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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

“how long it takes to open the browser and load a web page”.

a 2011 laptop will likely perform the same on this metric with a contemporary website. (a 2011 website with a 2011 laptop, and a 2026 laptop with a 2026 website).

“how long it takes to load the mail app and send a mail”

probably the 2011 laptop out performs on this metric.

I’m sure the modern laptop is a few times more powerful in terms of raw compute, but lets not confuse compute with utility, because better laptops should mean more capabilities, not more shitty developer harnesses to make the same programs we had before.

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Yeah this blows my mind. My work laptops were pretty powerful with 16GB RAM 15 years ago, 8GB was also fine. Now people say you need 32 or 64 minimum just to function, that these 8GB MacBook neos are "entry level" for students and kids.

I know it's all "back in my day" but back in my day (15 years ago) everything was generally software so the laptop was computing more, now everything is a website but the laptops need 32GB to not run like through tar.

Both of my arm MacBook pros hang from time to time doing basic tasks. It's ridiculous and at least one nice side effect of a ram shortage might be developers starting to care about memory footprint again

I have had the same work Windows box since 2019 and it has become agonizingly slow over the last 7 years.

Anytime I look in Task Manager "Anti-malware Service Executable" is pegging at least one CPU core.

FWIW, Windows dev drives can situationally aleviate a bunch of this pain.

This is another form of shrinkflation. Software quality (specifically performance) has cratered so that it could be built cheaper, faster, and with more ads.

I'm still using a laptop from 2013. It's an HP EliteBook with a third generation i7.

Graphics processing is beat by any new laptop or even a phone, but good old processing power can load a web site in the same time.

It can be interesting seeing what is often seen as a common task can make computers of that vintage suddenly start to struggle when they can seem to do so many other tasks just fine.

One common thing I've experienced is browser-based video conferencing. A lot of chips in that generation didn't really have a lot of hardware accelerated video codecs, so a number of things have to rely on pure software and thus really crank the CPU. Meanwhile a cheap modern mobile chip can handle those same video streams without even breaking a sweat, due to having accelerators for those video codecs.

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