PCs were incredibly snappy before SSDs, and didn't need much RAM at all. Gnome 1.4 was like lightning, whereas KDE was noticeably slower.
You don't need fast hardware to have snappy apps. Most of the microcontrolled devices you deal with day to day are clocked between 4 and 25MHz. Hard drives are only needed to access files once and load them into memory, and microcontrolled devices have like 256kB-4mB of memory. The only reason apps aren't snappy is programmers fail to make proper use of the hardware and OS.
Another anecdote: I fixed up a computer running vista for a secretary once. It had been running with a hard disk and would take upwards of a minute to load. After replacing the HDD with an SSD, it booted so fast that you got thrown onto the desktop and all of the "startup sounds" played all at once, the system seemingly booting faster than it could cope with!
PCs were incredibly snappy before SSDs, and didn't need much RAM at all. Gnome 1.4 was like lightning, whereas KDE was noticeably slower.
You don't need fast hardware to have snappy apps. Most of the microcontrolled devices you deal with day to day are clocked between 4 and 25MHz. Hard drives are only needed to access files once and load them into memory, and microcontrolled devices have like 256kB-4mB of memory. The only reason apps aren't snappy is programmers fail to make proper use of the hardware and OS.
Another anecdote: I fixed up a computer running vista for a secretary once. It had been running with a hard disk and would take upwards of a minute to load. After replacing the HDD with an SSD, it booted so fast that you got thrown onto the desktop and all of the "startup sounds" played all at once, the system seemingly booting faster than it could cope with!