And even if the 240 million laptops were all 24" ultra wide behemoths, that’s still only ~146,304 km; not even half the average distance to the moon.
I wouldn’t even call the article hyperbole, but if we take the author in good faith, then they’re just terrible at math.
You’re not really out of the loop, this was more than 20 years ago: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd