Software efficiency is a serious equity and environmental issue, and I wish more people would see it that way.
These was (is? - Not sure) a version of Firefox for PowerPC MaxOSX - TenFour Browser - that brought forward modern features/support of Firefox to Macs that were long past their prime. They mentioned that their favorite story in time of development was "One of my favourite reports was from a missionary in Myanmar using a beat-up G4 mini over a dialup modem; I hope he is safe during the present unrest. "
http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-end-of-tenfourfox...
This is what can happen when things are optimized for the people, not the business. This is part of why I still use a Core 2 Duo as my daily runner, if it ain't broke don't fix it.
But isn't the primary application for these machines going to be the web browser, which is pulling in so much JS insanity that the web sites won't render well anyway?
Nobody has any actual clue what they're doing, everyone keeps writing code for the compiler hoping for the best and the rest of the world has to buy new machines because the programmers of the last decades sucked.
That, btw, includes most of you people reading this. You're fucking welcome.
Companies will invest in what pays the bills. And hyper optimising for customers with no money isn’t it.
A top-of-the-line laptop CPU from 20 years ago likely just doesn't support addressing more than 4GB or RAM. Forcing it to work on modern resource-heavy Web pages and media is like forcing a GPU from 20 years a go to run Skyrim. It's just not adequate.
• Read the news
• Post on social media
• Make video calls
• Use instant messaging
• Create and edit word documents/presentations/spreadsheets
Today I use my computer for all of those same things... and yet they all require drastically more memory (and CPU, GPU, etc). What happened, and how does this benefit consumers? Yeah, modern web pages are resource-heavy—but to what end†?
In some cases, the requirements really did change. For example, I can now watch videos in 4K; my 2008 computer could handle 1080p, but I imagine it wouldn't have handled 4K as well. However, I suspect many users of old machines would be perfectly happy to drop down to a lower resolution.
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† Something I find amusing in all this... people often say they're glad Flash applets died because they were slow. Nowadays, instead of Flash, we use browser apps written in Javascript. I wonder how "slow" those apps would run if you threw them on a computer from the Flash era. (This isn't to discount other problems with Flash, although I do think it has a worse reputation than it deserves.)
I think that Apple just recently stopped to sell 4 GB computers. And their phones from the last year sells with 4 GB RAM while being perfectly able to do all the things you've mentioned as well.
I used to have a 2016 dual core macbook pro with integrated graphics and 8gb of RAM or something. The machine was great when I got it, but 18 months ago it was limping along and I finally decided to get rid of it.
And it wasn't any 3rd party apps that killed the machine. Every time the machine started up, iphotoanalysisd or some random spotlight service or something would be eating all my CPU. It was always a 1st party Apple app which was making it slow. And the graphics felt laggy. Just moving windows around felt bad a lot of the time, even when I didn't have anything open. Xcode would sometimes lag the machine so much that it would drop keystrokes while I was typing. I had RAM to spare - it was a CPU problem.
In the process of wiping the machine, I booted into Recovery mode and it booted the 2016 recovery image of macos. Holy smokes - the graphics were all wicked fast again! I spent a couple minutes just moving windows around the screen in recovery mode marvelling at how fast it felt.
I wonder if reverting to an old version of macos would have fixed my problems. As far as I can tell, this was all Apple's fault. They piled up macos with so much crap that their own computers couldn't cope with the weight. I also wonder if they broke the intel graphics drivers in some point release somewhere along the way, or they started relying on GPU features that Intel's driver only had software emulation for.
Modern macos still has all that crap - the efficiency cores in my M1 laptop are constantly spinning up for some ridiculous Apple service or something. But at least now that still leaves me with 8 P-cores for my actual work. Its ridiculous.
I bet linux would have worked great on that old laptop. I wish I tried it before turfing the machine.
Compare the memory usage of:
• 2008-era Skype and iChat vs Slack, Teams, and Discord.
• 2008-era web pages (including with Flash embeds) vs modern web pages.
• Microsoft Office 2007 vs current Microsoft 365.
And it's not only or even primarily memory, but also CPU requirements and so on.
Windows 10 (and I assume 11) has an option to "refresh" Windows in Settings.
That has never been a reasonable expectation in the history of computing.
> That has never been a reasonable expectation in the history of computing.
Yes, but again, why? As I see it, everyone has been conditioned to this lie that computers naturally slow down over time, because that's the way it has always been relative to the speed of current software. Originally, that was for a good reason—I'm glad programs now use full-color GUIs. But now?
What would actually happen if Moore's law ended tomorrow, and we were no longer able to make computers faster than they are today? I suspect that a (slim) majority of computer users would actually benefit. Not hardcore gamers, not scientists, and certainly not software developers--some people really do need as much performance as they can get. But for the people who just need to message friends, write documents, check email, etc., the experience would be unchanged—except that their current computers would never slow down!
Years ago while I was at a startup, I accidentally left my laptop at work on a Friday. I wanted to write some code over the weekend. Well, I had a raspberry pi kicking around, so I fired up nodejs on that and took our project for a spin. But the program took ages to start up. I hadn't noticed the ~200ms startup time on my "real" computer, but on a r.pi that translated to over 1 second of startup time! So annoying! I ended up spending a whole morning profiling and debugging to figure out why it was so slow. Turns out we were pulling in some huge libraries and only using a fraction of the code inside. Trimming that down made the startup time ~5x faster. When I got into the office on monday, I pulled in my changes and felt the speed immediately. But I never would have fixed that if I hadn't spent that weekend developing on the raspberry pi.
Since then I've been wondering there's a way to do this systematically. Have "slow CPU tuesdays" or something, where everyone in the office turns off most of our CPU cores out of solidarity with our users. But I'm not holding my breath.
Recently it's become less possible to run the same software for 10+ years because so many things are subscription only and have unnecessary networking, which makes it necessary to patch security flaws, and then you have to accept whatever downgrade the vendor forces on you.
Older applications that you used to be able to just install run just as well as they did the day they came out on the hardware available at the time. The idea that computers "get worse" is entirely a phenomenon of the industry being full of incompetence. Even (or perhaps especially) programmers at FAANG companies are just not very good at their jobs.
Check out the argument Casey Muratori got into with the Microsoft terminal maintainers about how slow the thing was. He got the standard claims about how "oh it's so complex and Unicode is difficult and he's underestimating how hard it is", so he wrote a renderer in a few hours that was orders of magnitude faster, used way less memory, and had better Unicode support.
File system fragmentation was a very significant problem when most people still used HDDs as their primary mass storage media. SSDs are far less affected by fragmentation because of much faster random access times, but HDDs and thus performance suffered.
The Windows Registry is an arcane secret not even Microsoft fully comprehends at this point, and it can get very messy if a user installs and uninstalls lots of programs frequently. This is, of course, a problem with uninstallers not uninstalling cleanly and not a problem with Windows or the users. With so much crap moving to Chrome online-software-as-a-service outfits, users aren't (un)installing as many programs as frequently anymore, but an unkempt Windows installation can definitely slow down over time.
Software in general also just gets more and more bloated as the moons pass. More bloated software means less efficient use of hardware, meaning less performance and more user grief over time.