the terms front-end and back-end. In reality applications are using a variety of internal & external services these days, and not all of them are behind a backend necessarily. Your own micro-services are meant to be used in much the same way as any third party's endpoint.
I got some older model (no touch screen, dual-core and only 1GB of ram) and it is indeed amazing. Perfect for work anywhere, when you put a lightweight Linux distro on it.
the build quality of surface laptop is superb also.