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Perhaps, rather than saying that older operating systems felt faster, and then getting into the weeds debating that (or quoting cold, hard numbers) we should change our terminology: I’d say that older operating systems felt ‘snappier’, which I think is quite different from ‘faster’.

(Side note: I would do unspeakable things for a macOS 9 GUI on a modern, lean OS, plus some cloud integration. That’s all I want, until I think of something else).

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I feel insane reading that older systems felt faster/snappier. Especially before SSDs everything was super slow. You'd wait for a minute to boot the system, load up a game or anything other substantial. Then of course all of the app crashes, hang ups, blue screens, kernel panics or other mandatory restarts that basically are all gone now on every major OS that we're for some reason not counting. It's super stable and fast now.

Old machines felt faster because the delays better matched our intuitive mental model of what should be difficult. Displaying a single letter when you type should be instant because that's conceptually a very simple task. Switching between open applications should be instant because you can already see them both loaded. Opening a new application can be slow, because that's equivalent to getting up and fetching a new tool from your tool box. If you wanted instant access to it you would have left it on your workbench (left it running).

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