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throwaway2037

Hell yes. I will never forget the day that I upgrade from spinning hard drive to an NVMe drive. It blew my mind. That was a "post I/O" moment for me. Up until then, almost all of my computing experiences were limited by slow hard drives. I had "enough" CPU, memory, and network, but the disks were always too slow. NVMe was a 100x improvement.

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I still remember apps opening in less than one “bounce” on the OS X dock back in the snow leopard days. That was on a hackintosh with a 7200rpm hard drive. To be honest, I don’t really remember my first real Mac (a Haswell late 2013 MBP with NVME) feeling all that different. I’m sure large disk operations were faster, and compile times were faster because of the better CPU, but something about that “good enough” snow leopard desktop setup withh spinning metal worked great; maybe they warmed up some caches of apps they knew you were likely to use to make the basics feel fast.

Overall I feel like things have gotten less snappy since then, but it’s hard to be objective after all these years.

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