Probably he based his opinion on speed of progress. In 2006 you could buy Core 2 Duo at 3.0GHz. Modern processor at 4.5GHz would be maybe just 3 times faster in normal, every day, single thread use which seems like a lot, but isn't too much if you think that CPUs 14 years before Core 2 Duo were clocked at 33MHz and IPC slightly below 1.

My dad uses a computer with C2Q CPU and it's still fast enough for everyday use.

Edit: to be clear, he's still wrong, we had quite untrivial IPC increase during all these years. I just wanted to point out that he's comment probably was based on empirical data.