Fast machines, slow machines
There&#x27;s actually an answer to this; if you compare the Windows machine to the average spec from the time it was released you&#x27;d probably find comparable performance. This is not a coincidence. What is happening is this: Work is put in to attain the minimum level of performance a paying user will find acceptable. This threshold has not changed, so in general, neither has real performance. The places where modern computers actually strut their stuff is where the paying users care a lot. For example, a game pushes 120Hz at 4K because the paying customer cares. Video editors care about every last bit of performance because at scale each bit becomes seconds to minutes to hours pretty quickly.<p>(There&#x27;s an averaging effect to. That game paying customer might like it if Windows was snappier, but in <i>that</i> market they&#x27;re just another voice in the crowd of people who on average are satisfied with the current status quo.)<p>&quot;Paying customer&quot; is important too because you can almost measure how much social power the user has by how slow the software is. Why is the point-of-sale device in the checkout miserably slow? Why does the device the desk receptionist is using at your national-scale bank need 30 seconds just to pull up your appointment information? Those people have no social power, so they get to just sit and wait while the computer swaps things in and out for a truly simple task. Executives get machines that can switch between email and the browser in a heartbeat with the other 24 gigs of RAM and 6 cores do nothing. Using what machines the developers get as a metric for how much the company cares about them is something smarter developers have been doing for a while; if your developer interviewer uses the 8 minutes it takes their machine to boot to sing the praises of the engineering culture the company has, well... make appropriate judgments.<p>(In 2023 this almost impresses me. Setting up a computer that needs 30 seconds to switch between a calendar and an email is almost a challenge now. You need to harvest those last few precious $10&#x2F;unit to give them <i>really</i> shitty hardware <i>and</i> combine it with an almost sociopathic dedication to layering on enough virus scanning and tracking software to slow down a cheap machine even so. Even the cheap stuff shouldn&#x27;t be that slow!)<p>If you work at it even a bit on Linux, you can set up a very responsive system. You&#x27;ve been able to for a long time, really. But you may find you don&#x27;t get to use the latest and greatest of the heaviest weight desktop system at the time. It&#x27;s a lot easier on Linux to use the stuff from years ago that flies now. Emacs use to be joking referred to as &quot;Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping&quot;; now it&#x27;s a &quot;light-weight&quot; text editor. (Though it doesn&#x27;t <i>quite</i> start instantly for me, it is under a second in my configuration. YMMV.)