Old vs. New: Productivity loses
I've always felt the need for upgrading computers came at a time when the stuff I wanted to do was taking too long for my patience. That usually came down to the speed at which it rendered video, or what it could playback. As tech increased, those acceptable speeds usually fell to a point where new hardware dwarfed the old in terms of usability in those areas, and hence productivity since you were no longer waiting around as much (sometimes days). However, I also always felt that at the same time, in general, things just weren't getting any faster. Why does it still take so damn long to launch an app? What the hell is going on at bootup that takes a minute or more? What about copying a few files? That one right there is what drove me from the macs in mid 90's… 1-2 minutes to copy 50 files that collectively were under 500k. Granted it's gotten better with OS X (and why I switched back), but why is the general experience still so slow and why do we put up with it?
Well, a new computer vs. old computer match was set up testing a 1986 Mac Plus vs a 2007 AMD DualCore in performing the everyday tasks of the computer experience itself and then running Office applications since that is the single most common entity between then and now. The results, given that the idea was even proposed, didn't exactly surprise me. But would I trade the experience? Hell no. I'll take what we have today over anything that existed even 10 years ago, heck, even 5 years ago.
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