Comment by JoshTriplett
2 months ago
> There is no price/performance improvement.
Both performance and performance-per-watt continue to improve with each new generation of CPUs.
2 months ago
> There is no price/performance improvement.
Both performance and performance-per-watt continue to improve with each new generation of CPUs.
But that is squandered by piss-poor programming and stupid visual gimmicks.
I had to return to Windows as a daily work platform after a long time away (on Macs). I already knew that it had devolved into a grotesquely defective, regressive parade of UI blunders and deleted functionality... but its actual performance is TERRIBLE. I'm waiting for simple operations that I wouldn't have expected to wait for 20 years ago, even on bog-standard office desktop machines.
Yes, occasionally using old systems from decades ago can drive this home.
Copying a tiny file at 1.1 MB/s should feel instantaneous. But on Win 10 and Win 11 with an SSD, you can get a multisecond progressbar. And if you dare to cancel this tiny operation (because you chose the wrong destînation or wrong file), you get another progressbar.
Opening a folder window for a local directory with only a few items in it should never trigger a "Working on it…" message. It should be instantaneous.
Searching for filenames with a substring "foo", when an item "foobar" was already visible on the screen, should never result in failing to find "foobar", nor in a long delays before showing any items. VoidTools Everything displays live results as you type. Windows 10/11 often fails on both counts even when searching "indexed" locations; Outook also seems to also suffer from this inability to reliably include in search results items that were already on display. Something is deeply wrong with search.
Devs should be required test against machines hobbled to run at most 10% of rated speed, and to make it buttery smooth.
Would also be nice to have all my screenspace back by being able to turn off what appears to be Simply Enormous Margins & Padding mode…
it really depends what you are using your computer for
a 128GB SoC m4 pro max can do pretty wild data science with close to a terabyte/second speed without the latency of typical offloading/back-and-forth
I don't think many people are running Windows on that...
You're not wrong. But, I recently did the mistake of upgrading my iPad to version 26 (the liquid glass version). I had a relatively smooth experience on my 6 year old tablet which now runs painfully slowly. Even scrolling through different parts of home-screen lags.
My point being, with time performance might go up. But instead of that making my device faster/long-lasting, developers use that extra performance to cram in more stuff, at the end of which I come out only slightly better if not worse (as is in my case)
I sympathize completely. My Apple TV 4K 2nd gen is a laggy, unresponsive piece of crap after the tvOS 26 update.
You're not wrong, but I was disappointed recently by how well an eleven-year-old Macbook Air still works. I installed NixOS on it, and it's still pretty usable even on modern websites.
An eleven year old computer is still useful, which is kind of cool, but also kind of bothers me in that apparently we haven't made enough progress in software to justify buying new hardware, apparently.
Progress in software is supposed to just needing more computing resources by your definition? As in, basically slowing everything down? Well, we got local AI for that I guess.
I'm not saying that things should slow down arbitrarily, but I feel like we should have progressed more to use the resources. A Windows 95 computer would not be expected to run much made in 2006, and that's because we added a lot to the experience that required more resources.
Thank the web for that. We have lost more control of our devices and our privacy; the more we depend on the web and SaaS. We need to get back to writing native software, be it for Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS, or Windows. We need to make the local device the priority.
Well said. Vote with your wallet. Use software that doesn't require an internet connection, write software that doesn't use s3 or online dependencies, stop patronizing online gaming communities, no adobe, no QuickBooks cloud, , pirate apps(not because it's free, because they work offline)
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