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Comment by city41 | Hacker News Reader

Back then a new PC was so exciting because upon first boot you noticed it was significantly faster than the machine it replaced. I haven't experienced that from new computers in decades now.

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As well as harddisk space. The feeling of just taking the entire old disk and putting it in an "old hd" folder, taking up a tiny corner of the new disk was awesome!

I recently upgraded a computer built in ~2013 to one with 2019-2020 components. Maybe it's because I went from lower-middle tier components to upper-middle tier, but I noticed a very significant performance boost: my NVMe drive boots in seconds (versus ~1 minute with my SATA SSD), and I can build large Rust projects nearly instantly without breaking a sweat (my old AMD FX CPU would turn into a radiator).

Magnetic hard drive to SSD gave the same type of boost...

Oh yeah, forgot about that one. Good call out.

On a 386, MS Word would make you sit around for 10-15 seconds looking at the splash screen. Then when you upgraded to a 486, you opened Word and it was like "bing!", you're up and running.

Now with magnitudes more speed and memory available, loading Word is...somewhere in between.

I run Word 97 under WINE on a decade-old Thinkpad running Ubuntu.

Opening it is a joy... what was a slow, lardy app when it was new is now lean, mean and fast.

In decades? The switch from mechanical drives to SSDs didn’t offer any noticeable improvement? I don’t upgrade every year but moving from an 8th gen proc to 11th and back again presents a pretty stark contrast.

This is part of why I'm going to rush to the Apple store the moment they announce an Apple silicon 16" MBP.

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