The last time I remember computers being very slow was waiting for C++ compiles in the late-90's/early-00's. Of course C++ compiles could still be slow for people, but I haven't had reason to need to use C++ since because of languages like Java or Go.
We always want faster server software as there can be many users using it at once, but even then an SQL db, indexes, and thoughtfully written queries generally get the job done. I remember there was a time that vertically scaling/federating dbs was almost not enough on bare metal, but add sharding and there's very little that you can't handle unless you're FB/Twitter.
[The slowest things I've run into in the last decade was Spring/Boot startup, and a React front-end where running all the assembly (TypeScript, CSS, images, polyfills, what-have-you) took over 30s to reload a page.]
I mean, my $400 crappy laptop can run Factorio flawlessly (because the devs give a fuck about performance), but gets bogged down while scrolling on a webpage. It can run gvim (or Sublime Text or Notepad++) with dozens of plugins as fast as I could wish for, but if I pull up a "modern" IDE, suddenly my computer "can't even". A Logitech mouse using default drivers is smooth as silk, but the moment I set up branded drivers, the computer gives up for several minutes.
It, frankly, makes me pretty sad.
Technical and human-imposed restrictions mean iOS devices tend to be the closest to feeling "fast enough". Desktops are hampered by little always-on utilities being written in fucking Electron and eating a GB+ each while also burning lots of processor cycles while not doing anything. Or feature-weak productivity suites living in the browser and taking 20x the resources of a more-featureful native equivalent from years ago (or well-written, native, modern alternatives). Or bad low-level building blocks leading to e.g. UI freezing, stuttering, or jankiness. Or vendor malware (Windows) doing god knows what.
I've only seen a couple operating systems that seem to give what I'd call enough priority to keeping UI snappy so the user feels like they're really in control and not just begging the OS to give them some time, in competition with their own software. iOS and BeOS... I struggle to think of another. QNX Proton was pretty good but I think that was a side-effect of design decisions made for other reasons, though I guess that still counts. Those would probably struggle to remain so running five different JS + HTML layout engines at the same time, like a modern OS is commonly subjected to. Human-imposed restrictions on iOS are what keeps it from suffering that fate.
However I don't think the bloat has yet overcome the benefits of SSDs, in particular, so things are still overall better than they were in, say, the 90s or early '00s.
The slowest tasks I had before were probably live-reloading a React app, which has gone from "takes a few seconds" to "pretty much instant". And compiling a fresh build of an iOS app, which has gone from ~20mins and the my computer lagging slightly while doing other tasks to ~3mins and it performs other tasks perfectly fine while it does it.
It is almost 10x faster (2x faster in single core, 4.5x more cores) so perhaps it shouldn't have been surprising.
For programming, the 2 applications where computers aren't quite fast enough is compiling massive C++ projects and getting julia to first plot. I recently lept from having ~6 cores to having ~32 cores, and this has helped with the C++ but not really with julia - I think that's a programming issue.
The former category has always felt fast to me. Word processing, programming/scripting, number crunching, compiling code, viewing documents, etc.
The latter category is what feels slow even to this day, on high-end hardware.
- OS/software updates that take hours (monstly on Windows/macOS).
- Janky animations that drop frames (Discord "stickers").
- Webpages overloaded with useless JS.
- Horrendously slow backend webservers (technically nothing to do with my computer, but it affects my UX nontheless)
The next bump came with the advent of the 2GHz quad-core i7. Then you no longer felt compelled to work with compiled languages (for purposes of this discussion I'm considering Java and C# to be compiled languages). There were many tasks and applications where these interpreted languages were "good enough" and allowed you to get solutions in the hands of users faster. Building serious business applications in interpreted languages was something that never seemed possible when writing drivers in assembly!
Finally, the most recent bump has been treating AWS as a runtime platform. Not only can I create solutions in Python, a language I absolutely detested back in the 90's, but hell, I don't have any servers to manage any longer! Things scale under load and HA is easy to achieve. I no longer even think of AWS as being "the cloud", it's a compute platform - and a very powerful compute platform at that!
I've come a long way from writing assembly for x86 processors with a few MHz of compute power and RAM measured in kilobytes!
I used a 2013 Macbook Pro (4 core, 16GB RAM) for a really long time and had very few complaints, but I then graduated myself to a desktop machine with 12 cores and 64GB of RAM, and I can finally say that this is fast enough. There is almost never anything to wait for, and if there is, it probably isn't the fault of the hardware.
