alt Hacker News> but the rest of us have supercomputers in our pockets.
The issue is they don't feel like supercomputers, because of how much they've been taken for granted.
My computer and phone today feel no faster or better to use than they did 20 years ago. They might be vastly more capable for niche applications, but for the day-to-day stuff it seems like we keep buying new hardware, so we can run the latest software at the same old speeds, mostly for security updates.
I have an M1 MBP... a bit old, but still does everything I need. When I click Calendar in the dock (when it is already open, but just haven't used it in a while), it can take 3-5 seconds to come to the front as the active app. It feels broken. This wait wasn't a thing 5 years ago on this hardware, nor was it an issue on a PPC Mac from 25 years ago. Yet now its' a problem... why? So the UI can calculate the refraction of the background image in the liquid glass? Should I be spending $2,500 on a new MBP just to switch more quickly from my browser to the Calendar? It doesn't make much sense.
You put it so much better than I could have. It's as though software bloat is just destined to run slightly higher than Moore's Law. A Mac SE/30 with a spinning hard drive, a PowerBook G4 (also with a HDD), a 7th Gen Intel PC, an M1 Mac. All of them can open a basic app like Calendar in... 3-5 seconds. Even with nothing else running. Yet each one in that list is orders of magnitude more powerful than the previous by every measure.