The computer you grew up with couldn't deal with taking, manipulating and storing photos of your phone's camera(s).
Sure, your phone could boot faster, but you also need to compare to the capabilities of both machines. Plus there's no need to reboot your phone on a daily basis anyway.
IMO this is the only vitally important point. If my phone’s screen was 640x480 and 8-bit colour, it would still be fantastically useful.
The fact that 4G cellular internet is higher bandwidth than the system bus on my first Mac (Performa 5200), the fact that every image the camera takes us too large to fit into that Performa’s RAM even when it was fully upgraded, the fact that a single Netflix film takes up more storage on my phone than my Performa had in total, is an impressive feat; but I use most of the impressive technical performance to share dumb photos of weird cooking experiments [0], for the purpose of social connection with distant friends, and I could manage those connections in other ways if the tech was not there.
In practical terms, what I care about is the instantaneous responsiveness — the fact that the screen lights up when I lift the device, the way the system unlocks with facial recognition so I don’t have to enter a passcode, the way most apps are about a second away from use, that they auto-save, that crashes are rarer.
And that is because, as you say, there is no need to boot up the phone whenever you want to use it.
[0] e.g. https://travellingcurious.wordpress.com/2020/12/05/greenies-...
> the computer you grew up with couldn't even handle the colour palette and resolution of the screen that you now carry around in your pocket
the other way of looking at this is that the phone is enormously more powerful, can render hi-res full colour depth 3D scenes at 60fps that would take minutes per frame on a 90s computer, can store and transfer amounts of data that would have been unimaginable back then
so why is it so slow to boot up?
A computer from the 80s probably rebooted multiple times a day.
How much effort is someone going to put into an event that happens once a month vs investing that same time into something like optimizing battery life or taking better pictures?
Also, in my personal experience with Android/Linux mobile devices, phones in 2020 boot significantly faster than phones in 2010.
Let's say you bought a 100-baseT network card in 1995. The features were fixed in metal, and so were the bugs. Even if a new revision of the board or ROM came out, you still had the exact same card. If a flaw was found in one of the chips they used, chances are someone would need to program around it. Settings were probably done once using DIP switches and never touched again. You probably never even knew if a new revision came out.
The wifi card you use today is going to boot up in a pretty dumb state. It'll identify itself on the bus and not much else. Your computer's kernel is going to poll every device on the bus to see who's out there. The wifi card driver is going to match the ID of the wifi card to one it knows and then upload firmware. Then the card will need to briefly reboot into the new firmware and identify itself to the driver again. Then the driver is going to configure it.
It may take a couple of seconds for all this to happen, and it needs to happen for almost everything. Even your CPU which booted the machine in the first place might get patched microcode uploaded when the machine boots.
Nothing is just a device anymore, and nothing is just a device driver.
Ultimately, though, the device enumeration and initialization is a tiny fraction of the startup time on most computers, be they desktops, laptops, servers, phones, tablets, or what have you. Usually the actual source of long startup times is the incessant need for these machines to spin up oodles and oodles of background services doing who-knows-what, and it's remarkable how much faster a machine boots when these services are pared down to more reasonable minima. And worse, it's these background services that often make modern computers feel so slow even after they're booted up.
I worked with (3D) graphics and computation intensive processing as well as modelling packages and the experience was horrible compared to today.
I have particularly fond memories of the workflow we used for a film project back in the late 90s. The lab only had so many editing stations and they were shared across multiple groups. So for each editing session we first had to copy the project from multiple CDRs onto the editing machine (which took ages on the 4x SCSI CD drives), edit, then burn the project to a set of CDs - performing various rituals to ensure the ROM image wouldn't be corrupted by a butterfly coughing in the corner or something - clean up the HDD so the next group could get working and hope the CDRs were even readable.
The editing experience itself wasn't great either: forget about real time scrubbing or full resolution previews. Today you can edit films on a phone much quicker, more comfortably and with significantly higher quality. No disappointment there for sure.
Same goes for 3D modelling packages, rendering and just plain number crunching in Mathematica, Maple or MATLAB.
Word processing is the one area that simply is so primitive by its very nature, that it's trivial to reach peak-efficiency without throwing tons of compute power and tech in general at it. If word processing is all you do, you don't need more than a glorified electric typewriter.
For many, many other applications - and yes, that even includes just taking and sharing pictures in real time - today's technology is vastly superior to anything the 80s and 90s had to offer.
But yes, it is impressive that my $500 phone blows away the $50,000 workstations I started on.
I'm also not quite sure about the capabilities. A 2014 $150 entry-level phone like the Motorola MotoG G4 has eMMC controller, SD-card interface, two separate camera systems, WiFi, BT, 4G modem, GNSS (GPS/Beidu/GLONASS), USB 2.0 (client), USB OTG (host), accelerometer, gyro, proximity sensor, compass, FM-radio plus the usual stuff (DRAM controller, GPU, audio subsystem, battery controller, etc.).
That's a lot of components that the OS needs to initialise and load drivers for on boot. And all that needs to happen on 1 GB 533MHz LPDDR2 RAM and 4 Cortex A7 cores at 1.2 GHz.
Just to give a point of reference: that's less computing power than a $35 Raspberry Pi 4 and significantly slower memory and storage.
A 10 year old laptop would likely feature a dual core Intel Core i3, i5, or Core i7 with 35W up to 75W TDP clocked at between 2.5GHz and 2.9GHz, dual channel DDR3 memory running at ~530MHz with a 4x multipler (i.e. 2133MHz effective vs 1066MHz on the phone) and your BIOS is most likely set to "fast boot", meaning it'll skip 90% of the hardware initialisation anyway. I also doubt your 10 year old laptop would last that long on a 2070 mAh battery (my own 9 year old model has a ~44000 mAh battery - just for reference).
TL;DR yes, even a vintage muscle car is still faster at 0-100 (or 0-60 if you prefer) than a 5 year old compact car. That shouldn't come as a surprise if you compare the specs.