[brk]

Around that time I was building "high end" PCs for friends and friends-of-friends. I remember the average price stayed around $2500, but the component availability iterated pretty quickly in terms of processor, HDD size/interface, graphics, standard RAM, etc.

A 2 year old PC felt woefully underpowered in that era, and a 4 year old PC was almost useless if you wanted to use any "current" software. You'd be out of drive space, unable to run a lot of programs/games, and limping along.

Now, my 8 year old Macbook Air is still more or less as functional and useful as it was when I got it.

[labcomputer]

> Now, my 8 year old Macbook Air is still more or less as functional and useful as it was when I got it.

This is my frustration with Apple's policy of dropping support for hardware in MacOS. It made sense in the 90's to upgrade every 2-3 years because you got 1.5-3x more performance each time. So 6 year old hardware was almost an order of magnitude less capable.

Fast-forwarding to today, a "legacy" 10 year old ("Mid-2011") MacBook Pro supports just as much memory (16GB) as Apple's current M1 offerings. The M1 does put up some very impressive numbers on the single-thread CPU front, but that's because we've gotten used to such small progress every year--it's only about 2x the speed of the 2011 MBP for single thread tasks.

[cronix]

> It made sense in the 90's to upgrade every 2-3 years because you got 1.5-3x more performance each time.

You still get that level of performance increase. It's just that it's to the point of being imperceptible, or invisible, to the vast majority of users. The only ones who really notice are the ones really pushing the machines with things like 3d rendering, 12k video production, and high end audio (I can run 80 plugins now where I could only run 70 before!).

Texting? Doesn't matter how fast your machine gets, you won't notice. It will perceivably perform just as good as a phone that texted 20 years ago. You can run benchmarks and see, oh yeah, this is faster, but it's not noticeably faster to your human inputs.

In the days of 300 baud modems, they were so slow you could actually read text as it was sent over the line, as if someone was just a very fast typist and you were watching them. Now, you get full multiple pages of text with videos that pop up almost instantaneously. Once we got to 1200 baud, it was too fast to read as it was coming over the line. You couldn't catch up. Ever since that threshold was crossed, it doesn't matter how fast speeds get, they're all faster than the human brain can absorb so they are basically the same in our minds.

[pomian]

Except for the web. Which seems to get slower and slower due to bloat and overload, no matter your computer or internet speed.

[ibiza]

Isn't the corollary then, that if we didn't upgrade our computers, the web would get faster, or at least not get any slower?

[ubermonkey]

Yeah, it's great, but it's also less fun.

Our 9-year-old Air went to live with friends who suddenly needed another computer (for their kid) at the beginning of COVID. It still works fine, though some sites are slow.

Sure, APPLE isn't releasing updates for it anymore, but that doesn't actually affect whether or not Word runs, or whatever.

I'll also say that biggest and most dramatic upgrade I ever had was moving from a 1988 AT clone to a 1991 386/33 (Gateway 2000, baby). We'd pick a directory with loads of files in it and do a dir just to watch it scroll by so insanely fast. Simpler times for sure.

The next most impressive upgrade I ever had was about 10 years ago. I had a 2010-era Macbook Pro (early Intel) that shipped with a spinning drive, back before everything was SSD. At some point in its life -- it was ultimately stolen in 2012, so call it 2011 -- I swapped the spinner for an SSD and OH MY GOD THE DIFFERENCE.

No other machine upgrade in my 30 years of computing has come close to the "holy shit!" moments of these two. I wonder if my ultimate shift to Apple Silicon will bring some of that -- I hear good things, so I hope so.

[zozbot234]

> I swapped the spinner for an SSD and OH MY GOD THE DIFFERENCE.

FWIW, that difference isn't nearly as noticeable under Linux. It's so lightweight on RAM and so good at caching frequently-accessed data that it can be incredibly snappy even when using spinning rust. SSDs mostly speed up your boot process and the rare IO-heavy workload. Though it wasn't until the late 2000s-early 2010s that RAM began to be truly abundant on out-of-the-box configs, and that was the same timeframe as the switch to SSD's.

[tonyarkles]

I strongly disagree, especially when running RAM-heavy applications where background tasks end up getting put in swap to make room for caches. For quite a while, there was actually an issue where the OOM-killer didn’t get triggered because swapping to the SSD was so fast that certain timers in the OOM system would never trigger. Instead of recognizing that the system has become completely unusable and killing off a process, it would just sit and thrash uncontrollably.

