It's pretty funny how a pair of crappy videos I recorded in 5 minutes have gone viral and landed here. I obviously did not expect that this would happen and is why I didn't give a second thought to the comparison. There are many wrong things in there (including inaccuracies, as some have reported), and Twitter really doesn't give room to nuance. (Plus my notifications are now unusable so I can't even reply where necessary.)
I don't want to defend the "computers of 20 years ago" because they sucked in many aspects. Things have indeed gotten better in many ways: faster I/O, better graphics and insanely fast networks are a few of them, which have allowed many new types of apps to surface. Better languages and the pervasiveness of virtual machines have also allowed for new types of development and deployment environments, which can make things safer. Faster CPUs do enable things we couldn't do, like on-the-fly video transcoding and the like. The existence of GPUs gives us graphics animations for free. And the list goes on.
BUT. That still doesn't mean everything is better. UIs have generally gotten slower as you can see. There is visible lag even in fast computers: I noticed it on a ~2021 Z4 workstation I had at work, I noticed it on an i7 Surface Laptop 3 I had, and I still notice it on the Mac Pro I'm running Windows 11 on (my primary machine). It's mind-blowing to me that we need super-fast multi-core systems and GBs of RAM to approach, but not reach, the responsiveness we used to have in native desktop apps before. And this is really my pet peeve and what prompted the tweets.
Other random thoughts:
* Some massive wins we got in the past, like the switch from HDDs to SSDs, have been eaten away and now SSDs are a requirement.
* Lag is less visible on macOS and Linux desktops as they still feature mostly-native apps (unscientific claim as well).
* The Surface Go 2 isn't a very performant machine indeed, but note it ships with Windows 11 and the lag exists out of the box, so that makes it enough to qualify as a fair comparison. The specs I quoted were wrong though because I misread them from whichever website returned them to me. I don't care though because this is the experience I get on all reasonably-modern machines.
* Yes, I had opened the apps in both computers before running the video, so they were all cached in memory (which puts the newer system in a worse light?).
* One specific thing that illustrates the problem is Notepad: the app was recently "rewritten" (can't recall exactly what the changes were). It used to open instantaneously on the Go 2, but not any more.
* NT 3.51 wasn't truly fair game because it was years-older than the machine. But if you scroll down the thread you'll see the same "test" rerun on Windows 2000 (released same year as the hardware).
I might come back to extend the list of random thoughts. A proper follow-up blog post would be nice, but I'm not going to have time to write one right away.