Sorry, I flipped values on you - I meant capacity more than speed. Drives are still doubling in capacity at roughly the same rate, ditto with RAM, and also bus

Sorry, I flipped values on you - I meant capacity more than speed. Drives are still doubling in capacity at roughly the same rate, ditto with RAM, and also buses. "Speed" is still improving, but as you point out, not in a raw "2x faster every 18 months" manner. All of that extra space and throughput results in zippier machines, in practice. Sure the RAM isn't faster, but being able to keep me 20+ tabs I seem to chronically have open makes everything faster because I'm not swapping from drive. My games load faster because they are sucking more from disk through fatter buses, and the additional latency isn't noticeable then.