[sz4kerto]

I think I have a rusty, almost 5 year old PC lying around. It has an Intel i7-2600K overclocked to 4.6 GHz, 24 GB RAM, 240G SSD and a Radeon 6950 GPU that can run most games well in fHD.

Most of the machines Apple sells are actually slower than this PC.

[atonse]

That's a great exception to the rule. The overwhelming majority of computers Apple is talking about, are probably shitty $400 PCs that were underpowered from day one, which are just barely chugging along.

Because that is actually what most people buy.

[paulmd]

Thing is, OS bloat has finally ground to a halt. Win8.1 wasn't really any slower than 7, and Win10 is actually faster in my experience. So really, you don't need a stronger machine today than you did five years ago. Any perceived slowdown is just the result of malware, fragmentation, and DLL buildup - refresh the OS and maybe install an SSD and they're fine.

I'm using a laptop from 2010 with an i7-720QM and an SSD, and it's perfectly snappy. I frequently let it do light encoding tasks while I'm using my desktop.

[atonse]

Partly. Yes, the operating systems feel faster, but they are all relying more on GPUs for their rendering. And one way cheap Windows PCs keep their costs down is by using cheap integrated GPUs that are quite underpowered.

I use Windows 10 on in VMWare every day at 4k resolution on my retina macbook pro. It feels a bit sluggish, but I know I'm pushing the limits of VM graphics on a laptop with that resolution. But I can only imagine that a computer that's 6-7 years old would start to struggle graphically in Windows 10.

[slantyyz]

I bought a 2008 Macbook as a refurb back in 2009.

Apple didn't think it was worth making Mountain Lion running on it.

Meanwhile, I installed the newest 64 bit version of Windows 10 on it as part of the Insider program, and it generally runs faster than my Lion install.