| 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. |
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.