Comment by 0xbadcafebee

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.