The biggest bottleneck for computers I think for the last 30 years is really network bandwidth. Again, I'm old enough to think that 768k is probably enough for just about anything, and if you really need to transfer a large chunk of bytes, just go to sleep while the computers are working, but even network bandwidth is pretty cheap these days. 1GB residential connections, 10GB LAN. We're good to go.
The problem is that these innovations mean that we can get away with building less efficient software. Ultimately this means that no matter how many computing resources are available, I think we're likely to find a way to use them all, and more.
Crunch through all possible games to figure out if ...
- White always wins
- Black always wins
- Every game ends in a draw
... when the players have enough computing power and all uncertainty is removed from the game.
But there probably won't be a fast enough computer in the foreseeable future.
Sounds like you haven't spun up a large project recently :) Anything Maven build times are terrible and Go isn't much better once you start bringing in a ton of dependencies and codegen frameworks for stuff like protobuf and dependency injection. Java builds can easily take 30 mins and Go at least 3-4 mins.
Don't even get me started on MacOS Docker IO performance. Every time something gets faster we fill it up with more inefficiency.
I have upgraded my main desktop recently, late 2020 IIRC, because I started doing a bit of video recording on it. The old CPU was fast enough but the new one does in less than an hour what would have been an overnight task for the old. The old kit was handed down to improve the home server, mainly to give it more RAM rather than for speed (the old motherboard in there wouldn't take more than 16G, at least not officially).
The other “fast enough” question is home Internet. For me that was probably 2011 when FTTC became available with 10mbit upstream (more is useful, but 10mbit is fast enough). For downstream I'd say even earlier with 17mbit down (the 1.4mbit up I had then was much more limiting) and anything that didn't happen quickly at that rate wasn't urgent enough to leave running while I did something else. Of course what I do has grown but the connection has grown too so stayed in the “fast enough” range. I'd like faster either way (currently up to ~76down/17up though right now ~50/10 as after multiple disconnects I think due to the recent storms (my last section of line is string down the street from a pole)) but that would be luxury not something I need at all.
That's around the time when quad-cores become cheap/ubiquitous, SSDs were a huge performance improvement and Windows was in its good era (W7/W8.1) and wasn't a dumbed down yet bloated tablet OS that we have now.
Also, our ISP was doing multiple free speed upgrades and we went from 25/25 to 100/100 while paying the same amount.
For every day use - since the first SSD I've not really had problems.
For games - I'm not usually one to chase fresh AAA titles, so either my 2008ish Core 2 Duo or my 2012 i5. That were 4 years and then I only upgraded in 2019 after 7 years, while still using the machine mostly for games.
Work is a whole different thing though. From 2013-2017 I had an i7 (laptop), which was kinda fine as I was "only" doing Java, Python, ops stuff etc - so a huge SSD and a lot of RAM were more important. End of 2017 I started doing mostly C++ and they gave me an i5 laptop, I hated every minute of it because of the compile times. Now I'm not doing so much C++ and now an i5 is fine again.
The only times I feel performance issues these days are in the self-inflicted category thanks to developers who adopted the write-once/run-everywhere/consume-all-the-resources mentality. I’m pretty convinced if those developers vanished and we had native apps for most things, performance would be a non-issue for most computing users who aren’t doing heavy gaming or resource intensive analysis tasks.
The feeling of fastness isn't just the literal latency of pushing buttons and seeing things appear, but also how well the task has actually been optimized: sometimes "sending an image" can feel slow because the task has been made more complex, for example, because I don't know where the image was saved.
I built a P4 box with 15k RPM Seagate Cheetahs at the time, and on Windows XP, everything loaded near instant. Things feel way more bloated nowadays, though everything still loads near instantly, so I think we're roughly even to what we had once threaded processing came out.
Now at work I often am rebuilding millions of lines of C++, there I'm still screaming more more more.
The processor was pretty weak, but that lead me to be careful with my makefiles. And write scripts so that LaTeX could be compiled asynchronously after writing in vim.
Nowadays my builds are slower because I have too much processing power and got lazy about working out dependencies. Everything is a little annoying because I don't bother hiding the limitations.
I think if computers were faster, we would simply invent new tasks that take a long time with them.
On multiple occasions I had to force them to fix some completly abyssmal performance regressions in our software.