If I recall, Ubuntu 16.04 still suffered from this. And Android Studio could very reliably trigger this situation on my older/upgraded early i7/16GB RAM/SSD laptop. Hard power cycle to recover.

[lproven]

I totally disagree.

When I was preparing to emigrate in 2014, I put an SSD and a big HDD in my desktop-replacement laptop, and the transformation was a revelation. Ubuntu 14.04 went from booting in only a minute or so to booting in a single-digit number of seconds. It was astonishing.

[SavantIdiot]

> my 8 year old Macbook Air is still more or less as functional and useful as it was when I got it.

Right? I remember the enormous performance jumps from 286 to 386 to 486DX2 to Pentium to P6S...

Today, I'm still using a late 2013 MBP. Other than the lame 128GB of disk space, it is still my primary machine and is fine for everything I do. Most of my work is done in the cloud anyway so its essentially a 1970's dumb terminal.

[sgtnoodle]

My i7 desktop from 2011 is still strong, but I was in the hospital ICU last year and promised myself I would build a zen 3 desktop. It's a bit more stable, and the pci-e v4 NVME storage is awesome, but otherwise it's pretty much the same experience. Games play about the same because I moved the same GPU over. The CPU bound softwares I tend to use are also single threaded, so the fact that I have 4x more cores doesn't change much other than let me run lots of processes. In practice, my ability to multitask is limited by UI bugs rather than raw compute power.

[farmerstan]

I've been using my 2012 desktop without any discenible issues. The only thing I can't do is edit 4K video and for that I use my 2019 Macbook. I've been toying with the idea of upgrading my desktop but I have no compelling reason, and the idea of reinstalling all my applications (I'm still on Windows 7) makes it really unlikely. To be fair though, I don't play games on it.

[aksss]

To some degree I imagine there’s also a question of how much demand we put on these modern old computers that reflects changing/diminishing interests as we age. There are certainly workloads available today that would cripple an 8 yo computer (Mac or PC), workloads that a younger version of you may have been more interested in (multiple VMs, gaming, real-time video processing at same time). You probably stressed your 386 to the breaking point within three years of buying it, and you could easily load up an 8yo computer today to its breaking point. My 2016-era laptop is no longer useful to me as, well, anything except an emergency backup.

If one can’t discern issues with a four-five yo computer, I would very humbly suggest it also says something about the demands of the owner stultifying to a degree.

[anthk]

Eh, bullshit. Go try running Max Payne from 2002 PC on a 486.

Then, show me the equivalent of a 2015 game on par on the gap to a game from 2021 as a 486 game like Doom compared to a Pentium III game like Max Payne.

[aksss]

My life doesn't revolve around games enough to do that, but I can tell you that running an IDE, a stack of VMs, driving external monitors, screensharing while on VC, along with misc productivity apps was not doable on my skylake laptop, whereas the same workload is easily doable on my tiger lake platform. How's that?

> eh, bullshit

Precisely what's bullshit? You're telling me that your workloads on modern computers are stressing them out and you simultaneously don't see a difference between a 6th gen platform and an 11th? No, you don't see a substantial difference in modern platforms because you don't have a need for the performance gains.

[anthk]

That's just better perforanmance on parallel tasks, not by raw capacity.

My point stands.

[CamperBob2]

The single-thread performance of my 10-year-old Sandy Bridge is only now reaching the magic half-as-fast point relative to the fastest CPUs available. That's the point, historically, that's prompted me to upgrade.

For those whose workloads aren't multicore-intensive (or GPU-intensive, which is pretty much the same thing), it's been a dry, boring 10 years in the PC business.

[otabdeveloper4]

> and you could easily load up an 8yo computer today to its breaking point

I've seen people load up a 200 machine cluster on AWS doing quite mundane tasks.

Information complexity is the only physical quantity that doesn't obey conservation laws, so this kind of thing really isn't impressive or interesting.

[mianos]

In real life, a few years ago, people at work fired up a 20 host cluster on AWS to do something that I later replaced with a script and GNU parallel (at the time a perl script), running on my 2013 Macbook pro i7, beating it by 10X.

Sure, I'll admit it may not be fair to compare, considering the AWS host type, copying the data out and in, and all the other overhead.

That said, the project sure looked like it was resume driven 'big data'.