The amazing thing about services such as Google Stadia and Geforce Now, combined with high speed internet is that I will never need a gaming machine again.
And, I can now use virtual environments for high horsepower development environments for cloud work.
NUC8i5 was the first time I felt like machines weren't really getting faster year after year. I bought a 4x4 last year just because I assumed things have changed, and don't really notice any difference in day to day usage.
So I’d add web-based or electron-based apps to your “unless” list.
The one notable exception was my MacBook Pro 2019 which drove me insane because the stupid fans were always running.
Recently, my MacBook Pro 2021 M1 Max with a lot of RAM is running perfectly and I've never heard the fan on it.
My current laptop I bought in 2016 and it's fine. I only replaced that because the screen on the old one died.
So I guess for at least a decade, nearly.
No-compromise 3D video rendering would be interesting too. Not game quality - which is very good, in limited ways - but full truly photorealistic render quality at game frame rates.
It was the first time the computer was not slowing my workflow. AutoCAD and Turbo Pascal running on a 80286 with a floating point coprocessor and a 50MB HDD.
Previous hardware/software stacks in 8086/Tandy/Osborne/PCjR... were not fast enough.
But it took an hour to compile 9MB of source code (our operating system).
So it's all relative to the task.
The last time things felt slow was loading a tape on a commodore 64
Browsers are the main thing which seem to gobble up resources, specifically memory.
1. When I used an Acorn Archimedes.
2. When I had an AMD K6-2, had a Matrox Mystique and ran tkdesk
3. When I had a Pentium III ‘Coppermine’ and ran KDE
4. When I had a dual Athlon and a Western Digital Raptor
4. When I first got an SSD
5. M1 Air
Next year, of course, there'll be a new game with even higher settings.
For desktops, probably 2000.
Had a few friends buy $2k-$3k laptops around then, all of which have been replaced years ago.
Building software (unless it's a big Rust project) is quick enough to not care. Occasional gaming (random steam games, warzone 2100, even valheim) seems fine full screen. Even watching 4k downscaled to 2560x1440 seems fine.
Sure 7 years later I'm considering an upgrade, but not sure I'm going to notice. A zillion terminals and chrome tabs don't seem to slow it down at all. Looking for PCIe-5, DDR5 (twice as many channels), and a mid range Alder lake, or the coming out later this year zen 4. I would like ECC so I'm leaning towards an alder lake flavored Xeon (when they come out), or a Zen 4 desktop or laptop. Or maybe a SFF (typically laptop parts in a small desktop case with a integrated GPU). The new "zen3+ and RDNA2" chips sound like plenty for the next 8 years.
Outside of gaming, I've not felt the need to upgrade for raw performance reasons since ~2012. That was the year I bought by first MacBook Pro. That's not to say that "Mac" was the turning point - that MBP was just the first laptop I've owned where the build quality was sufficient that it wasn't the limiting factor for device longevity. That particular laptop lasted me until late 2016, when my youngest daughter spilled a full glass of milk onto the keyboard. The one I bought to replace it was thinner and lighter, but only enough "faster" to be barely noticeable.
Most of my personal and professional computer use relates to development. There's a point where want I'm working on grow to be complex enough that _no_ laptop is going to be sufficient, and I switch to using some sort of hosted runtime. A powerful desktop would push that point a bit further, but again, not enough to be worth the added expense and inconvenience.
I use CLI tools 90% of the time or more; the only real use I have for a GUI is a web browser. As a result, I've used some pretty limited environments productively and without real issues - I used a Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB) at home for a few months between "real computers" a couple of years ago, and went without a laptop for almost a year before that. I used an iPad with a Bluetooth keyboard and a remote developement environment (a Digital Ocean droplet running ArchLinux, using Blink+MOSH) and Safari was fine for checking incremental progress.
Lately I've become more active with my photography and have begun doing some videography as well with various drones. The M1 Macs are substantially better for that kind of work, but I don't see myself falling back into a frequent upgrade cycle.
TL;DR: My upgrade cycle doubled from ~12-18 months to 3+ years in ~2012 for general computing.
Today I have 32 gb of ram and can barely run chrome, acrobat, and word.
I built this machine with latest greatest hardware in late 2010.
AMD Phenom II X6 1090T 16gb ram 128gb SSD crossfire amd HD 5900 gpus
various upgrades over the years but 12 years later, that was still more or less within the specs of today. I got my moneys worth for sure.